The Idea Brokers is an excellent chronological exploration of the evolution and impact of think tanks on U.S. public policy. The reader is presented with a comprehensive history of these obscure institutions that have spawned dramatically since the start of the 20th-century. The author adequately provides a thorough and detailed account of the personalities that were responsible for establishing these research institutions, their intended purpose, their area of expertise, their advising successes and their implementation failures. At the end, you will agree that these research insitutions will only play a much larger role in shaping government policy and public opinion in the coming years.

The Idea Brokers is a thorough and lucid chronological examination of the evolution and impact of the modern day research centers known as 'think tanks'. These obscure research centers have spawned dramatically over the past century and their significant contributions in shaping the policies of the United States are revealed.

Mr. Stevenson is back with another corn poem book. He always takes me back to my youth with his smart funny poems. I am a big fan of this man. This book is for someone from 9-109 years old. He will make you think,reflect and laugh.

Sincerely,

This book had it all. Great action, great courtroom drama. Great characters that you love (and lawyers and liberal sympathizers that you despise). This is Hustons best book yet. My only gripe is the choice of weapons for the main characters.

In Secret Justice, the best yet of James W. Huston's highly-readable techno-military thrillers, Lieutenant "Rat" Rathman returns for the capture the world's most dangerous terrorist. As with Huston's other novels, this one is fast-paced and intertwines several compelling plot lines. The courtroom trial scenes, a trademark of Huston's novels, are remarkably believable and appropriately tense, perhaps the result of Huston's own substantial experience as a trial lawyer. Huston's diligence in research is also well-reflected in his description of the risks associated with terrorist access to the large number of aging, portable nuclear powered generators which are still to be found in the former Soviet Union. The danger that nuclear "dirty bombs" could actually be made from these sources is a major and troubling theme of Secret Justice. Rat's return to action makes Secret Justice a worthy addition to the Huston library.

This was perhaps the most engaging, suspenseful, and deceitful book Huston has written. Rat is back again! That unbelievable SEAL from Dev Group except this time he is with the CIA. The book takes unexpected twists and turns always in the direction you least expect. Once you start into it, you will not be able to put it down. I finished this book in one week because it was so addictive and interesting. I highly recomend James W. Huston to all Jack Higgens and Tom Clancey fans, you will not be disapointed. Enjoy!

I felt the story in this book was not 100% complete toward the end. For example, **** showed up a couple of times in the story and no mention about him/her at another time, what happened to him/her or what is being done for the crimes being committed (ongoing investigation) and so forth. Overall, the book is still good and worth a read, full of suspense toward the end. I was surprised, but it made sense when you think about the circumstances around it.

BEYOND SUSPICION is not your ordinary legal thriller. The fast paced action and interesting characters kept me reading at a feverish pace.

With a lull in my reading last month I was looking for a new author to read. I read the inside flap of the latest James Grippando book, BEYOND SUSPICION, and I was hooked. The second book in the Jack Swyteck series (THE PARDON being the first), BEYOND SUSPICION starts out with Jack defending his ex-girlfriend, Jessie Merrill, in a case worth 1.5 million dollars. He wins the case and soon after Jessie ends up dead, in Jack's own bathroom. Suddenly Jack Swyteck is the prime suspect in her death. Jack teams up with Theo Knight to attempt to uncover the details around the death of Jessie Merrill and the action kicks in.

More than just a legal thriller this book has some great story lines. Jack's wife Cindy Swyteck is having nightmares from her troubled past. She is my favorite character in the whole book. I felt the author did a wonderful job creating the tension around Cindy. She is dealing with the fact that Jack is the suspect in the death of his own ex-girlfriend, her troubled back-story with Esteban, and her past coming to her in dreams. All of which are sewn together seamlessly.

There are some other good characters that play integral parts as well. Yuri, a ruthless thug, and Katrina an insider who has her own demons to deal with, are two of my favorites.

If you're looking for a new book to read I suggest you pick up BEYOND SUSPICION. It brings a diabolical mystery, wonderful side stories, face paced action, and a twist at the end that will leave you wanting more! I recommend it along with THE PARDON.

When I first picked this book up, I thought, here we go again, another legal thriller by another lawyer. But I'm glad I read it. This is the first novel I've read by Mr. Grippando and I really enjoyed most of the characters in the book. Jack Swyteck reminds me of the Matthew Hope character written by Ed McBain - my favorite. Theo is the one of the best "unsavory" characters I've read in awhile.

Only flaw I found with the book was I did not like the ending - much like that of "Presumed Innocent". No matter what her background or reasoning, nothing was presented strongly enough for me to think Cindy Swyteck should get away with murder. Or that Jack should let her. I hope Grippando resolves this in another book.

and it was a winner!

Grippando has given an intricate portrait of the tracking of a serial killer, and increased the believability by having the two main characters, FBI Agent Victoria Santos and reporter Mike Posten, work together in a credible way, and without the seemingly obligatory affair or companion story about them falling in love.

The identity of The Informant is a little too easy to guess, and a little farfetched, but other than that, the book succeeds on many levels. It's action-packed, with interesting characterization, and compels the reader to finish the tale as fast as possible. Grippando keeps the plot twists somewhat bizarre, so its difficult to know which way the story is going next....all of which adds up to a very satisfying read!

The Informant, the third James Grippando book that I have read, is a high-class thriller. After reading The Pardon, and Beyond Suspicion (both recommended) I wasn't sure what I'd think of a non-Jack Swyteck Grippando novel. I was pleasantly surprised.

In The Informant Mr. Grippando has woven together an interesting story about three different people. Victoria Santos is a FBI agent tracking a serial killer, Mike Poston is a top notch reporter at a Miami newspaper, and the informant is a mysterious person with an uncanny ability to predict where the killer will strike next. I love the characters that Grippando creates. There always seems to one that has a past that works its way into the plot by stories end. This book is no exception. Although I did figure out the "twist" early in the story, it still was well crafted.

The story is fast paced, intriguing, and at times gruesome. The final 100 pages were non-stop action. It's a fun read that will keep you up all hours of the night. I recommend The Informant!

Overall I think it was a great book, it was very realistic and really held my interest. It was never boring, and it kept a fast pace, the tension keeps getting higher and higher. The book is about a serial killer that murders people all over the US. In the book you follow FBI agent Victoria Santos who teams up with Mike Posten, reporter for the Tribune. Mike Posten is getting calls from a person who says he is an informant. This informant says he can predict the murders before they happen. It is a good book and I recommend it to anybody who like fast paced thrillers.Overall I think it was a great book, it was very realistic and really held my interest. It was never boring, and it kept a fast pace, the tension keeps getting higher and higher. The book is about a serial killer that murders people all over the US. In the book you follow FBI agent Victoria Santos who teams up with Mike Posten, reporter for the Tribune. Mike Posten is getting calls from a person who says he is an informant. This informant says he can predict the murders before they happen. It is a good book and I recommend it to anybody who like fast paced thrillers.

Like all of James Rollins' books it presents a fascinating premise within the first couple of pages. One of the things I like about his writing is that there is very little "fluff", that is he sticks to the story and keeps it moving along at a fast clip. Every chapter was different and fascinating.

I like the way he often uses actual places in his books (although the Amazon doesn't seem too mysterious". In this book, I assume the plants and shaman medicines described are real, as are many of the dangers normal to that part of the world.

The only negative comment is that this book (as well as Subterranean) stretches the imagination a bit too much for my liking. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the read and finished the book in a few days, I have a hard type imagining a 100' long alligator, for example.

Don't let this deter you though. If you enjoyed any of his other books you'll not be disappointed with Amazonia.

If you loved SUBTERRANEAN, you're going to love AMAZONIA. Having a personal tendency to rank books by my favorite authors, this one ranks head to head with Rollins' first thrill ride SUBTERRANEAN. The concept and plot of this novel are both captivating and unusual thus making a suspenseful and exciting story to read. Add to that the gigantic man eating crocs, land lubber piranhas and giant black panthers (my own personal faves), you're set for a rollercoaster ride. You'll find that
the action doesn't slow down and the characters drive the plot to its triumphant conclusion. The worse thing about reading this book was the feeling of "what am I going to read now to top that?" after I finished it! The prologue alone was enough to hook me. Highly recommended. Rollins easily leaves his peers in the action/adventure genre behind him in the dust with this new novel.

A team of scientists launch an expedition into the Amazon jungle and disappear without a trace. One of the lost members is a Special Forces Agent who lost his arm while on duty in Iraq. Four years later, this same one-armed man miraculously staggers out of the jungle and into a missionary camp. He dies shortly thereafter but a photo taken shortly before his death shows both arms intact. Could it be that the Amazon is the habitat of some sort of miracle elixir that can actually grow back limbs? Perplexed, the government hires Carl Rand (the son of the original expedition leader) to lead his own team into the region to (1) what happened to the original team and (2) what research had they uncovered that would explain the numerous oddities discovered after their disappearance. The group must survive extraordinary encounters with walking piranhas, 40-foot anacondas, and other deadly dangers while their fellow Americans deal with a plague of abominable proportions.

James Rollins hands us a bit of everything in this exciting action adventure...an exotic locale, Indiana Jones-type protagonist, devilish villains, and detailed scientific descriptions of fauna and animal life. His pace is fast and feverish, his writing taunt. I was left wondering at the end of each chapter what he could possibly have up his sleeve next.. For those who love an exciting adventure with a dose of science thrown into the mix, AMAZONIA should fit the bill perfectly.

Nelson is developing his talents as an author of historical fiction. It's good to see a writer who actually improves as he goes along.

Indicative of this improvement is the amount of historical detail given in this book, the second in the Brethren of the Coast series. Largely about the slave trade, The Blackbirder reveals the depth of the author's research into African cultures of the period.

Ex-pirate Marlowe should by rights be a fascinating character, but he lacks depth -- not merely because he's a rather shallow person, which he is, but because Nelson hasn't developed him sufficiently. He has a certain blank quality. James, the other main character here, is better drawn, but still not quite exemplary. Secondary characters, such as Marlowe's wife and her rakish ally Billy, aren't bad, but aren't fantastic either -- I'd say overall that characterization is a bit of a weakness here, though not disastrously so.

The plot, as one expects with Nelson, is an exciting one -- I don't find the themes here as interesting as his battles-at-sea books, but other readers may well prefer them. I did find my suspension of disbelief faltering at one point, when a psychotic racist tries to imprison Marlowe's freed workers: either they're free, and he would have to have a warrant, or they're slaves, and he's stealing property, and either way, that element didn't quite work for me. Overall, though, the story is fast-paced, enjoyable and holds the reader's attention well.

A premonition - and suddenly the comfortable world of Marlowe is turned on its head.
King James, the freed slave, slaughters the crew of a slave ship in a fit of passion, and to save face and reputation, Marlowe has to run him down and bring him to justice. Meanwhile, his sworn enemy is intent on destroying all that Marlowe holds dear ...

This sets the scene for another gripping tale in the same vein as 'The Guardship' - the same flowing prose and command of language endows this book with the mark of a master storyteller coming into his stride. Many threads, at sea and at home, combine to make this a thrilling, un-put-downable period story.
As the tale unfolds, we are taken into the minds of the protagonists, taking a glimpse behind the facade that each one has created, seeing the tale from several different perspectives, each with its own ideals and agenda, making us more and more involved in this wonderful complex story.

Even better than 'The Guardship' - and that's saying something. *****
Look out for 'The Pirate Round', book 3 in the series.

The quality of Nelson's writing improves measurably with every book. Here he balances a complicated three part plot masterfully right up to the inexorable end. He obviously has done extensive research on the historical and geographic details. While dealing with some strong subject matter he yet maintains a level that would be fully acceptable to a bright junior high school reader and certainly anyone older. I have come to regard these later works as on a par with Patrick O'B!

I could really get into the reasons why Last to Die bored me so much, but that would probably be tougher to read than the book. To be fair, my dislike of the book stems mostly from personal taste. Some readers, especially die-hard mystery and legal thriller fans will may glean some enjoyment from this book. Anyone else, well, good luck...

The book is based around a well-worn mystery premise. A lot of money at stake, and a group of people that are in line to get it. Shockingly for people who have never read a book before, these people, one by one, start dying mysteriously. The originator of this little morality game is one Sally Fenning, an extremely wealthy Miami socialite with a shadowy and tragic past. Following her murder, an event that seems to defy logical explanation (the rest of the story doesn't cure that minor plot point) a group of disparate individuals is called together by a high-powered legal official in Miami. The main figure the reader is interested in is Tatum Knight, a "reformed" contract killer who gets mixed up in the whole mess. Along for Knight's adventure is Jack Swyteck, an all around boring defense attorney who is called on by a friend to help out Tatum. These two meander through, as more of the participants die and the 46 million reward for living the longest get closer and closer.

I think I made it more exciting than it is. Oh well. The problems with this book are legion, but I'll keep it relatively short, as criticism is best served quickly. The characters are by far the worst, a cast so devoid of fascination or intrigue that it's a wonder they did not fall asleep themselves. No one is sympathetic or interesting in the least, it's almost as if Mr. Grippando took a list of modern day stereotypes and threw them immediately into his little plot. Tedious, really tedious. The story offers little relief, as it is a weak rehash of a mystery genre devise used ad nauseum. I am not a very smart sleuth, but I saw the ending coming a mile away, and I think most intelligent readers will too. Please, how could anyone compare this to Christie's Ten Little Indians, which is a masterwork not just of mystery but of fiction as well? That comparison just shows that the device of a "survivors bonus" has been done to death, and, much better. So, unless you have a natural inclination or love of boredom, steer clear of this book.

Before picking up LAST TO DIE, I had never heard of James Grippando, and I was pleasantly surprised by this smoothly written legal thriller. Jack Swyteck, a Miami defense lawyer, is approached by his best friend Theo to represent his brother Tatum, a one-time contract killer who believes he is going to be implicated in the murder of Sally Fenning. Sally's tragic past has strange implications in what unfolds next: she has left 46 million dollars to six potential beneficiaries, but only the last alive will receive the money. Who is the mysterious sixth beneficiary? Why did Sally leave her money to these six, all of whom appear to be enemies? What connects them? What did Sally hope to achieve? And most pressing of all, who is murdering them one by one?

Jack is a likeable protagonist. He is earnest, intelligent, professional, with a soft spot for kids. He is one of the few legal heroes of the genre who looks at his career as a job and not the driving force of his life. What spurs him onward is his own curiosity. I did object to Jack's treatment of one character (and I can't specify without ruining the plot), a reaction that seemed excessively harsh and unforgiving given the circumstances and Jack's emotional attachment to the character.

Grippando's writing is unobtrusive - not noteworthy but smooth enough to propel the story forward. For a thriller, the suspense does not reach adrenalin-pumping levels, although Grippando kept me interested throughout by his judicious meting out of details. I did lose some interest as Grippando took me to Africa, a portion of the book that reads more like a travelogue than a thriller. However, my main complaint with this novel is the weak ending. It lacks the oomph of a first-rate thriller, although the rest comes close.

This book's undemanding yet exciting premise is perfect for beach or airplane reading, and for anyone desiring pure entertainment. Those who love legal thrillers should definitely add Grippando to their reading lists. I'm looking forward to Grippando's next book.

Sally Fenning has been murdered. Shot to death as she sat at a red light in her Mercedes. She leaves a will naming six beneficiaries to her estate which is valued at 46 million dollars. The six are a mixed bunch: an ex-husband, a shameless lawyer, a newspaper reporter, a hired killer, an assistant state attorney and a mystery person that no one can locate. There is no apparant reason that she would have left a dime to any of the people listed, much less 46 million dollars. But of course, there is a catch. She leaves the money to the one amoung those listed who is the last one left alive.

After the reading of the will is when the fun begins and the blood starts to flow.

Jack Swytech, a Miami criminal defense lawyer has been hired by one of the beneficiaries, Tatum Knight. Tatum is the brother of a man that Swytech has saved from death row by the use of DNA to prove that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of. Tatum's line of business is that of a hired killer, although he claims to have retired from that line of work for a few years.

It turns out that a couple of weeks before Sally was murdered, she tried to hire Tatum to kill her. He claims he turned it down. Others are not so sure.

Grippando has done a masterful job with the interaction bewteen the beneficiaries as the plotting and scheming go on to convince others to drop out of the running. And then people start dying.

Who is behind the scheming and killing are not revealed until the very end of the book and the reader is kept very much in the dark until that time when all becomes clear. Last to Die is one of those books that you look forward to picking up and reading while you enjoy a master story teller at the top of his game.

This book is a call back to the true Jesus of the Scriptures and away from the false "bless me" Jesus who is primarily being preached today. The writer is not harsh towards today's Christians but, rather, he writes with compassion.

He speaks of us turning to Jabez's prayer as a model when Jesus gave us the model prayer. That part really touched me. The popular prayer today is not "give us this day our daily bread" - - today's ideals say that daily bread is not enough! Some of our leaders even teach us that "faith" will cause us to ask for more than just daily bread. Why do a lot of us Christians not get as excited about forgiving those who trespass against us as we do getting blessed and having our territory enlarged?

A couple of other things the author says in the book:
"The prayer of self-interest is more interested in getting God's blessings than in discerning God's will." And "What is the will of God? We often make this a selfish search. What does God want for me? What is the best path for me? However, in the context of kingdom of God, seeking God's will is always discerning our role in making earth as it is in heaven."

There are many other things the Mr. Mulholland writes that will cause us to think and repent.

If you've felt that something is lacking in some of the more popular teachings on prayer, this book will bless you.

I read The Prayer of Jabez. Anything that is marketed that heavily just had to play to the Church of American Culture I thought. I was right.

Read Praying Like Jesus, preferably 3 seconds after you've finished The Prayer of Jabez.

What you encounter in Mulholland's book is the real thing folks and an effective antidote to the Christianity American Style embodied in The Prayer of Jabez.

Recently I wrote a review on the book 'The Prayer of Jabez.' I outlined in that review some of the things I appreciated about that book, but also recounted the many things that made me uneasy with both the development and the intention most seem to pick up from the practice of the prayer.

There are few things in our lives that are as personal and touch us as deeply as prayer, particularly our own prayer life. We each feel we are an expert at praying in our own ways, and to a large extent, each of us is. For this deep part of our lives to be co-opted by a feeling of selfish intention for personal gain is tragic. This is why I considered 'The Prayer of Jabez' problematic - the author's intent might not be selfishness, but the message being heard is precisely that.

In searching for an alternative to hold up as a model more in keeping with my own prayer temperament, Charles Allen, a theology professor at my seminary, directed me to James Mulholland's 'Praying Like Jesus: The Lord's Prayer in a Culture of Prosperity.'

The book begins where the disciples of Jesus began -- Thomas asks Jesus to teach them how to pray. In an interesting, fictional conversation, the disciples recount their experience of praying another prayer that seems to work better for them (of course, this is the prayer of Jabez). Many followers of Jesus seem to slink away after hearing Jesus tell people that they should stop asking for an increase in territory, but rather ask God to provide for their needs; that they should stop asking for a blessing in earthly terms, but rather be willing to follow the will of God even to death, to 'take up their crosses and follow'. This teaching is too hard to follow!

'This is not what happened two thousand years ago. Unfortunately, it is happening today in thousands of churches and with millions of Christians. ... Thousands of Christians are repeating an obscure prayer first uttered by a man named Jabez over three thousand years ago. Many have become convinced his words are the formula for prosperity.'

As Mulholland points out correctly, Wilkinson did not intend his prayer to become a manifesto for righteous greed. He also points out that neither Jabez nor the Bible hold up the prayer of Jabez as a model for anyone but Jabez to follow.

'This honour is reserved for another short prayer located in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. We call this prayer The Lord's Prayer, though I prefer to call it the Prayer of Jesus.'

Mulholland does not promise riches or special healing or power; he does not give the magic formula for getting what you want. What he does is reiterate the intentions of Jesus with the Prayer of Jesus -- an opportunity to reconnect with God and with each other through the words that, as the disciple Peter said, 'contain eternal life'.

The first chapter is entitled When You Pray. This, of course, assumes that you pray. Not if, but when. Mulholland talks about the prayer of self-righteousness and the prayer of self-interest. These prayers are one-communication, but even worse than that, they are directive or instructive, as if God needs to be told what to do or informed of something God did not yet know (such as, how good we've been lately). God is put in the mode of Santa Claus. Jesus gives a corrective to this.

'Praying like Jesus offers far more than prosperity. When prayed with sincerity, it cleanses our hearts of self-righteousness and strips our motives of self-interest. It challenges the false and inappropriate ways we approach God and each other. It reminds us of what we so easily forget -- our proper relationship to God and the world.'

Praying like Jesus reminds us of God more than it invokes ourselves. Praying like Jesus also reminds us of our needs as a community. This prayer is a prayer for the world, a world in which the will of God is primary.

The other chapters give insights into the particular parts of the Lord's Prayer: chapter titles include Our Father, Thy Kingdom Come, Give Us, Forgive Us, and Deliver Us. Each of these chapters stress the love of God for us, the importance of community, the importance of relationship, and the need to see who and where we are in right respect of God. This is not a prayer for become rich and famous, which is the trap of much of current culture, including the prayer of Jabez and many other 'Christian' things.

'This obsession with material blessing, at the expense of the spiritual, is a congenital disease. Being born an American is to be so afflicted. Jim Bakker was merely the most blatant prophet of a philosophy to which most of us pledge allegiance. His lifestyle was an exaggeration of a nearly universal merger of religious life and the predominant values of our culture. He sprinkled holy water on the American way.'

Of course, one of the problems with the Lord's Prayer is that it has become, for most Christians, an almost genetically-encoded prayer routine that it is done without thinking. Unfortunately, this means it is almost always done with comprehension on any level; it is just one more part of the liturgy that we say in our drive to get on and get through on our way to the next thing. Praying like Jesus requires us to pay attention, and pay attention deeply. Mulholland's final word in the conclusion is a charge for us to regain this attention and incorporate the prayer anew into our lives deeply and with meaning that it has in abundance, but which we've missed for so long.

Sheridan published his book in 1975, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of turmoil, mass killing, disintegration, unjustice, economic failure and human tragedy in general as disastrous as no other in the Chinese history, maybe with the sole exception of the Great Leap Forward (1957-60), another Mao Zedong's orchestrated descent into hell, this time featuring mass starvation (30 million deaths?) and stupidity as signs of the era. Apart from this, the whole Mao tenure was marked by the Gulag. Sheridan was, one have to suppose, a scholar on the subject of China in general, even if his book is devoted to the so-called Republican Era (1912-1949). How could he ignore so blatantly the consequences of the movements, decisions and political clashes he was reviewing? Because he was obsessed with words. Sheridan loves one word above any other: integration. His book is all about integration, his central theme: integration is supposedly that thing that turns feudal or semi-feudal or backward countries into modern players in the world stage, like Mao's China, as he naively suggests in his introduction. The book itself is named China in disintegration, and his message goes like this: the Kuomintang didn't integrate, so it lost. The Communists did integrate, so they won. Quite simple. There's other words Sheridan loves too, like modernization: like so many other 60s and 70s scholars, he hails Mao as the founder of the "modern" China, whatever it means, like that's good (or bad), like it wasn't Chiang Kai-shek who won the beloved seat and veto in the Security Council for the Republic of China. Maybe, he had to say all this empty words to make a point in the furiously anti-communist environment of Vietnam War U.S. I don't care. That's over now, the people who were supposed to listen to him are doing something else now, and his empty words remain empty. In A People's Tragedy, the Brit Orlando Figes portrays the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as a bloody business from both sides points of view. In his study of the other Great Agrarian Uprising, he shows clearly how the communist won not because they were nice guys who wanted to help the peasants and won their simple hearts, as Sheridan tries to demonstrate in the Chinese case, but because their policies looked better in the long run for the majority of a largely apolitical mass of people who wanted Land. Only Land (even if they were finally cheated, and ended up with No Land At All). Mao Zedong knew perfectly the basics of the Kidnapping of the Agrarian Revolution, that old communist strategy, as expressed in the notes written by the CIA case officers in Arbenz Guatemala (1954) or later by J.P.Vann in South Vietnam. Sheridan ignores it all. His revolution is a Bad Guy-Good Guy struggle, a young, brilliant, idealist Communist with History blowing his sails, versus that old creep who would kill his mother for money, the Kuomintang Confucionist Chinese. That's the weakest point of the book and one real important, because the Communist-Nationalist struggle is the key of the Republican Era, the one thing that basically weakened the Kuomintang's capacity to "integrate" China and finally gave birth to another China, 39 years of bloody soul-searching that ended up with a sell-out in exchange for Coca-cola. Sheridan, apparently unable to read either Chinese or French (the language in which so many excellent books about China are written), as I suppose after checking his sources, didn't have access to many authors that traveled behind the communist lines during the 30s and the 40s and wrote what they saw before 1975. In fact, when he's got to speak about Mao's revolutionary base in Yenan, he doesn't provide a single footnote identifying the sources of his lack of any knowledge whatsoever about the place, though he later states how helpful was for him Red Star over China, that piece of propaganda rubbish courtesy of Mao's friend and frequent guest Edgar Snow. The rest of the book, when one doesn't have to cope with the idealization of Mao and the reds, is well written, even occasionally insightful about the many flaws of the Kuomintang regime and the Warlords wars. Too bad all the names are in the Wade-Gilles transcription, which is currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and is (I believe) inferior to the pinyin transcription used in communist China, and confusing, especially since there is no Chinese characters or pinyin translations anywhere in the book. There you have one of the very few communist successes in history, and Sheridan doesn't take advantage of it.

This is the second in a series of books on modern China published by The Free Press, a division of McaMillan Publishing Co. Although published in the mid 1970's the series still has value for college undergraduate and graduate level instruction.

The writing style of the entire series easy to read and yet conveys much correct scholarly history. Professor Sheridan is the author of a number of books on China and he seems to favor writing on the warlord era of China--1912 thru 1949--having written this book and a biography of the famous "Christian Warlord," Feng Yu-hsiang.

This particular book, "China in Disintegration" deals with the period of time from the 1911 Sun Yat-sen democratic bourgeois revolution up to the time of the 1949 Revolution in China. During this time much of the centralized character of Chinese society and governance was broken apart. Various regional warlords controlled local areas of China and ran them independently from the wishes of the central government under Kuomintang Party of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus the title of this short 294-page book.