These books are garenteed awesome to buy. Mr. Koch is quality, and so is his writing.

Good humor is based on truth, and this wise cracking book is both good humor and good history.

A must read for any history buff. This book pokes fun at the entire history of humanity and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

This is a superb book for nurses, doctors, social workers and family members wrestling with difficult medical ethical questions. Who should go first in the lineup to receive a heart transplant: a young child or a father of three? Should a person with Down's Syndrome be equal to others? How about a convicted criminal? Or someone age 75? Tom Koch explores these difficult questions and then offers a framework for health care workers and others to help work through their own answers. He examines what it means to be human and the sanctity of human life -- and how a better historical understanding of these concepts and a reasoned methodology can help guide us as we make difficult life and death choices today. Koch does an excellent job of weaving the practical and human with the technical and philosophical. This is a must for those who are forced to make the choice of who lives, and who dies.

Looking into a mirror can be devastating. Koch unflinchingly turns not only his father's face and his own to the mirror, but the eyes and heart of the reader.

I discovered this book in a display at my library for Grandparent's Day. As I reached for it, tears rushed from my eyes and part of me froze. I didn't want to think about this. Who does? But the time was fast upon me. I had an appointment with a geriatrician scheduled for my dad at that point. His clinical eyes (not unexpectedly) mirrored back Alzheimer's. Reading this book gave me a wise and gentle hand to hold throughout what I know is only the start of a long hard passage. Not only does Koch provide useful information, he allows you to share his journey from the inside with candor. Could I be moved to violence by the demands of care giving? Could you? Could we all? He not only lets us face that worst case scenario vicariously, he gives us alternatives to help us plan for the best case.

You need to read this book before you are likely to think you need to. If the title applies to your life, the contents do. The less you want to read it, the more you probably need to look into the mirror of this book. Perhaps if Don Quixote had prepared for a battle with the Knight of Mirrors he would not have been vanquished.

Those who need this book most will have the least time to read it. Make the time. If you read it a page a night during your 36 hour day, you will benefit.

A sequel to "Mirrored Lives", this book presents the stories of a series of children, grandchildren and spouses who are caring for relatives with Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease and other, similar disorders. Of special note is the discussion chapter which asks, "What do all these people know, together, none can say individually?" The author attempts to understand the reasons people decided to care for their fragile seniors and what they learned from that sometimes intense experience.

Being a bitter journalist myself, I can usually empathize when someone feels the need to yell about the profession. But it seems in this case that the author somehow decided that journalists lacked aggression, and he spends much of the book giving dubious examples to back up this claim. I'm sure many readers would be surprised to learn that the media fail to challenge public officials. (I'm sure many public officials would be shocked!)

There are some interesting passages about technology that are ahead of their time. (The Internet has come a long way since the book was written.) I'd read another Koch book on creative ways to harness technology.