Charles Calhoun's MAINE is a departure from most travel guides. Rather than just pages and pages of lists of motels, restaurants, and things to see, Calhoun focuses on the state's people (past and present), natural history, and state-of-mind. Instead of simply an address and phone number for the famous L. L. Bean's (outdoor outfitters, for example, Calhoun gives us several pages, including the story of the founder of the company.

The book opens with a chapter entitled "Learning Maine" and is organized geographically into nine main sections which cover the entire state. The final chapter, "Practical Information" gives all the usual, plus "A Dozen Fun Places to Eat" and antiquarian booksellers. Scattered throughout the book are literary excerpts and topical essays by authors such as May Sarton, John McPhee, and Longfellow. There are maps, reproductions of period art, and plenty of gorgeous color photos. Whether the reader is planning a trip to Maine or merely wishes an intriguing armchair journey, this guide is a must.

Kimberly Borrowdale, Under the Covers Book Reviews

An excellent book to take along with you during your travels to Maine. The photos in this book are simply beautiful! The photographer, Thomas Mark Szelog actually lives in the lighthouse on the cover!! I was lucky enough to meet him and he was kind enough to show me some of his photgraphs. Absolutely beautiful work. This is a great book and I highly recommend it when you travel down east!

Sydne, I've got to tell you that I'm having a "vacation" with your book. I was up until 3 a.m. because I couldn't put it down, am over 1/2 the way through it, and can't wait to get back in. What a movie this would make. This should definitely be on the top 10... can't wait to see what else happens. By the way you're writing I'm sure I've got some surprises in store and I'll be up AGAIN all night. Very nicely done, entertaining, and VERY refreshing. It's one of those books that you hate to turn the last page on.

Graphically reallistic word pictures of art and culture in a delightful story. I felt like I had made friends with the characters in the book and hated to see it come to an end. Has this author written any more books? I'd love to read them.

I'd like to give twice as many stars to this book, even though its probably the most challenging one I have read since college. The whole layout is very sophisticated. The vocab is sometimes way above my head, but the concepts are pretty intense. The way the whole thing is weaved together is really amazing, even though it takes some concentration to go at it and figure it out. I met this author at a conference -- I don't knwo how he put all this together but I think it is genius. Some kind of modern-day Jefferson. I go section by section and the red summary boxes help.

This book was startling to me - I've never seen anything like it. And I really hadn't been able to see all this information change in our society in this way before. The book has a rhythm, sort of like poetry, but the author uses well-developed academic principles to show how to see the individual in his entirely new way. That whole idea of the Humanterprise seems so right and so clear. I think the way several types of knowledge and insight were tied together is most impressive. I am a nurse, so I heal people's bodies. This offers a philosophical basis and a way to let people heal their own minds and souls. I really felt challenged but refreshed by it.

Nobody was reporting on the changes in the newspaper industry as the chains were becoming larger and more dominant, owning 80% of the nearly 1,500 newspapers in the US. In the middle 1990s, journalists no longer working for newspapers (to avoid conflict of interest) launched the Project on the State of the American Newspaper, projected to produce some 20 articles that would appear in the American Journalism Review and be the foundation for two volumes.

Leaving The Reader Behind: The Age Of Corporate Newspapering surveys a generation of relentless "corporatization" that has radically transformed journalism and newspaper publishing. Unprecedented in the 300 year history of American newspapers, the blitz of buying, selling, and consolidation of newspapers has effected the industry from small town weeklies to the nationally renowned dailies. Gene Roberts (an immensely respected newspaper reporter and editor) has provided the reader with a unique and documented history that is as engaging as it is informative. Leaving The Reader Behind is essential reading for aspiring journalists and students of American newspaper publishing.

Sanford writes a well-documented but accessible account of Jefferson's religious ideas. Other books on Jefferson's religion extract his ideas from his letters, papers, and speeches, but Sanford goes deeper, tracing the roots of Jefferson's ideas and the influence Enlightenment philosophers played in shaping his thinking. Sanford's book reveals how Jefferson's ideas about liberty, rights, and democracy sprang from his profound belief in God. Sanford's book also shows the contradictions and complexities of Jefferson's beliefs: that he loved Jesus's teachings even while doubting his divinity, that Jefferson attacked immaterialism in religion while believing in the afterlife, and that he contributed to and regularly attended churches while blasting the corruptions of the church and clergy on the Christian faith. I highly recommend this book to understand Jefferson's religious ideas, but to get historical context for the development of this ideas, I recommend as a companion book. "Sworn on the Altar of God" by Edwin Gaustad. Together the two books give a complete potrait of Jefferson's religious life.

This book is an excellent look at the deep roots of spirituality, not religion, of one of America's most important founders, Thomas Jefferson.

The book is both informative and very interesting. It's a great book to keep for future reference as well.

It points out that Jefferson, like many of America's key founders, was not a Christian, but was a Deist. That is, he believed in God based on reason and nature, not on the Bible, Torah or Koran or any other man made book.

This is a book that will stimulate your brain and cause you to expand your mind!

Robert L. Johnson

Excellent in-depth coverage for those who want more than the usual cursory overview. R. Thomas Campbell's Sea Hawk Of The Confederacy brings drama to the naval war, providing both a biography of Charles W. Read, a Confederate Navy officer whose battles were legendary, and a narrative style which reads like a novel while incorporating plenty of strategy and military facts.

Thomas Campbell's latest addition to his several other books on the Confederate Navy is the most exciting, as an 'old, mostly unknown' hero emerges to the spotlight he so well deserves. This first, complete biography of Lt. Charles W. Read, CSN, skillfully weaves various obscure sources of information, mostly unknown except to serious students of the Confederate Navy, to new family histories recently discovered. Many of the generous number of photographs have never been seen in public before. Read's participation on such ships as the CSS McRAE, ARKANSAS, FLORIDA AND WEBB are but a portion of the many thrilling experiences he originated and encountered. A brief history of each of the ships such as with Capt. Maffitt on the CSS FLORIDA fills the reader with anticipation of the next chase and adventure. Charles Read's overland escapades will surprise many students of the army to find they were done by navy personnel. In short, this book is a must for anyone who wants to learn of a true life adventurer and to ask themselves "why haven't we heard of him before?". Thomas Campbell is to be commended for this work. John E. Ellis, founder, Confederate Navy Research Center, Mobile, Alabama, http://www.csnavy.org

I don't have much to say except that this is a really well put together edition of The Spirit of the Laws. The translation is very readable. The introduction is well written. And the notes at the beginning of each book are very helpful.

For almost 300 years this classical political work of Montesquieu has been must study for anyone interested in creating or supporting a government, dictatorial or democratic, it doing yoeman work for all varieties. But now Montesquieu's classic has been hurried into late Twentieth-Century modernity by the curious Castroite and Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez Frias. For Mr. Chavez, and his babbling coterie of marxists, has just force fed the Venzuelans a "new" constitution which claims to improve, inter alia, on the French baron's division of government into three branches, Executive, Legislative and Judicial, by adding two more branches, Moral and Electoral (sic). The reader -- Chavez's sans culottes are functionally illiterate -- can doubtless puncture these pretensions for himself. Even so, it is a shame that Montesquieu is not present to do so. In his absence, however, the reader will find the excellent work of Prof. Carrithers -- Kiplingesque with prefaces, introductory notes and appendices -- invaluable should he be disposed to investigate the "new" Venezuelan Constitution.

Just plain outstanding and informative. A powerful preacher, a powerful message, a powerful book. Dr. Thomas is truly an anointed man of God. The brother has done it yet again.

I am familiar with Dr. Thomas' down to earth yet keenly insightful preaching. This book is equally as powerful. Dr. Thomas helps us understand the paths to problem resolution through the power of Jesus Christ. Dr. Thomas imparts his wisdom through a series of sermons which address "everyday" situations. I was able to use the book for morning devotions and I intend on utilizing it as a reference point throughout my own ministy.

"Salvation" is the last book in "Summa Contra Gentiles", after "God", "Creation", and "Providence".

In the introduction to the first book of "Summa Contra Gentiles", Thomas promised to treat of truths that could be reached by natural reason and those that surpass it. The first part of that promise were dealt with in the first three books, although the third, "Providence", started to shade into truths of the second type, while, this, the last book, is wholly concerned with the second type of truth.

The transition between the two types of truths is easy to perceive from a shift in the premises Thomas used in his arguments: in approaching truths of the first type, he began with our common experience of the world, while in the second, he began with a particular sub-set of that experience, our experience of revelation through scripture. Where Thomas did not change was in his method: his approach was one of reason and argumentation, using an analytic method built on Aristotelian foundations.

With regard to subject matter, "Salvation" is concerned with four mysteries of Christian belief: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Sacraments, and the Resurrection. For each of these, Thomas was not concerned with demonstrating their truth independent of revelation - indeed, he considered such a task to be an impossibility. His purpose was instead two-fold: first, to defend the Catholic doctrine on these matters as philosophically possible, and second, as scripturally correct.

The first of these two purposes is easily understood from the purpose of the work as a whole: to provide intellectual support for Christians in Spain against Jewish and Moslem opponents. It takes little imagination to understand that demonstrating that Christian doctrine was not simply absurd was necessary both in reinforcing wavering Christians and in converting non-Christians.

The second of these two purposes is less obvious, but still understandable. Little is gained if the defeat of some anti-Christian argument is accomplished only by inadvertently adopting some other anti-Christian heresy in the process. A Christian defense must be a defense based on generally sound theological principals, and so Thomas provided not only defenses of the reasonableness of Christian belief, but also defenses against heresies that might otherwise be introduced in the process.

That said, one thing I could not help but feel missing from "Summa Contra Gentiles" was a defense of the authority of the New Testament. There is a substantial gap between demonstrating that such acceptance did not lead to unreasonable conclusions and demonstrating that such acceptance is more reasonable than non-acceptance. Nevertheless, this is something that Thomas simply did not attempt to do, even though it is clearly a necessary step in the defense of Christianity against non-Christians. Why Thomas omitted it is something of a puzzle, with the answer perhaps lying in what we don't know (which is a great deal) about the origins of the work.

That said, the points Thomas did undertake to demonstrate were handled with his usual surpassing insight and clarity. While Thomas had many great qualities as a writer, one of his qualities particularly welcome in a work such as this is the ability to clearly summarize and present without prejudice arguments with which he did not agree - Thomas didn't waste time constructing and demolishing straw men. Some of the subject matter is quite difficult (there's nothing easy about Trinitarian theology, for example), but that takes nothing away from Thomas's clarity as a writer.

As a final note, readers should be prepared on two levels: first, obviously, a familiarity with scripture. Since the premises of this book are drawn from scripture, the more familiar the reader is with scripture, the better. Second, it helps to be familiar with Aristotelian philosophy - particularly his "Physics". In my review of the first volume of "Summa Contra Gentiles", I presented a list of the core philosophical terms that Thomas used.

Thomas Aquinas was an extraordinarily systematic thinker and writer. Because of this, one of the best ways to comprehend "Summa Contra Gentiles" is through consideration of its structure. At the highest level, it consists of 4 books, with the third book in two parts, on account of its length.

The titles of the five volumes are as follows:

Summa Contra Gentiles: God

Summa Contra Gentiles: Creation

Summa Contra Gentiles: Providence, Part I

Summa Contra Gentiles: Providence, Part II

Summa Contra Gentiles: Salvation

Each volume is formally divided into about 100 short chapters. A typical chapter gets its title from some proposition that is to be affirmed, or in some cases refuted. Each paragraph is an argument in support (or denial) of that proposition. The chapters are themselves ordered so that the later chapters build on what the arguments in the earlier chapters have established, and it is this arrangement of chapters that constitutes the real structure of "Summa Contra Gentiles".

Although in his later "Summa Theologica", Thomas formalized the higher-level structure of his writing, he did not do so here, which somewhat complicates any presentation of this structure - the book titles are so high level that they give little feel of the work, and the chapter titles so numerous that the reader is easily overwhelmed by a list of them.

In order to give the reader some sense of the overall work, I've prepared an outline of the work that (hopefully) is short enough to be readily comprehensible and long enough to give the reader an understanding of what topics are covered and in what order. This outline is presented below:

1.0 Summa Contra Gentiles: God

1.1 Intention of the Work (1 - 2)

1.2 Truths of Reason and Revelation (3 - 9)

1.3 That God Exists (10 - 13)

1.4 That God is Eternal (14 - 20)

1.5 God's Essence (21 - 28)

1.6 That God is Known (29 - 36)

1.7 That God is Good, One and Infinite (37 - 44)

1.8 God's Intellect and Knowledge (44 - 71)

1.9 God's Will (72 - 96)

1.10 God's Life and Beatitude (97 - 102)

2.0 Summa Contra Gentiles: Creation

2.1 Purpose of the Work (1 - 5)

2.2 That God is the Creator of All Things (6)

2.3 God's Power Over His Creation (7 - 29)

2.4 For and Against the Eternity of the World (30 - 38)

2.5 The Distinction of Things (39 - 45)

2.6 Intellectual Substances (46 - 55)

2.7 The Intellect, the Soul and the Body (57 - 78)

2.8 Immortality of Man's Soul (79 - 82)

2.9 Origin of Man's Soul (83 - 89)

2.10 On Non-human (Angelic) Intellects (90 - 101)

3.0 Summa Contra Gentiles: Providence (Parts I and II)

3.1 Prologue (1)

3.2 Good, Evil, and God as the End of All Things (2 - 25)

3.3 Human Felicity (26 - 63)

3.4 How God's Providence Works (64 - 94)

3.5 Prayer and Miracles, Magic and Demons (95 - 110)

3.6 Rational Creatures and Divine Law (111 - 130)

3.7 Voluntary Poverty and Continence (131 - 138)

3.9 Rewards and Punishments (139 - 147)

3.10 Sin, Grace, and Predestination (148 - 163)

4.0 Salvation

4.1 Forward (1)

4.2 The Trinity (2 - 16)

4.3 The Incarnation (27 - 55)

4.4 The Sacraments (56 - 78)

4.5 The Resurrection (79 - 97)

This is the type of book that can transport you back to the stream in a moment. In the dead of winter while I'm tying flies this book would help me remember the take, the run, the awe and release. But I didn't wait and I'm glad. This book is a treasure of sights and words that works any time of year. Charles Lindsay's photo's are very unique and yet at once familiar to anyone who has fished a stream. Dream-like and enchanting. If you fly fish, buy this book, buy two, one for your best fishing buddy too.

Tom McGuane is hands-down our best fishing writer. His observations are always provocative and invariably dressed in memorable language. The surprise here is Charles Lindsay's photographs. Lindsay does not give us familiar shot of the country's top fly fishing destinations, as do most tomes in the photo book genre. Rather he offers a look at the shape and whirl and textures of fly fishing. He gives us the trout as it noses up out of the element to take a fly, or as it leaps from the water, sending a spray of water. He offers rainbows schooling beneath the surface, the water purling over rock so that it is hard to tell where the water stops and the rock begins. A lovely meld of words and pictures.