Arguing About Slavery has a very difficult subject to make live, what William Lee Miller calls the "tedium and sublimity" of republican debate. The historian's duty to be evenhanded even when faced with the moral pit of slavery doesn't make the job any easier. Yet, Miller handles these problems with aplomb and, more, handily succeeds.

At about 500 pages, Arguing About Slavery is concerned with the parliamentary debate and tactics used by pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in the Congress in the 1830's and 40's. It shows how, nearly single handedly, John Quincy Adams insistence on the right to petition exposed the South's determination to controvert the Constitution in its quest to shelter the practice of slavery from congressional criticism. By the time the Congress puts the "gag rule" to rest, Adam's exposé had made abolitionism a powerful and accepted political force in the North.

Miller storytelling skills has the reader discovering the extent of sophistry the pro-slavery forces were willing to go to as they were forced to resort to deeper and deeper hypocrisy. He does this, however, without denigrating the men of the South. Indeed, much of the enjoyment you'll derive from reading Arguing About Slavery will come from the rhetorical skills the Southern Congressmen liberally display throughout.

Although Miller's protagonist is clearly J.Q. Adams, he spends considerable effort on a broad cast of characters, from the original abolitionists and their puritan backgrounds -- the Grimké sisters, Theodore Weld, Elizur Wright, Elijah Lovejoy -- to Adam's allies in the House -- Joshua Giddings, William Slade -- to the pro-slavery giants -- John C. Calhoun, Caleb Cushing, Francis Pinkens -- and moderates like Henry Pinkney (whose gag rule ironically was intended as a compromise) and President Martin Van Buren. If these biographies are not familiar to you, these and others in Arguing About Slavery should be. Miller describes the history and premises of all parties involved, but doesn't interrupt the flow of the tale to do so.

Miller does an incredible job of making the tedium and sublimity of republican debate come alive and at the end of the book you better understand the place of liberty in America's national consciousness, the intellectual forces that led to the Civil War, and the nature of the founders' relationship to the practice of slavery itself. The only criticism I have is that sometimes Miller's rhetoric is a bit too partisan, which reduces the value of the book as ammunition against slavery's apologists, which do still exist. But that has nothing to do with merits of the book as a work of the historical art, which are excellent.

This is an excellent book, one that surpassed any expectation I might have had for it. And my expectations were high, because the critics spoke so highly of it when it was released. Still, I doubted whether a decade-long legislative battle could carry my interest for 300+ pages. I was wrong. Every page and character was interesting, and the consistent imagery of John Quincy Adams, in the sunset of his political career, battling the southern foes in Congress on a daily basis is an enduring one. Books like this one should be substituted for the dry history curriculum that I had in high school.

Miller has taken a little-known set of antebellum incidents and made them live. The book is both a scholarly work and highly readable for the layman. Miller provides a modicum of "modern parallels" and editorial asides that would, if they weren't so intelligent, be inappropriate. As it is, his observations along these lines as the book progresses makes the work more interesting rather than less. This book is more interesting that last year's biography of John Quincy Adams, which I also enjoyed.

Studs Terkel meets Asian America. The author, affiliated with Queens College at the time the book was compiled, records oral histories from first through fourth generation Asian Americans from China, Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, and Pacific Islands. (Chinese immigrants began to officially arrive in 1848; they were not allowed to apply for citizenship until 1943. Japanese and Koreans were not allowed citizenship until 1952; Filipinos and Asian Indians beat them by six years) These histories are grouped into three major section: Living In America; Americanization; and Refections on Interracial Marriage. In "Living In America", selections include Will Hao on being a true Hawaiian, and Andrea Kim on being born and raised in Hawaii, but not being Hawaiian. Sam Sue, a Chinese American lawyer, talks about growing up bitterly in Clarksdale Mississippi during a time of segregation. The Americanization section includes stories of escape and exodus, the bumpy road of acculturation, 3 stories just on run-ins with traffic cops (driving while Asian), and over 9 stories on Americanization, racism, tension, being Asian versus being American, and even on being a minority within a minority. Cao O discusses life as an ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and being Chinese-Vietnamese in America and dealing with social service agencies in Chinatown that is staffed by Hong-Kong born Chinese. In "No Tea, Thank You", Setsuko K. discusses the subtleties between the generations, such as politeness and their hidden meanings (when "no" means "yes", and "yes" means "no"). In a sub-section of nine stories about family, Cao O discusses the idea of 'obligation', while Hideo K talks about the "Company as Friend". Tony Ham discusses Mah-Jonng as a family social focus. In a sub-section on religion, there is an interesting piece on Koreans and church membership. In one of eight stories on "Interracial Marriage", Jody Sandler writes talks about "So He's Not a Jewish Doctor", in which a 23 year old Woodmere Long Island Five Town girl marries an Asian America and faces pressures from family and friends, and contrasts Tony's values with those she grew up with in Five Towns.

This book by Joann Lee is an excellent book on Asian-Americans. It tells the life stories of Asian-Americans without so much stereotypical baggage found elsewhere.

It shows Asian-Americans as people. Instead of the shallow, stereotypical views found in the movies, it gave me a deeper view of what it feels like and means to be a person of Asian descent living in America. And it does so honestly. It gives the reader a view into a very intimate but often overlooked part of life in America.

I recommend this to all who are interested in this topic.The book reads well and easily.

Enjoy!

An excellent overview of what it is to be Asian American in America today. Joann Lee writes beautifully and puts you in touch with the individual struggles and victories of her subjects. A must read.

When I first read this book (more years ago than I care to recall) it ignited my interest in so-called sword and sorcery epics. Tanith Lee's lost child-woman draws you into her story from the opening chapter and I would definitely rate this as a read-at-one-sitting book because it is absolutely impossible to put down. It is one of the most broad ranging and breath-taking adventures as the heroine-of-many-names struggles to find her lost race, her identity and her destiny. From healer to warrior to enslaved goddess and reluctant birthgiver, she enchants, saddens and delights. She and her world are beautifully detailed, as are its occupants. The only thing that makes up for reading the last page is the knowledge that the two sequels ("Shadowfire:Vazkor, Son of Vazkor" and "Quest for the White Witch") are just as brilliant and provide a most satisfying, if unexpected, conclusion. Get this if you can - then hunt for the sequels. You will not regret it!

In this tale of blood, love, violence, beauty, magic, dreams, brutal murder, swords'n'sorcery, rape, battle and deadly races, we follow a woman on a journey of self-discovery. First a Goddess, then a slave, later a pawn in the game of an emperor who shows her her true nature and leads her to understand what she is looking for. And then the end of this story.. a twist of the plot and atmosphere so totally unexpected I couldn't believe it at first. Terrific.

This was the first book I read of Tanith Lee and she has since become my favorite author. This is a story of a grown woman who wakes inside a volcano. She finds she is the last of a unknown race and this is her story of her search to find herself. Traveling through lands full of vast ancient cities and strange religions you will find yourself engulfed with the beauty and loneliness of her quest.

If you are utilizing J2EE on your current project you owe it to yourself (and your project) to read this book.

I've spent the last several years consulting to numerous companies implementing solution using J2EE technology. This book covers many of the most common mistakes made in J2EE projects. Most of these companies had exceptional expertise in their domains but lacked experience mapping their business needs into J2EE. The result was many variations of the anti-patterns covered in this book, many sleepless nights for the development team and many missed delivery deadlines.

A few of my favorites anti-patterns are: Tangled Threads, Ham Sandwich; Hold the Ham, Application Joins, Rusty Keys, Performance Afterthoughts, Thrash-Tuning, Manual Performance Testing, System Loaded Application Classes, Running with Scissors, and Integration Hell.

Most projects contain at least a half dozen of these anti-patterns. You can rediscover these anti-patterns on your own or benefit from the excellent advice and experience contained in this book.

Bitter EJB couldn't have come at a better time for me. My development team is at a crossroads. Having developed a reasonably complex web-based model-view-controller architecture from scratch in Java, we thought we knew everything. Then it hit us: scalability problems, transactional integrity questions, database portability nightmares... we were in trouble. Ah, but knowing all, we determined that a simple migration of some of our logic to Enterprise JavaBeans would solve everything.

Or would it? We started thinking: Are EJBs really better than JDO? Or home-grown solutions? How about JMS? Does it let us scale too? And what's with these Message Drive Beans? If we go EJB, do we use CMP? Hey, we hand-tuned a lot of JDBC code... aren't we going to see a performance degredation? Why would we choose Entity Beans over Session Beans or the reverse? How do we tackle the complexities of building and testing these components? We read the JavaDocs and specs, but we still had lots of questions, and not a lot of informed answers. Suddenly, we didn't feel so smart. At all.

Thankfully Bitter EJB tackles these issues and more with humor and insight. There are plenty of good books that tell you how to build an EJB or use a message queue from Java. Instead of regurgitating the mechanics, this one tells you the why, why not and when to's of developing with EJBs and related technologies. You won't find a lot of EJB cheerleading in these pages, but rather a whole lot of unbiased, intuitive advice that will help you make the right decisions for your environment, product, team and goals.

Bitter EJB is a terrific book about technology that's hard to get a good grip on. EJB technology is complex, with many pitfalls. Some of those pitfalls are hidden, while others are so obvious they obscure the possible benefits.

Alfred Korzybski once wrote, "There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." Many people are currently sliding easily through one side or the other of the EJB debate, but the authors of Bitter EJB have clearly done some serious thinking. Some of the familiar EJB criticisms are here, but so are endorsements -- with warnings, to be sure, but endorsements nonetheless -- of some EJB techniques that many others have dismissed. It's an extremely fair and balanced book, and I think nearly everyone who reads it will learn many useful things about when and how to use EJBs, as well as when not to.

Although not a reference manual, the coverage is both broad (covering the various types of EJB) and deep (including discussions of transactions, interfaces, deployment descriptors, build systems, testing, and performance). To top it all off, it's an enjoyable read. It's a must-read for anyone currently or soon to be involved in a project that might be a candidate for EJBs.

"Way out west in Cactus County there was a horse named Calico. She wasn't very pretty...but she was very smart. She was the smartest fastest horse in all of Cactus County." She could run like "greased lightning", and she could smell like a bloodhound. "Her nose was so keen she could track a bee through a blizzard." She was owned by a cowboy named Hank, and "...she would go to the end of the trail for Hank. They had a language all their own and understood each other perfectly." Life was good and happy for everyone who lived in Cactus County, no locks, no fences, and no sheriff or jail. But across the Cactus River were the Badlands where the villains of this story lived. And the meanest, sneakiest, absolutely worst bad man of them all was Stewy Stinker. He was so mean, "he would hold up Santa Claus on Christmas Eve if he had a chance." So sit back and get comfortable and see what happened when Stewy Stinker and his nasty gang came to town..... First published in 1941, Calico The Wonder Horse is as fresh and entertaining today, as it was over fifty years ago. This is an old fashioned, action packed, rootin' tootin' western that has it all...cattle rustling, hold-ups, a stampede and kidnapping, a wild and thrilling stagecoach chase, and through it all, Calico comes to the rescue, outsmarts the bad guys and saves the day. Virginia Lee Burton's clever, witty text is dramatic, engaging and full of wild west colloquialisms that will have both kids and adults laughing and cheering at all the fun. Her marvelous comic strip illustrations are expressive and full of detail and beg to be pored over and explored. Put it all together and you have the makings of a timeless classic to share with friends, family and future generations. Perfect for youngsters 4-8, Calico The Wonder Horse is a masterpiece and a MUST for every home library.

The illustrations of this Wild West comedy saga are just as good as the lively and creative prose. Easy to read in one sitting as a great "before bed" story. The adventure and humor will keep even those with short attention spans listening intently. The ending is perfect!

My 2 1/2 year old daughter and I love this book! Best of all, and unlike many of our other favorites, the hero (Calico) is female whose merit is based on her intellect and problem-solving skills. I really like that subliminal message. I'll admit that at first I was a little put off by the artsy "comic book" format, but it grows on you, and I appreciate it more each time I read it. This book and Mike Mulligan are must-have Burton books.

I found this book at our local library and just loved the illustrations- my one year old took to them as well, so we bought our own copy- the pages are sturdy so he can turn them with minor wear-as we read it every morning with our breakfast- the book has such clean vibrant pictures of things we use every morning and my son has already learned what all the items are in the book and where we have them in our house. Such a joy to read with your child!

Children can't resist this one! I gave a copy of The Chair Where Bear Sits to my neighbor's little girl and watched her eyes widen. She loved it. The flat screen just doesn't do this book justice. It's breathtaking.

THE CHAIR WHERE BEAR SITS is an innovative variation on the well-loved "House that Jack Built," with its same catchy rhythms leading to a rambunctuous climax. It's also a rebus, cleverly concocted by Russell Benfanti's playful, eye-catching illustrations. Children will love the rhymes and the chance to fill in the rebus words. They will be learning to read - without the struggle. This book is lively and fun - exactly what Lee Wardlaw's fans expect.

I actually started collecting the storyline in the single-issue comics from the Batman vs. Superman and since nearly all the backissues for this storyline is near-impossible to get, I bought the TPB for the earlier stories. The art of Jim Lee is stunning, it is easy to see why he ranks as one of the best comic artists of all time. And add Jim's talents with Jeph Loeb's storytelling, you've got a winner. While I really admire Jeph Loeb's works (The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, Superman for all Seasons), the story for Hush falls a tad below my expectations. Sure there is a great plot, a new villain, new developments, but in my opinion the stories seem to drag on a little. The main point being that I guess he was tryiong to provide elbow room for Jim Lee to showcase his take on the world of the Dark Knight. I mean some of the plots that encompass an entire issue could have been done in half the time and space. I guess those who buy the TPB will not feel it as much as those who still have to wait each month for the new upcoming issues, like me, but I guess I am just venting. But other than that complaint the storyline is flawless and a great read. And trust me, get volume two of Hush as well, there are a lot of developments (identities are revealed) :), a lot of old characters come into play and you finally meet the man behind the enitre Hush storyline. The debate on his identity is a heated one, just check the DC messageboards.

Whether you have the actual issues this book contains (Batman 608-12) or not, you should pick this one up. Loeb writes an amazing story and Jim Lee's work is fantastic. While I don't think it's Lee's best work (for that buy X-Men Mutant Genesis), it's still amazing. And at the price Amazon is selling this book, there's no reason not to get it.

This is the hardcover edition of the first five parts of a 12 part story, and it is an amazing one! I used to collect anything Jim Lee illustrated and thats how i found this title, so it goes without saying that his art in this book (and on the regular monthly issues) is amazing. Jeph Loeb's storyline is also top notch. In just the first 4 parts we've already got Killer Croc, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Superman and the next few issues (not included in this volume) turn out more suprise guests and villains. This one is an instant classic. That other review from the 14 year old kid....he knows what hes talking about. I'm a 22 year old (kid) and i dig this stuff.

This book is an absolute read for any person wanting to learn a little about the darker side of life and abortion. The title Casualties of Indulgences hits the nail on the head. This author, with her very refreshing and unique way of getting her point made, does just that. She minces no words when detailing her tragic background and experiences with abortion. But, she does not share these details with a beg for sympathy. She offers anecdotes that are sometimes hysterical but grabs you by the collar and shoves reality down your throat. Don't read this book if you are looking to "sling mud". You won't find any to sling if you read this with an open mind and accept what it is she is attempting to point out.

Sadly, there are some printing errors which are obviously just printing errors but they arrive at a bad time, forcing you to pay more attention to those details than the detail of the book itself. Nonetheless, this is a very powerful tale with a clear and honest message. A great quote from the book "Unfortunately, one learns (at least in my case) to get pissed off in an effort to evade the reality of being pissed on!" Referring to rage encountered with her sexual abuse and her abortion. A very good read.

I have read many books on abortion. I have learned from reading these many books on abortion. But, I have never read a book quite like this one. From the beginning the author throws you directly into the mesh with her introduction; "I found myself utterly disappointed by many people I thought were true to their cause, whether their cause was pro-life or pro-choice. I had once found these "pro" people valiant members of a battle courageously searching for an unfettered way to show the truths in the subject of abortion. They now proved to be nothing more than avaricious attention seekers, similar to the opposing parties they attack." This is from the very first paragraph. If you are reading this book with a certain objectiveness you can't help but to be hooked from the very beginning.

The author gives you a brief history of her youth. Her comical descriptions of a most harsh life amazed me; I almost saw her laughing as I laughed while at the same time attempted to understand the harshness of what she described. She certainly validates her position as a "pro" person. So few books on abortion are written from the perspective of those most vulnerable to the realities of an unwanted pregnancy and its possible termination. And though you will find yourself very entertained by the brief bio at the start you will soon find yourself in the midst of a serious education. The information given is rather brief in some parts but very concise. You are left wanting to find out more (if you have a REAL interest in this topic) and in some cases asking yourself "is she serious?". From what I have found this stuff is concrete.

Overall this is a great book. Very entertaining and amazingly easy to read despite the complicated information it contains. Once I started reading it I did not put it down until I was finished. Though there some parts that are rather disturbing (history of her sexual abuse, experience with abortion, abortion methods) I will be giving this book to my 15 year old daughter as an additional method for arming herself. There appears to be a lot of things out there that are well concealed from parents. As a widowed mother of a teen daughter I need all the info I can get. I found a great deal in this book.

I learned more about the "personality" of abortion in this one book than I have in any other text I have read about the issue. I personally am at the opposite end of the spectrum politically from Ms. Lee, but definitely have changed some of my views on abortion and social responsibility since reading this book.
Challenging some of her determinations, I made queries to find out just how off-base she really was. Was I disappointed! You will not find the general unsubstantiated claims often found in abortion books with this one. She holds true to herself and her cause.
A great read that will certainly have you asking yourself "does this really happen?".

This is the first book of Rachel Lee's that I have read that will have me eagerly looking out for new books by her. The story was gripping and the romantic interest of Kate and Connor kept me hungering for more of them and saddened when the book ended.

Connor was a damn good profiler for the police--that's why he had to quit. When the police are stumped for clues about a new serial killer, Connor gets sucked into his old nightmares again. During her married life, Kate Devane has lived a life of hell. Only just getting her emotion feet back under her, she 'escapes' into cyberspace & finds a friend...and an enemy. Unfortunately, her illusion of safety is shattered when she is targeted by the killer....

This was my first book by Rachel Lee and it won't be my last. Kate and Conner's relationship had an interesting twist and kept me wanting more. I'll definetly loan it out to my friends.

This past year, it was suggested to me my the publisher of our 6th grade social studies textbook to have the students read the Ch'I-Lin purse in conjunction with our chapter on Ancient China. I cannot tell you how much my students loved this book. They are just wonderful. Of particular interest to my 6th grade girls was the story of the carp fish who gives up her immortality for love. I also have to confess, I really enjoyed this book myself and plan that in years to come, should I have a daughter, I will be reading this book to her.

This book was given to my son as a Christmas gift last year and he didn't bother to read it at first. But once he started he couldn't put it down! The stories are very interesting and a Chinese friend told me these are the authentic Chinese stories, unlike some that were Americanized, she herself heard of these stories when she grew up.

Absolutely a good book for young adults.

As the mother of a daughter adopted from China I struggle with keeping her background alive in her day to day life. This is just one of many books I read to her at night to celebrate her homeland. Its very well written and easy to understand. She was adopted at three, so often she corrects my pronunciation, and it warms my heart !! I recomend this book to all families of chinese adoptees.