After spending literally thousands of hours reading true crime books, I can say that this is the real thing. I was absolutely thrilled to see that it is available because I am going to make it required reading for the students in my Criminal Investigation classes! They may grumble at first about having another book to read, but when they start on "The Evidence Never Lies", they'll not want to put it down!

As the spouse of an award-winning crime reporter, we found "The Evidence Never Lies" to be a compelling, thought-provoking analysis of the incredible career of Herbert MacDonell. For those whose careers focus on crime, crime buffs, and seekers of great reading, this is a must-buy.

I first found this book in 1992...and it changed my life. I am not kidding. Because of this book, I went on to studying serial killers, profiling and forensics...I was a paralegal major before that. The Evidence Never Lies is one of those treasures that should not be lost....never mind out of print!! I searched for it to see if there were a newer edition; I cannot believe it is out of print. Please Mr. MacDonell, write another like it. It is truly great

Peter Bogdanovich has written a book that is for the movie enthusiast. I suspect the general reader may find some of the interviewees obscure, and the topics technical. I feel that is their loss. For the student of film or film history, this is a treasure trove of information, ideas, experiences, and feelings about films taken from interviews with some of the most distinguished directors in movie history. The author's selection is not encyclopedic, but the directors' experience spans from the earliest years of silent film to the present. These men are not just informative, but their strong and distinctive personalities show in each interview, giving the sense that one has actually met and understood many of them. Some of the interviews are brief, or even very idiosyncratic, but the best are delightfully personal. This is a long book, but affords many pleasant evenings of good conversation. It also makes one want to go back and see the films again!

Peter Bogdanovich pioneered the director interview in English, and this wonderful collection will give endless pleasure to film buffs. The book-length interview with Allan Dwan alone is worth the price of admission. Bogdanovich always did vast amounts of study before sitting down to talk with his subjects, and his expertise and enthusiasm encouraged them to open up in a way they usually did not with other interviewers. Anyone writing about the careers of the directors Bogdanovich interviews has to start with his work on them. A fitting companion piece is Bogdanovich's encyclopedic interview book "This Is Orson Welles."

The title was suggested by Howard Hawks who once observed, "...I liked almost anybody that made you realize who in the devil was making the picture...Because the director's the storyteller and should have his own method of telling it." Hawks is one of the 16 "legendary film directors" represented in this volume. It is important to keep in mind that these are conversations rather than interviews such as those conducted by Robert J. Emery in The Directors: Take One and its sequel, The Directors Take Two, as well as interviews conducted by Richard Schickel in The Men Who Made the Movies. It is also worth noting that Bogdanovich is himself a distinguished director of films such as The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc?, They All Laughed (a personal favorite of mine), and Texasville. As a result of his own background, Bogdanovich's questions and comments reflect somewhat different interests and perspectives than do those of Emery and Schickel.

I rate all of these books Five Stars but probably enjoyed reading Bogdanovich's book the most because the conversations ramble along somewhat messily, as most of my own conversations tend to do, and also because Bogdanovich is more actively involved in the interaction than Emery and Schickel are. As a reader, I feel as if I were really an eavesdropper as 16 directors casually share their opinions, information about specific films and actors, gossip, "war stories," and overall evaluations of their careers' various successes and failures. At no time does Bogdanovich seem intrusive or manipulative. Moreover, perhaps to an extent he did not realize when writing this book, he also reveals a great deal about himself...much of it endearing and some of it admirable. His passion for film making and his appreciation of the great directors are almost palpable. Readers' interests about various directors and their respective films obviously vary. I include myself among those who are die-hard film buffs and so I enjoyed reading every chapter and every word in each chapter. Indeed, each conversation was for this amateur "gourmet" a feast to be consumed with delight and, yes, gratitude.

How was lynching ever respectable? Why did nightclub owners discourage Billie Holiday from singing this protest song against the murder of innocent Blacks? How did this powerful, somber song become Time Magazine's Best Song of the Century?

David Margolick traces the history of Strange Fruit from a forbidden, banned song to a celebrated cry for civil rights in a concise style. Performers, club owners, reviewers, and activists are extensively quoted - and the differing perceptions allowed to exist next to each other without comment.

This facinating book should be carried in all public school libraries, read in courses on American music. It's a fine addition to the scholarship on the civil rights movement too.

I do have, however, one serious criticism. Somehow, even if in just a single sentence, Margolick should have noted the irony of sensitive, gentle progressive defending Stalin's regime. Several key people, great souls, involved in the early civil rights movement - including the songwriter of Strange Fruit - were members of the Communist Party during the Stalin's dictatorship. They were outraged at the lack of freedom for blacks in America, and their criticisms of Jim Crowe laws were totally accurate. I wish, however, that Margolick had at least mentioned - once - their blindness toward the brutal rule of Stalin in the USSR.
The vast, vast majority of these progressive activists recognized their mistake, and their committment to the Bill of Rights and individual freedom only increased.

Despite this minor criticism, this is a fantastic book that documents the great change in American cultural norms over the last 50 years.It's hard to imagine a time when Billie Holiday and Strange Fruit would be banned and lynching accepted as a Southern tradition.

Thank God for progress!

The late John Hammond, who literally listened to Billie Holiday's music until the moment he died, considered "Strange Fruit" to be the song that took the strange beauty he had discovered and nurtured and in making her art, took away her primitive integrity and aesthetic, and replaced it with inauthentic artiness, making her a celebrity for all the wrong (political) rather than the right (soulful) reasons.

Strange Fruit is far from my favorite Billie Holiday song, but David Margolick is right in assessing it as the fulcrum of her career and in a strange way, of her location in the history of black America, the civil rights movement, the American left, the relationship of the left to jazz and of jazz to the American intelligentsia, and the tragic misunderings among all of the above and each of the above in relationship to the coarse country that gave them all bith.

Margolick is one of the few remaining writers in America whose every sentence illuminates American culture. His is a quiet brightness, not a showy one, but my god can he write, with nuance and feeling, making prose do what Billie beauty once made do with sound. A great book from a writer whose feelingful, rich work at Vanity Fair shames the shallows where the rest of the publication's writers dwell.

David Margolick, a well published writer and journalist, has gathered the threads of an amazing story in STRANGE FRUIT. He deftly weaves together a sort biography of Billie Holiday, that gifted and troubled singer, with the story of her most famous song, a disturbing reference to the lynching of African Americans in the early 20th Century South. While many others recorded STRANGE FRUIT (a handy discography is included at book's end), Billie's moving version has remained the standard. The author also goes into the story of Lewis Allan, aka Abel Meeropol, the song's author and political maverick. Margolick draws upon a wide array of documentary sources and interviews to capture the song's and singer's dynamics, including numerous quotes and also a smattering of photos. I was thoroughly informed and impressed, as will be all readers.

As a voracious reader of everything, but especially social history and even more of olde new york, I was so excited to discover this book. But, it is hard to plow through the verbiage, repetition, and confusion of this book. Each of these woman could have been the subject of her own book and Lewis has done little in the first three quarters to give us anything so we may understand connections that merit their lives being twined together in this fashion. Also, Lewis has tried hard to develop mystery and suspense where there doesn't need to be any - these ladies are great just the way they are, the endless foreshadowing, broad hinting and leaving a story just when it gets interesting is rather silly. The author has obviously done detailed research, but I found it confusing enough to have to jump back and forth between the narratives about the four subjects, but threw up my hands as chapter after chapter began with three pages on someone new who turned out to be the sister or next door neighbor of one of the subjects. Whew, I finally deconstructed the thing by reading each woman's story through by picking it out of the morass. What a shame, because these are interesting women.

Each of these women could easily have had their own biography, but the author does a pretty good job of covering all four, their relationships with their world and each other. This book is a bit disorganized, but once you sort out the characters, this is a wonderful view of four outstanding women and their world.

Thank you Alfred Allan Lewis for creating a book of these spirited women who were the backbone of New York City, American society and worldwide. They are invisible in our history books, but thanks to you and your accuracy for facts their spirit remains alive!

These women influenced their power, money, political and social status to unite and heal mankind. I should know, I was there........to carry on, and say every "Queen" to there own home..

This book is a methodical step by step progression that introduces you to the beliefs and practices of HUNA, then goes on to give you exercizes in later chapters to help you clear your fixations of sin, guilt, fear, etc.

Chapter 1. "The Minds of Man" (introduction to the three selves Unihipili, Uhane, and Aumakua)

Chapter 2. "The Bodies of Man" (a talk of the three aka bodies)

Chapter 3. "Of Breath and Mana" (a talk of using the Ha rite to accumulate a surcharge of mana (Hawaiian term for Universal Lifeforce Energy). This material is weak. You can use surcharges of mana for many things. This chapter only give you a few hints. E-Mail me for more ideas!)

Chapter 4. "The One Commandment" ((Harm no one and nothing with hate)I Prefer Clark Wilkerson's version in "Hawaiian Magic" (Harm nothing with hatred).)

Chapter 5. "To Gain Control" (This chapter explains that reading the book is NOT enough. You MUST do the internal work if you want to see real changes)

Chspter 6. "Into the Silence" meditations, and visualizations to re-program your unihipili (sub conscious)

Chapter 7. "Meet Your Subsconscious" (explains the reason to go into the silence in order to reach a concensus between the conscious and sub conscious.

Chapter 8. "To Forgive and Forget" (deals with the importance of forgiveness. If your subconscious and conscious minds are holding onto things people have done to you, or you believe they have done to you. You can not reach your true potential.)

Chapters 9-11. "Release of Sin, Guilt and Fear" (obvious)

Chapter 12. "Clearing Fixations" (Letting go old belief systems that no longer work for you)

Chapter 13. "To Cut the Cords" (visualizations to aid in letting go of the matters dealt with in chapters 8-12)

Chapter 14. "Meet Your High Self" After doing the inner work you can get help from your high self the Aumakua. Your high self will only interfere with your free will in cases of emergency)

I like this book; a lot; but I also have some problems.

1. There is no index; so finding specific material you are looking for is difficult (so use a high lighter or book marks to mark important sections.

2. In several places the author talks of getting aid from the God high self. The Hawaiians believed in a Creator, but they believed it was beyond human conprehension. so the Hawaiians generally worked with the Aumakua, Po'e Aumakua, and the Akua (gods and godesses as in Hina, Kane, Kanaloa, Pele, Laka, etc,)

3. Mr. Lewis passes on some of the errors in HUNA thought began by Max Freedom Long. (that HUNA traces it's roots back to Israel, Egypt, and Lemuria before that.) By asking questions and going into the silence you will receive visions or dreams of hunches that will lead you in directions you never thought of before. This does not mean there was a distinct line of teachers because two people had similar ideas.

4. I am upset with the visualization "Pillar of Light" beginning on page 141. Why would the author include an exercize from the kabbalah (The Middle Pillar) in a HUNA book?

5. I am upset with the visualization "Ankh Cross" beginning on page 149. Why would the author include "The Rose Cross" from the teachings of The Golden Dawn in a HUNA book?

This book is very good as a whole. I am most upset with the Pillar of light, and Ankh cross visualizations.

I encourage questions and comments via E-Mail; Two Bears.

Wah doh Ogedoda (We give thanks Great Spirit)

There are few songs in the world that stop you in your tracks and render you speechless of mind and heart. Billie Holiday sang one of them. The combination of her signature smoky vocals and the stark lyrics of the song written by Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, proved to be spellbinding. Its emotional charge stirred activists and intellectuals and even popular notoriety. Margolick's biography of the song is a slim volume but full of interest, well-written and researched.

This book is an elegant portrait of a song, the woman who sang it, and the man who wrote it. It is a poignant look at the interplay between them all.I am not a student of jazz, and yet I found this book to be fascinating. It is as much about civil rights and human dignity as it is about music. Margolick is an amazingly astute observer of events, and he has an uncanny ability to describe what he sees in beautiful, elegant prose. This book would make a wonderful gift to anyone interested in jazz; interested in the civil rights movement; interested in Billie Holiday; or just interested in a little known profile in courage. Read it and savor it!

Strange Fruit : The Biography of a Song by David Margolick, Hilton Als, moved me! I think Margolick did a great job of ferreting out and marrying an extensive array of first person accounts of people's experiences listening to Billie Holiday sing her heartbreaking ballad, enough so that I almost felt like I was there too at times! Margolick doesn't pretend his book is a historical analysis - it's a biography, and a short one at that. As such, it does it's job and will resonate with me, as does Billie's song. It would be to the historians that I would look for analysis of its effects on society - anyone listening? The book adds another layer of fine patina to an historical moment in musical history and illustrates how brave Billie Holiday must have been!

This book is shallow, judgemental, poorly researched and an insult to any the intelligence of any thinking person. There are some marvelous biographies about Edgar Allan Poe (The one by pulitzer prive winning biographer, Kenneth Silverman, is the best.) To call this a STUDY guide is absurd. It's a slanted, bias, narrow minded piece of propoganda.

Harold Bloom has assembled a slim volume of literary criticism on Edgar Allan Poe. Bloom's introductory essay on Poe and his critics is interesting and informative but takes a harsh slant against Poe's literary merit. Not surprisingly, a number of the essays side with Bloom.

The great majority of the essays were written by esteemed Poe scholars, poets and novelists. D.H. Lawrence's essay contains a number of factual inaccuracies and is gratuitously offensive. Allen Tate's essay "The Angelic Imagination" is very good, as is Richard Wilbur's "House of Poe."

What surprised me most is the pausity of references to Poe's metaphysics, mysticism and hidden meaning. Harold Bloom has written at least 3 books on gnosticism and gnosis in American religion and literature. In at least one of those books, he called Poe a "representative American gnostic." Ironically, Bloom more or less pretends in this book that Poe's works have no meaning or message whatsoever and that Poe wrote only for effect. There are a number of essays which focus on Poe's metaphysics. Take a look at those collected in Eric W. Carlson's book, Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe.

a pretty good book. it's definently a good read for those interested in poe.

I have read every HUNA book that I could lay my hands on.

I read Allan P. Lewis's first book "Clearing Your Lifepath Through Kahuna Wisdom", and consider it to be a step by step 14 lesson guide to practising HUNA, and I wanted to read this book too.

Since "Clearing Your Lifepath Through Kahuna Wisdom" is out of print; the best HUNA books available in my opinion is "Fundamentals Of Hawaiian Mysticism" Charlotte Berney. If you want to see a more complete list of HUNA material; please see my two HUNA listmania lists or my HUNA "So you want to" comments.

Page 9: Allan P. Lewis made some nice comments about the 52 years of HUNA research done by Max Freedom Long.

It IS true that Max was a tireless researcher; but Max did not have the entire picture. He went to the islands in 1917 to teach School. Occasionaly he would overhear the Hawaiians comment about miraculous feats performed by various Kahunas. When he would ask the Hawaiians for more details they would stop talking for fear of persecution from a ha'ole. Max did a wonderful job in reclaiming as much as he did under the circumstances.

Max made two major mistakes. His "christian" beliefs caused him to believe Jesus was an initiated kahuna. He completely overlooked the role of the Akua (gods and goddesses as in Hina, Kane, Kanaloa, Ku, Lono, Pele).

You have to understand; this was only 97 years after the "christians" did their good deed of trying to destroy the native Hawaiian culture, and outlawed practises performed by the kahunas because of fear.

Ha'ole means breathless one: This is in regard to the missionary priests that did not breathe deeply to accumulate a surcharge of mana before prayer to help the prayer come into manifestation, as the Kahuna Pule (prayer kahunas) did.

Page 10: Mr. Lewis is absolutely correct about the 10 parts of a human being.

The 10 parts are; The three selves (Unihipili, Uhane, and Aumakua), three aka bodies, three voltages of mana (mana, mana mana, and mana loa, and the physical body; 3+3+3+1=10.

Page 82. Mr. Lewis is in error about the alpha brainwave pattern being higher than beta.

The four brainwave patterns that I am aware of are listed below.

Delta: 4-7 HTZ. This is deep sleep.

Theta: 7-11 HTZ. A tiny amount of meditation occurs here.

Alpha: 11-16 HTZ. Most meditation occurs here.

Beta: 16-22 HTZ. This is the normal wakeful state of consciousness.

Page 111: Mr: Lewis comments about all magick being the same. and the only thing that seperated black and white magick was the intent of the practitioner.

This is absolutely correct.

I enjoyed the book. It just doesn't convey enough information to be useful.

E-Mail if you have questions or comments; Two Bears.

Aloha nui loa (I love you very much)