Admirers of Ray Murphy's The Siege of Gresham who've beenwondering about what else this manic wordsmith has up his sleeve maybe surprised--& impressed--to find that in Empire & Victory the writer shows himself to be master of quite another mode. In this spacious & heartfelt novel we follow the career of Joe Pakotas, full of hungers & angers fueled by his bleak midwestern childhood. Dazzled by the grace of a University of Michigan tailback, Joe leaves the known world behind & sets out across an America where people hustle, suffer & dream. The faces of this Greyhound landscape are given a vivid, Whitmanlike presence as we follow Joe, hurt, hoping & chasing after dreams he can't quite make out but can't abandon, either. Don't be fooled by the football photo on the cover; this is a book about more serious games & the honesty with which Murphy portrays the desperation around his protagonist makes his affirmations all the more persuasive. Score one more for this writer who increasingly bears watching.

Empire & Victory is one of the best books I have ever read. The story of Joe Pakotas and his riotous journey across the North American Continent is an awesome ride, a tour de force, an American classic in the truest sense. It isn't afraid to be ambitious on a grand scale, and has the heart and faith to tackle subjects cynically judged as passe -- rights of passage, American destiny, freedom, love, and the open road -- with a heady abandon and confidence, as if no novel had ever broached these themes and the record has to be set straight. And it is put forth with such passion and skill, the only books you can compare it to are old and big -- Huck Finn, Look Homeward Angel, Suttree -- books that want to take on so much they burst their seams. Books whose subject is ... America, everything, life. God, it is great and refreshing to read a novel like this. A story that kicks off the old cobwebs of theory and commercial considerations and makes you remember what it is like to discover the world. Hell, if that ain't what novels are for, I think we've forgot.

E&V starts with a bang, recasting an early 70s Michigan-Ohio State football game into a pagan ritual of ecstatic intensity. And continues as Joe Pakotas makes his trek by hook or crook across the country toward the Rose Bowl. It is a pilgrimage as rich, varied and dangerous as the Canterbury Tales. Reading it, I found myself in a state of anticipation as one episode followed the next, wondering if the pace would slow. The sheer number of characters introduced, and the economy and vividness with which they are drawn, is breathtaking -- football coaches, book salesmen, prostitutes, hucksters, religious zealots, hippies, reporters, store clerks, priests, and bus drivers -- all pass before us and instantly ground themselves as real.

There is a throwback quality to the book. There is no sarcasm here, no narrative trickery, no distrust of the medium itself. It is sad that we live in a time that passion is looked upon with a jaundiced eye. Just as the decline of theater has impoverished our acting, the marginalization of poetry has withered our prose. But Ray Murphy has that old time religion. His writing has the clarity and density of 19th century Romantic poetry, as well as the beauty. The prose is so addictive and flows so effortlessly, it colors your consciousness, enriching your view of life. Empire & Victory is exhilarating and revelatory. I can't wait to read it again.

Roxanne Henkes' books are very good and very hard to put down. She has the gift of telling her story from different view points, and I like this style a lot. Living in a small town in North Dakota made the book Finding Ruth even more of a delight for me to read. Besides being entertained by Roxanne's books, she includes insights that make one think about their own life. Keep the books coming Roxanne! They are definitely winners!

Henke's compelling first book, After Anne, was such a page-turner that I wondered if she could possibly repeat her success. In Finding Ruth, the reader has all the components for a delightful read: fast-paced story, believeable characters, interesting dialogue, heart-wrenching moments, touching romance, and plenty of take-away. I couldn't put it down.

Ruthie struggles with years of unfulfilled dreams that sour her view of small town Brewster. Tough circumstances early in life are part of the problem, years of bad decisions don't help. When Paul, her highschool sweetheart, returns to town, Ruthie's life takes a new twist.

Roxanne Henke has the wonderful ability to engage the reader as if one is sitting across the kitchen table listening to "girl-talk." When I open her books, I feel like she is saying, "Now let me tell you about Ruthie!" And I pull up my chair, pour myself a cup of tea, and listen.

I return to this book again and again for comfort. It does discuss issues of homosexuality and spirituality, but the focus is very much on spirituality, so it is appropriate for people of any or no sexual orientation who want to learn to love more deeply and purely. I also appreciate the friendly, conversational style of the book. It makes me feel as if Dr. Morrison were a good friend.

This book is the perfect response to those "Christians" who tell those of us that are gay that we must either change or go to hell. Ms. Morrison tackles the questions of inclusiveness of all in the modern church, and does it with love. This book is not just for homosexuals, it is for anyone who has ever felt unwelcome or unincluded in church. Read this book!

I was given this book by my minister when my mother died. I found the quotations it offered very thought provoking especially since it is not dominated by Christian themes. Her funeral service was of her Christian faith of which I am not a part. This book helped me come to terms with her death in my own way with wisdom from Emerson, Shakespeare, Whitman, and the Chuang Tzu just to name a few. I recommend it to anyone who would like to refer to a text for quotations and wisdom on death, marriage, birth, and coming of age.

We found this book when looking for ideas on wedding ceremonies. We pulled our entire ceremony from passages in this book and felt the passages helped us create a personal and empowering service. We have since been able to use the book on a number of occasions - particulary at the death of a close cousin. Many of the passages we read helped to comfort us, but one in particular, spoke to us about our cousin in a way we did not otherwise discover.

Mr. Woodrow has pointed out that many people have departed from the purity of the simple Gospel (page 165). He uses organized facts to refute "dispensational" misinformation. Woodrow uses details in a clear manner to expose modern false teachings about Daniel's 70th week. He clearly shows that there is not a 2000-year gap in the 70-week period described by the prophet Daniel. Every Bible student should own this book and give it as a gift to anyone they care about. Although I have not agreed with all of Ralph Woodrow's books, I highly recommend the scholarship in "Great Prophecies of the Bible."

In a very convincing, well documented way Ralph Woodrow makes clear what is often confusing in the context of the very young futurist approach to explain Biblical prophecy. He instead uses the historical approach, a method which has stood the test of time. The book answers those unresolved questions for a reader curious about a more historical explanation of what has already happened to fulfill Biblical prophecy and what Christians can expect to happen in the future of the Church. Well worth reading.

If you have questions about being a gay or bisexual teen, this book has the answers. It's informative, yet interesting and has some great pics too! Check it out! Read it! Live it!

I am 18 years old and recently came out. This book is filled with useful information. It's funny, well-written and informative. It offers answers to many questions relating to being young and gay...I recommend it!

This young author explodes onto the scene with this debut novel! Not only is it well-written, but the characters are extremely well-developed. Although I am not of African descent, I could relate to many of the themes in the novel. The book trancends ethnicity -- and gender as well. Nkem is a wonderful character and Ms. Onyejekwe looks to be one of the budding, hot, young Black female writers -- young writers period!

I am utterly impressed with the quality of Ms. Onyejekwe's work. She has written a story with a very central and universal theme. Although I am not from Nigeria, I can relate to the environment and traditons she narrates so well. I still wonder why many cultures are slow to appreciate the female child - without them, we would have no mothers to raise the world.

This book uses the life of its main characters to tell an emotionally captivating story that crosses over oceans and continents. I recommend it for anyone who believes in freedom.

It's Alive has an unusual perspective. The authors argue that the valuable innovations of the next ten years are being developed in the research laboratories and advanced developments of organizations and companies today. The template is looking backward at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1971 as a way to have gotten a preview of today's computer-connected society.

The book will primarily appeal to those with an interest in applying complexity science and biological analogies through information technology to large organizations. Most of the applications here require tens of millions of dollars to do. So for those in small organizations, the examples will seem out-of-reach.

The main advantage of this book over similar books is that it has more and more contemporary examples and a further development of its concepts than the predecessors that I have read.

From looking at technological developments that are available now and those that are in process, Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis see the maturing of the information technology revolution occurring at the same time as the commercialization of various "molecular" technologies (such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and materials science). Because the two fields operate conceptually in similar ways, the authors point to a convergence that has begun between the two fields that will probably grow in the future. They also draw key lessons from the way that evolutionary biology operates to prescribe for business organizations in the future.

Here's the book's structure:

Introduction

Part I The Next Ten Years
Chapter 1 Economic Evolution: Learning from Life Cycles

Part II Code Is Code
Chapter 2 General Evolution: Learning from Nature
Chapter 3 Biology and the World of the Molecule
Chapter 4 Information and the World of Bits

Part III The Adaptive Enterprise
Chapter 5 Adaptive Management
Chapter 6 Seed, Select, and Amplify at Capital One
Chapter 7 Breeding Early and Often at the U.S. Marine Corps
Chapter 8 Creating the Capacity to Respond at BP
Chapter 9 Born Adaptive at Maxygen
Chapter 10 Becoming an Adaptive Enterprise

Part IV Convergence
Chapter 11 The Adjacent Possible

To me, the most interesting parts of the book involved advanced experiments and applications of technology to solve problems. Most of these I had not read about before. For the most part, these are written in ways that a lay person can easily follow.

The organizational examples were helpful to applying the concepts of an adaptive enterprise. Apply the six memes (gene-like qualities of ideas) for managing:

Self-organize; recombine; sense and respond; learn and adapt; seed, select, and amplify; destabilize.

Of the organizational examples, I found the Capital One and Maxygen examples the easiest to understand. The BP and U.S. Marine Corps examples seemed a little sketchy.

My favorite example in the entire book was of artist Eduardo Kac turning Genesis 1:28 into Morse code and translating the results into a DNA sequence. He then had the sequence inserted into live bacteria, and displayed the bacteria publicly where viewers could zap the bacteria with UV to create potential mutations. Now, that's technological convergence!

The book ends with some speculation about new applications of convergent technologies such as matter compilers, personal hospitals, universal individual lifelong mentors, experience machines and social-science stimulators.

Don't let the book's conceptual structure scare you off. Underneath the new definitions and concepts, there's a lot of common sense that most will agree with: Get experience fast; learn from your experience; keep it simple; be agile; get to the most valuable places first with the most; and communicate in all directions.

After you've finished reading the book, I suggest you think about how the book's principles could be accomplished on a shoe-string by an organization that you know well. In that way, you will play a valuable role in being a commercializer of advanced laboratory results.

This is an original work that provides rich detail about why and how companies must adapt. As a college professor, working on an article about contingency marketing, I found "It's Alive" to have numerous insights and examples that will greatly help my work, if not my teaching. While many of the concepts are abstract, the authors almost always manage to make their points effectively and realistically. I enjoyed reading this book.

I could hardly wait for time to continue this book once I had started reading it. Reds is fearless and has a depth of character which is inspiring and I could not wait to see what crazy mess he would get into next. I also admire his ability to tell all and you feel like he holds nothing back.

He never missed an opportunity to get involved in a just cause, even in his later life with his trips to Haiti, to which I can relate, since my sister has made trips to Haiti to take portable water purification systems and train the Haitians to use them.

The book also relates to the unstructured lives of the youth of our generation of the 40's & 50's, when you used your wits to make decisions. Reds is a man's man. America could use a few more good men like him.

In all my years of being an ardent fan of non-fiction, my imagination has never been quite so stirred as by this heartfelt account of life and personal groth during one of this nation's most tumultuous times...The setting for much of Reds book is Savannah Georgia, whose quaint yet quirky nature was previously explored to great acclaim in the landmark publication,'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'... this tale is decidely different, however, as one of rather than tragedy..It's the fascinating true story of an American patriot's sudden decision to hijack a U.S. airliner to Cuba. This unusual saga of a small town boy who caused an International incident is unlike anything I've ever read. It is alternately sweetly nostalgic and gripping. Reds Helmey is the quintessential everyman... restless, passionate, and vulnerable in ways that every reader will find achingly familiar. A terrific book that no doubt will have Hollywood calling very soon.

A beautiful book of photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others culled from the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration collection (a New Deal project that covered far more than farms), Long Time Coming may strike you at first as a nostalgia trip back to the days depicted on the cover: when whole towns lined up to watch their Boy Scout troops march down the street waving American flags. But Lesy hasn't combed the archive's 150,000-plus negatives only to offer up a tribute to lost Americana. Try putting this book out on your coffee table; lean close, and you'll hear it ticking.

Many of the images in this book -- a little girl sprinting up an alley in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, beneath rows of washing and before the disinterested stares of the older girls and women; the backs of five bony men as they carry a homemade coffin up a rocky path in Jackson, Kentucky; an angry black Muslim in Chicago leading his two stricken-looking sons on an errand or into fanaticism -- are as haunting and disturbing as anything Lesy has presented in his earlier work. They are also weirdly filled with hope. Neither inspiring, exactly, nor sentimentally-portrayed, the men, women, and children in these photographs might, looked at by themselves, fade away quickly. Gathered together in all their painful glory, they seem possessed of a Faulknerian quality: They endure.

Long Time Coming is best looked at it not just once and slowly, but several times over. At least once go through quickly, flipping the pages as if to set the coal miners, preachers, nuns, farmers, carny barkers, and bankers contained therein into continuous motion. Follow the running girl from Ambride, PA to the family wrestling and splashing and staring at the camera (beneath a giant billboard for Iron City Pilsner, "Just a sip at twilight") in a "homemade swimming pool for steelworker's children" on the following right-hand page; and on to a thick column of a mother -- the girl grown up? -- marching, baby in hand, past "Factory workers' homes, Camden, New Jersey," and then back to an alley, where now a young black boy stands staring at the camera defiantly even as he keeps his distance from it.

Sequences such as these abound throughout Long Time Coming, stories of escape and capture, of growing old and being born again. But beyond those literal progressions, there are stories told by shapes: A woman in a long black coat dominates the middle of a frame of a pleasant residential street in Woodbine, Iowa, as does a bent-over drifter crossing a dry, empty road in Dubuque, and a traffic cop standing like a statue in the middle of street glistening with rain in Norwich, Connecticut. The black hole at the center of a mountain man's guitar leads to the white sphere of a black musician's maracas, which in turn foreshadow the white straw hats seen from above at a cockfight in Puerto Rico.

That these stories slowly reveal themselves as morality plays is no accident; both Lesy, and the man who originally commissioned the photographs, intended them as such. There are eight chapters of text interspersed throughout Long Time Coming, in which the mastermind of the F.S.A. documentary project, a man named Roy Stryker, is introduced, mocked, and redeemed. A bureaucrat with tyrannical tendencies, Stryker drew up lists of books for his photographers to read in order to "understand" America -- cut-and-dried sociology, experts on regional hygiene -- and "shooting scripts" the photographers were supposed to adhere to. "Husking bees. Barn dance; hay rides -- Halloween -- football games; making pies -- mince meat and pumpkin; turkey dinners; picking feathers from the ducks." In his attempt to control reality's representation, Stryker ended up composing prose poems of Americana, which in turn became the major chords of a symphony much expanded by the keen eyes of the photographers.

The whole is a requiem mass. The fact that its subject -- the United States -- continues to exist doesn't so much refute its minor chords as make them all the more relevant to the Coplandesque sweeps of optimism: elements of a portrait of what the country was, is, and -- isn't this the point of all propaganda? -- may yet be. Roy Stryker saw these photographs as facts; the ordinary citizens who viewed them understood them as testimonies. "Every new form of communication," writes Lesy, "every new kind of media, has been and will always be a blind, blunt, crippled effort to make the past into the present, the far into the near, the outside into the inside, to turn us all, for a moment, into supernal beings.... The File" -- the collection of 145,000 photographs -- "had the potential to create, over time, an experience of totality that felt boundless... It's as grand a thing, in its own way, as Yosemite or Yellowstone. It's the common property of every citizen of the United States. It belongs to us. It is us."

A stunning book of 410 photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information archives now in the Library of Congress. This book takes a different approach to the many others which use FSA photos, here you will not see many of those well-known images of poverty in rural areas, the effects of land erosion, the plight of Southern sharecroppers, not even the greatest FSA photo of all, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother but instead a comprehensive and wonderful showing of the ordinary and everyday in American life from 1935 to 1943.

All these fascinating photos are divided into eight sections, City Life, Hard Work, Hometowns, Hill Towns, Coal Towns, Family Farms, Hard Times and Amusements. Most of them are from 1938 to 1943 so there are few by Walker Evans who left the FSA in !937 but plenty by Russell Lee. The photos (well printed on excellent paper) are presented one to a page with a caption, photographer's name and date centred below. Because these are FSA images they depict a very detailed picture of everyday life and in 1941 when the US joined the Second World War it was decided to expand the coverage to record the war effort and life in general. This is the main reason I like the book plus the eighty-two photos never published before.

Between the eight photo sections author Lesy writes (in a very honest way) various essays about Roy Stryker, who ran of the FSA and how he organised the photographers work through his exacting shooting scripts (these were partially inspired by Robert Lynd and his 1925 book, 'Middletown' based on Muncie, Indiana which turns out to be average small town USA, tough luck Peoria, Illinois!) how this huge file of images was distributed to the media, correspondence between Stryker and the photographers and more. I found one section (pages 230 to 235) called 'The Middletown Spirit' very intriguing, it is a list of the things that the folks of 'Middletown' (or small towns anywhere) believed in and as well as the goodness that one would expect it also reflects an alarming collection of deeply conservative beliefs, ethnic prejudice and a Horatio Alger like deference towards business. The back of the book lists all the negative numbers so you can order prints from the Library of Congress and in fact see 60,000 photos from the FSA/OWI collection on the Library's 'American Memory' website.

Because of what these photographs show, the quality of presentation and production, I think this will become the definitive reference book for the period. A glorious reminder of the American spirit.