Volume one of this biography concerns his early years and his career up to 1941. He was born in a country town and came from a poor family. He was able to get a university eduction and became a succesful lawyer and state politician before moving to the federal sphere. He did not serve in the first world war although his brothers did.

The book is actually by an author who has more sympathy with the labour side of politics rather than the conservative. Never the less it is a reasonable portrait of the man and also the period. One of the better Australian political biographies.

"Whether or not Schulz is a devout Christian I could not say," writes lexo-2. If he had taken the trouble to actually read Short's book, however, he would have found numerous quotations from Schulz himself concerning his religious views. Speaking of a Bible-study group he attended shortly after his return from the Second World War, Schulz says, "The more I thought about it during those study times, the more I realized that I really loved God" (quoted on p. 70). Or again, "I don't even like the expression 'take communion.' You cannot 'take' communion. You are a part of the communion. You are communing with Christ; you are a part of the community of saints" (p. 80). The rhetoric, complete with its anti-Catholic bias against the notion of "taking" communion, is clearly that of a born-again evangelical (in Schulz's case, Church of God). And lest there be any doubt of Schulz's authorial intentions, he is quoted in the very first chapter as saying, "I have a message that I want to present, but I would rather bend a little to put over a point than to have the whole strip dropped because it is too obvious. As a result . . . all sorts of people in religious work have written to thank me for preaching in my own way through the strips. That is one of the things that keeps me going" (p. 20).

Schulz was worried about being too obvious. Clearly he wasn't obvious enough.

Short's book is cogent and well argued; it certainly is not a collection of "homilies." Contrary to what lexo-2 implies, Short does not ignore the darker side of the Peanuts world. Indeed, of lexo- 2's "three phrases," Short uses two or them in chapter titles: "The Wages of Sin Is 'Aaaugh!'" and "Good Grief!" Good grief! Read before you review!

Yes, lexo-2 is quite right that the world of Peanuts is a "sunlit hell, in which the characters never grow, never change, etc." Where he goes wrong is in assuming that Short--a Ph.D. in literature and theology, a man who had taken the trouble to study the cartoon in depth and even write a book about it--couldn't see that for himself. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Short's whole point is that we all live in a "sunlit hell," suffering "unimaginable fears" and "wreaking appalling cruelties on each other," and that we will never escape that hell unless we can find . . . (you guessed it!) the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The salvationist message does not come across too strongly in the cartoon (Schulz did not want to be "obvious") but it just as surely is there, between the lines, in the occasional epiphanies of love and reconciliation that illuminate the otherwise bleak moral landscape of Peanutopia.

You can agree or disagree with the Short-Schulz analysis of the human predicament. Personally, I disagree strongly. But in a world in which evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity have so much influence and power, it simply will not do to be idly dismissive. Indeed, I particularly recommend Short's book to freethinkers of every stripe, if only that they may remind themselves just how subtle and persuasive evangelical discourse can be. There is more, much more, to Short's little book than "pious ramblings" and that is precisely what makes it, depending on your point of view, so inspiring or so insidious.

A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

This book is anything but boring--calling this book boring strikes me as a desperate subterfuge by someone who want to keep its explosive contents from fuller circulation. This book is *fascinating* and explosive, not least because of the very well documented coverage it provides of how Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, used Robert Maxwell to penetrate not just the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, the military, and the national laboratories, but many foreign governments including the Chinese, Canadians, Australians, and many others, with substantial penetration of their intelligence service databases, all through his sale of a software called PROMIS that had a back door enabling the Mossad to access everything it touched (in simplistic terms).

Also shocking, at least to me, was the extensive detail in this book about how the Israeli intelligence service is able to mobilize Jews everywhere as "sayanim," volunteer helpers who carry out operational (that is to say, clandestine) support tasks to include spying on their government and business employers, stealing documents, operating safehouses, making pretext calls, and so on. I am a simple person: if you are a Jew and a US citizen, and you do this for the Israeli intelligence service, then you are a traitor, plain and simple. This practice is evidently world-wide, but especially strong in the US and the UK.

The book draws heavily on just a couple of former Israeli intelligence specialists to address Israeli use of assassination as a normal technique (and implicitly raises the possibility that it was used against Senator John Tower, who died in small airplane crash and was the primary "agent" for Maxwell and Israel in getting PROMIS installed for millions of dollars in fees all over the US Government).

Finally, the book has a great deal of detail about the interplay between governments, crime families, Goldman Sachs and other major investors, and independent operators like Robert Maxwell who play fast and loose with their employee pension funds.

This book is not boring. Far from it. It is shocking, and if it is only half-right and half-accurate, that is more than enough to warrant its being read by every American, whatever their faith.

Alternative title: "Financial Planning For High School Freshman"

Case-in-point, the reader must slog through 290 pages to get to chapter 16 titled, "Risk & Reward". And then, (drum roll, please!) we get this gem, "Sound investment management principals dictate that the investor should almost never invest in just one asset class to the exclusion of all others". WOW, that's worth every penny of my ($). THANKS!

Bottom line, if you're in the financial services business and you need this book...it's time to rethink that career choice.