The Mountain View Development Company began leveling Dismal Mountain, West Virginia in order to construct a mall. The firm bought out most residents but elderly Lizzie Neal refused to leave because this was the home of her ancestors and her parents were buried nearby. When the company sends trucks down from the mountaintop, an incident finally occurs. Lizzie's nephew Bobby Ray killed the driver who he swears fired at him first. Lizzie sets up the scene so it would seem she shot the driver.

Lizzie's nephew, transportation inspection consultant Owen Allison, comes home to visit his ailing mother and to help Lizzie. While Owen's mother recovers from cancer surgery, Sheriff Thad Reader explains to him that Lizzie's confession of being responsible appears phony. He asks Owen to try to learn the truth. As he makes some inquiries, Owen begins to uncover a dark conspiracy to fund the Dismal Mountain Project, which places his life in danger.

DISMAL MOUNTAIN is an exciting and relevant Owen Allison mystery that highlights the environmental versus economy issue. The story line is entertaining due to the strong secondary characters that help bring West Virginia alive while providing depth to Owen through his family members and his former college sweetheart. John Billheimer makes mystery reading fun (see HIGHWAY ROBBERY and THE CONTRARY BLUES for additional pleasure).

Harriet Klausner

Though Owen is in no sense an easy read, here is a work with a profundity that makes any amount of struggle well worth the effort. One senses, in the author a deep personal spirituality and an intense devotion to his subject. Though the work is several hundred years old it anticipates much of the modern discussion and no important issue is skirted. Owen provides a deep and finely nuanced treatment of Christ for the advanced reader. The title well captures the content of this book.

Owen rocks. I am thrilled I bought this book. I want to find the original language edition, as this one is abridged, but it is quite easy to read.

This book has everything you wanted to know about John Owens and more.

Dr. Ferguson introduced me to John Owen through this work and I have been hooked ever since. If you would like to study a man who epitomized the way scholarship and piety is to be mixed together, then Owen is the one for you. Dr. Ferguson does a noteworthy job of making otherwise difficult reading a real joy.

This book has been out of print for years, yet is continually cited in current Steinbeck scholarship. It needs to be reissued.

This book has rich amount of protocols,which lead you correct therapy.As Johns Hopkins is one of the leaders of Cardiac surgery,you can touch knowledge of them

Wow-this book really simplifies the stock selection process. I'm an experienced investor who has lost money in pure momentum stocks. I see this guy on CNBC and Bloomberg quite a bit and he seems to know his stuff. I agree with Standard & Poor's great endorsement "Magnet Investing provides an insightful look into the stock selection process. It will be a great boost to professional investors, as well as ones that only dabble in stocks." The first several chapters teach investors how to develop a disciplined approach to the market and then describes a new trademarked system that selects stocks based on a well defined set of criteria, combining value and momentum. If you have a PC, you can access this program through Telescan or set it up with another screening service. Then, with the click of your mouse, you can pick a pool of stocks that have the potential to be great performers. The system has averaged a 30% return per year over the past ten years. The trial CD from Telescan is an added bonus. I think the author's system is one of the best I've seen.

The more you know about psychological theories and Winnie-the-Pooh, the more you will enjoy this book. Dr. Williams blasts away with tongue-in-cheek satire aimed at the psychologist's belief that everything that is said, thought, dreamed, and done has many layers of significance. Unfortunately, that approach means that your enjoyment will be modest if your knowledge is correspondingly limited in either area. If you know little about psychology and have not read Winnie-the-Pooh, you may not get most of the humor in the book.

In Freud-like fashion, Dr. Williams begins by descrbing the case for Winnie-the-Pooh being a super psychologist. The thrust of this argument is that Winnie employs every method ever recommended by any psychologist or psychoanalyst somewhere in his fictional adventures. In fact, he often combines them in a single fictional encounter.

The book then recounts seven cases and Winnie's role in them.

Case 1 -- Pooh Cures Christopher Robin of Arktophobia (fear of bears)

Case 2 -- Pooh Assists Piglet to Mature

Case 3 -- Pooh at His Most Eclectic with Tigger

Case 4 -- The Problem with Rabbit

Case 5 -- Parenting: Kanga and Roo

Case 6 -- Wol's Problems with Communication

Case 7 -- Eeyore: A Case of Classical Depression

The cases are written up like Freud's with the exception that they are illustrated with many drawings from the original Pooh stories.

As an example of the approach, the book Winnie-the-Pooh opens with a reference to his living under the name of Sanders. That is never mentioned again. Dr. Williams provides a lengthy argument in favor of this meaning that Winnie-the-Pooh is describing himself as the Sand man, the bringer of dreams. This is an indication of his role as psychotherapist.

In the famous story where Winnie eats too much honey and cannot get out of the hole in the tree, Dr. Williams reinterprets this as Winnie-the-Pooh making an example of himself to discourage others from overeating rather than using aversion therapy on them.

To put this prescience into context, Dr. Williams points out that the Pooh stories date in the 1920s. In the text, he finds "frequent anticipation of theories and practices which more plodding psychologists arrived at much later."

I don't know about you, but I didn't think much about Jung when I read Winnie-the-Pooh. Obviously, the references were too subtle for me.

Those who have experienced psychotherapy will probably find humor in the observations made about Winnie-the-Pooh that they may have heard applied to themselves. Could the observations be equally apt?

This book is best enjoyed by a roaring fire on a cold night with a warmed snifter of brandy, and savored slowly.

After you have finished the book, you might consider the many instances where novels do show ways to solve psychological problems through their fictional developments. Could it be that we can use fiction to be our own therapist? Or, is someone else the therapist? If someone gave you the book, perhaps they are the therapist. If so, is the author the propounder of the theory . . . or is the character?

See the possibilities for humor in pomposity everywhere!

This is a book of The X-Files episode "Leonard Betts". It is one of the scariest episodes, and the end of it leads to the revelation of Scully's cancer, which is obviously a very important event in the history of The X-Files, as any fan of the show will know. It is also hardback, which I greatly appreciated, and is well worth the money.