Used price: $10.99
Used price: $0.50
Collectible price: $6.25
Used price: $1.69
Collectible price: $6.99
Buy one from zShops for: $5.95
Used price: $9.95
Collectible price: $25.00
The author, John Powers, has a great sense of humor and enjoyable use of sarcasm. I found myself literally laughing out loud several times throughout the book. Every anecdote is full of humorous descriptions and mocking comments. Each chapter ends with a hilarious punch line; I could hardly resist sneaking a premature look at the last sentence.
Powers also does a great job at creating characters with whom teenagers can identify. The stories are told through the eyes of the narrator, a teenage male in high school. Although the book was written over twenty-five years ago, I still found that I could relate to the narrator and that we share many of the same thoughts. Powers does an excellent job at getting into the psyche of a teenager and describing the world through the cynical, self-conscious eyes of an adolescent.
Overall, this is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It flows nicely and I did not want to stop reading it. It is a great book to read to make one laugh and improve one's mood.
Used price: $4.24
Collectible price: $25.00
Used price: $6.50
Collectible price: $9.97
Used price: $0.99
Collectible price: $13.22
Used price: $8.95
On scale of 10 it's a 10. You write it, I'll read it!
Used price: $2.21
Collectible price: $11.00
Buy one from zShops for: $9.99
Reeves' looks at the Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile Crises take advantage of recent disclosures from US, Soviet and other sources to show how close we came to World War III in both of those situations.
The book's description of the start of the US commitment in Vietnam under JFK allowed me to gain a better understanding of how Kennedy's prior failure to stand up to the Soviet Union and Krushchev in Laos and Cuba "forced" JFK to stand firmly behind the unsupportable South Vietnamese government.
Other topics addressed by the book include JFK's tepid support of civil rights and his rampant promiscuity.
I had to rate this book a 9 (I've yet to read a 10), but this book has to be one of the best out of the almost unlimited supply of JFK biographies
List price: $38.50 (that's 30% off!)
Used price: $26.90
Buy one from zShops for: $22.00
This book shows American history as it should be written--giant machines moving the citizens and the commerce of the land, a huge railroad corporation with all the bureaucratic "snafus" of any multi-layered business as those snafus are seen by and sometimes affect the career of an engineman, the impact of the Great Depression on one family as typical of America as any could be. Historical facts are all here, but they are facts as seen by two very real, very human people, a father and a son. Were all history books written so well, we would all understand history far better and read it far more willingly.
My own grandfather was an engineman, through his road was the Frisco rather than the Pennsy, and my own father was a great lover of trains, though his career paths took him in a different direction. I came along late in my father's life, and, by the time I had the ability and the leisure to write about him, he was gone and his history with him. "Set Up Running" is the type of book I wish someone could have written about my own father, and I know of no higher praise than that. This is a book for railroaders, historians, Americans, and every father's child. At the end, I hated to have to say good-bye to O.P.--and to his son John--but I left knowing much more about the first half of 20th Century America, and I really enjoyed the telling.