Good if you need stuff on public, centralizing models. Pretty poor if you want to read up on the evolution of e-markets.

I particulary enjoyed the section by Tempkin at Forrester Research. It provided a powerful look at how the Internet would ultimately impact businesses. While I'm not totaly convinced that the Internet will completely change how big, established businesses operate, his chapter was extremely thought provoking and should probably be read by any business executive thinking about what eBusiness will mean to them.

Despite its size this book is not a "typical" academic work. "Typical" in this case begin defined as a dense work characterized by turgid prose. Yes, the topic is difficult, but Fuller writes so well and brings out so much interesting detail (detail that others would allow editors to cast off as unimportant) that it can safetly be said that if you could read only ONE book on the rise of Russian power then this would be the one. First rate!

William Rusher was a Wall Street lawyer who abandoned his legal career to become publisher of Bill Buckley's conservative 'National Review' magazine, a spot he no longer occupies. He is well-known for his appearances on the radio and television, his syndicated column, his lectures, and his political activism. He helped in Goldwater's campaign for the presidency in 1964.

In this book, he makes a persuasive case that the national media elite are heavily biased in favor of the politically liberal viewpoint. He supports his view with case histories, naming the people and outlets involved.

So, what else is new?

Accuracy in Media has been doing the same thing for years, to no avail. Polls have been taken, demonstrating that the reporters, editors, talking heads and other functionaries of network television news and the great newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today) and the AP are all, virtually unanimously, devoted to the liberal cause.

The Constitution provides for freedom of the press, which includes the freedom to slant the news, if the practitioners choose to. There is no law that they be unbiased.

It is not an original thought with Rusher. This is just another book, telling us what we already know. Now, it is out-of-print.

Although it is well-written and persuasive, I think it is not a major loss. The sun rises in the morning; we have learned to live with that. We have also learned to live with a liberal press. It's just the nature of the beast.

Joseph Pierre,
Author of THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS: Our Journey Through Eternity

The seeminly futile struggle of these idealistic men (and more often than not, their wives) is part of the larger struggle by "liberal" Catholics to make the church more democratic. However, the "conservatives" seem to be firmly in control of the institution and little progress has been made in the effort to make the church more responsive to the people and more atuned to modern ways of looking at things.

I would hope that Free Priests might sit there on library shelves and some day be of value when the history of the church in this country is written. Bill Powers. Feel free to contact me at WFPowers2@aol.co

Shapira's first chapter explains the plight of Europe's oppressed Jews, which led to Theodore Herzl's convocation of the first Zionist meeting in Switzerland in 1896. Although periodic slaughters never reached the level of the Chmielnicki pogroms in 1648 and 1649, which left more than 100,000 Jews dead, as the 20th century began, anti-Semitism in Europe remained a terrible force. The 19th and early 20th century were meanwhile an era of universal nationalism. Peoples around the globe reached into their respective pasts, bolstering identities and calling for national borders. For the Jewish people, nationalism was heightened by a threat to existence that few if other people (except the Turkish Armenians) experienced.

Shapira shows admirably that hope and self-preservation, not belligerence, drove the first and second waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East to Palestine. From 1881 through 1914, Jewish immigrants joined the families of co-religionists who had lived in Palestine since before the destruction of the second Temple in 70 AD. Some sensed hostility among young Arabs of Jaffa. Others, like David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson, remarked on little about Arab inhabitants except their extreme poverty, illiteracy and the diseases by which they were afflicted. The immigrants had no complex ideology or political structure; They merely wanted to live in Zion, which the Jewish people had for 2,000 years considered their homeland. Funded by Jewish organizations and philanthropists such as Baron Rothschild, they began buying land in quantity.

While some Jewish settlers developed a chauvinistic attitude, Shapira also shows that they had no plans to conquer resident Arabs. On the contrary, they adapted local customs and culture--wearing kaffia headdresses, riding horses and carrying weapons.

From 1905 on, as pogroms against Jews in Russia intensified, Jewish settlers arrived understanding the need for self-defense. Yet, no discernable confrontation between Arabs and Jews took shape until the Young Turk revolution rocked the Ottoman empire in 1908, bringing Arab nationalism to Syria in particular. Even then, disputes in Palestine remained local and concerned grazing rights and water. Buying land, Jews learned, did not always entitle them to water sources on it. Where Arabs considered grazing pastures public domain, Jews who had purchased land expected it to be theirs' alone. As they had in Europe, Jewish settlers optimistically hoped for peaceful relations with non-Jewish neighbors.

As World War I approached, however, moods crystallized. Zionist immigrants burdened their new situation with their previous outlook. As in Europe, they attributed the animosity of others to agitation and incitement, in this case, by Christian and urban Arabs. Here, as in Europe, incitement definitely existed. As the Ottoman grip on Palestine gave way to anarchy, anti-Jewish hatred increased. Jewish land purchasers were constantly beset by sellers' fraud: Claims and counterclaims, violence and counterviolence arose. Worse, legal purchases often displaced fellaheen--tenant farmers.

Based on their European experience, when violence arose against the Jews, they assumed the authorities would not protect them. Jewish settlers who had arrived hoping for peace and security in their ancient land discovered that they had exchanged one "existential threat for another." Jewish defensive thinking gelled after the Yom Kippur 1928 and August 1929 riots and lasted until 1936, when the Arab Rebellion--during which Jews were murdered with abandon--stimulated a Jewish offensive strategy.

This was followed by the most traumatic 9 years in Jewish history--1939 through 1947, during which the spontaneous response in Palestine was to go to the aid of Europe's Jews. Jews came, rightly, to believe that they could rely only on themselves. This ethos was celebrated by poets like Nathan Alterman and Hannah Senesh. The Nazis murdered the latter, then 26, after she parachuted behind enemy lines to aid her fellow Jews. In Palestine, Jewish self-preservation was directed at the British, whose grotesque 1939 White Paper, Shapira shows, locked Jews out of the National Home that the League of Nations approved for them in 1922. Alyssa A. Lappen