My 6 1/2 year boy loves the Myth Men Guardians of the Legend books. They are a bit like reading a comic, and they have collector cards in the back. He loves the illustrations.

This book provides background for seasons and feast days in the Christian (Catholic) calendar. Although it is aimed at a Roman Catholic audience, it has been very helpful to me as a Protestant worship leader, and will be appreciated by anyone in a liturgical environment. The book is detailed and thorough, but will be just as useful to laity who seek to better understand the worship in which they participate as it is to those who plan that worship.

"God is love" is the one of the most profound statements ever written and revealed. It is the foundation of religious faith, and of Christianity in particular. It is a sufficient answer for many "problems" of our present age.

Kreeft explains the profound nature of this simple statement and shows clearly that the Love of God, which is agape and not like our human loves which are only shadows of His love, is the most important thing and indeed the only thing for it is God Himself.

That knowledge forces us to treat each other as God views us.. as created in His image. Your neighbor is practically the most holy object presented to your senses.

Read this and you will not look at your fellow man the way you did before.

This is a fascinating look at papal elections. Hebblewaithe regales us with wonderful historical and behind-the-scenes details which alone make the book worthwhile. His descriptions of the likely candidates, though likely to be outdated when the actual event arrives, are informative. Hebblewaithe's own agenda tends to permeate the book; he seems intent to replace the "intricate and highly politicized process" with an intriccate and highly politicized process of his own, to ensure the election of what he hopes will be a more "liberal" Pope. Fortunately, this partisanship doesn't spoil an otherwise engaging work.

The key word here is "pastoral". Just because thebook has questions and answers, this is not to be confused with apologetics, which is the art of defending the Catholic faith with rational arguments.

The questions here deal with practical, everyday problems e.g. What do I about my anti-Catholic husband? What is the Church's teaching on foul language? Is oral sex morally licit? So, it covers pretty important ground for the believer.

Personally, this is not Bertolucci at his best. I prefer his books like his personal testimony "On Fire with the Spirit" and his book to youth "Straight from the Heart". Nevertheless, this is still a useful book. It's from one of America's most popular Catholic evangelists. It's clear and readable. And very pastoral.

This book is an excellent compellation of the myths concerning the foundation of the Roman empire. It is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in exploring these myths.

THIS BOOK HAS NO EXCITEMENT OR DRAMA FOR THE KIDS,THEY JUST REWROTE AN OLD STORY

Would you ever fight a one hundred headed dragon? Well Hercules has in MYTH MEN Guardians Of The Legend. In the middle of the story Hercules has to hold the sky. I like Hercules the best, because he's strong and cool. I believe that the moral is that if work hard for something, then you achieve it.

One of my sons had a lot of trouble with beginning reading. How laboriously we taught him his letters, then sounds, then short words! But then we found the Myth Men series. He read these books over and over -- and they have some big words! It's a comic book format, so he could pick up cues from the pictures. This series (and Archie comics, actually) got him over the reading hump, he moved on to text without pictures, and last year he won an award for most books read at his school!

This book was so extremely bias against the Romans that one could easily conclude that the author lost his most beloved ones in a battle against the Romans!! Even his phraseology throughout the book betrays what seems to be a personal hatred of this ancient race. I found his contemptuous remarks to be distracting to the ease of reading. That aside, the author struggles in this book to portray the Celts as a culture much more advanced than was perceived by the first hand accounts of ancient Greek and Roman writers and historians. In doing so he resorts to some fairly weak leaps of logic. His primary view seems to be that to arrive at historical accuracy all one needs to do is to reverse whatever the Roman accounts were in each and every case.

The arguments in this book for Celtic superiority over the Romans is so tainted that in some cases I actually laughed out loud. Reading this book one would think that the armies of Rome won most of their battles by dumb luck. Which is not bad considering that Rome's greatly outnumbered armies eventually conquered almost all of the Celtic lands and added Britian to the Empire, holding it for over 400 years!

If you're interested in names and dates this book is fine. But if you're interested in what the ancient Celts and the Italic/Roman people were actually like, and how the cultures interacted, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Peter Berresford Ellis has done, I think, an excellent job portraying a culture whose accomplishments are far too easily dismissed in favour of other well documented ancient cultures. To present his representation of a culture that traditionally recorded historical events orally, Ellis has had to make some insightful points using the material at hand and has made good work of presenting it in a fashion enjoyable to read.

Although I only ordered a quantity of one, I was shipped 5 copies of this pamphlet (I believe the 5 copies is a quantity of one). The pamphlet itself is a typical Kreeft-styled dialogue between Sonny (whose Catholic faith is bright) and Dusty (who has drifted from the Church). Although the pamphlet briefly gives exellent reasons to re-examine lost faith, it caters to "Mere Christianity", not Catholicism. The title might lend one to think that Kreeft was going to explore the Holy Mother Church, but not here. Overall, this is not quite up to par for Kreeft.

Kreeft at his best, explaining to a cradle Catholic what the gospel is all about. Old-school fuss-budgets will call this simplistic--which is one reason Catholic pews are empty. The Pope should read this aloud from St. Peter's...

"So THIS is what all the hyberpole at Mass is about!"

The Reformation may have been a tragedy, but a greater one is the fact the Catholic Church has such a hard time explaining to its members how to get to Heaven. At least Kreeft gets it.Thanks!

Fr. Richard McBrien is a well-known cleric who has made a career of public dissent in the Church. If this is the position he wishes to take, that is his business. However, when he purports to write a history of the papacy, is it too much to expect precisely that?

Instead, McBrien has provided several hundred pages of typical, tiresome "Catholic" dissent badly disguised as a history book. As a non-Roman Catholic clergyman, historian and theologian, I find that very unfortunate.

For a far better book from an academic perspective, I would suggest Dr. Owen Chadwick's Oxford Dictionary of the Popes as a much more valuable reference tool.

McBrien tries to compress almoat 2,000 years of religious, social and political history into one volume and does a pretty solid job. He gives anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages on the over 260 popes throughout history, with the bulk of his text spread out over the popes of the 20th century.

For the most part, McBrien looks at the popes with a scholarly and critical eye, describing how most of the popes throughout history were preoccupied with political and military matters rather than spiritual ones.

However, he does drift from a scholarly, critical examination from time to time. For example, I thought that he was improperly airing out his theological complaints against the current pope in his section on John Paul II (McBrien is theology chairman at Notre Dame), but I enjoyed his passage about the much-beloved pope, John XXIII. (can someone out there recommend any good books on this pope?)

McBrien ends this reference work with some papal facts, like "best and worst" and "firsts and lasts" and has a chronological list, as well as an alphabetical list, of the popes. However, my favorite parts of this book were the introductions to each chronological period of papal history. McBrien gives a general picture of the mood of the day and how each pope dealt with military, political (and sometimes spiritual) issues of the day. He also takes a look at internal church politics and stresses that throughout history, popes were sometimes under control of kings, emperors, powerful families and groups of bishops and clergy.

I've even used this book to settle barroom discussions over popes and in August, 2002, when the press began to ask if Pope John Paul II was going to resign, I referenced this book when people were asking me if other popes have resigned in the past (they did, BTW).

The book is a solid reference if you someone asks you who Pope Eugenius or Sixtus II was, and when they were popes. Since McBrien had 2,000 years of history to cover, it piqued my curiosity to learn more about these fascinating individuals and the times in which they lived.

This book is the most important among my vast library of papal history books because McBrien includes many facts about the popes that I have only been able to find in obscure books. He lets us know who is favorite and least favorite popes are, but that helps to give a more personal approach to this topic, which is refreshing in that most informational (particularly historical) books tend to be so dry. This is an excellent sourcebook for those interested in papal history and can easily be read from cover to cover without the reader ever getting bored with the text. McBrien is an excellent writer and this is by far the most well-written, interesting, and informative books on the subject of popes that is readily available.