This book gives a very good account of expedition caving by Oxford University cavers in the picos region of Spain over a number of years. It is very well written, humerous in parts and manages to capture the exitement of initial underground exploration.

This is the most useful guide to collectable china that I have found. It is not only an exhaustive reference guide to Homer Laughlin's "Virginia Rose", but provides much information about other types of china as well. This book provides details and information that you can't find elsewhere.

Unmatched by any history book, these letters constitute a rich and intimate glimpse into the 15th century.

Spanning several generations of the redoubtable Paston family, they are a unique record of their rise to eminence in their native Norfolk, and of the life during the upheavels of the civil wars between Yorkists and Lancastrians.

The Singing Bird Will Come is a remarkable book by a man who is truly in touch with himself as he struggles with the reality of death. His strong desire to continue to celebrate life as he prepares to die makes a lasting impression on the reader. How the author comes to grips with communicating his journey is the focus of the book. He seems to follow Kubler-Ross's stages of death--denial, anger, bargaining with God, depression and finally, acceptance. He feels it is especially ironic that he has to come to accept his dying so soon after he had come to accept himself as a gay man. This story captures the well-balanced tension John Noonan experiences between continuing daily living and thinking of eternity. I recommend it highly for caregivers, service providers, and all of us who will prepare to die someday.

This book portrays the typical reactions of students who will be studying worms. It is comical for the children to whom it may be read as well as to the adult reading it. It is an excellent read aloud. It is also a great book to share with your child whether he/she reads it alone or you read it together!

If Denzel Washington Touched Your Heart in The New Movie "John Q" Than read.....Jennifer's Story...DEATH BY HMO...A Real Life Tragedy.

This book touched the nerve that ties all the problems and mistakes together within our medicine for profit system. It held my attention from begining to end. My heart goes out to this family that has suffered so much. I consider the money paid for this incredable story a donation to a worthy cause.

Larry

This is a very disturbing indictment of modern health care. Dorothy Cancilla exhibits an extraordinary amount of restraint in recalling the preventable death of her daughter at the hands of inept doctors and an unforgiving system.

It's ironic that a organization whose charter is to maintain people's health can actually compromise their lives when the bottom line might be in jeopardy.

Kudos to Mrs. Cancilla for having the courage to face her demons by sharing them with others.

Alma Rose was born to musical royalty in Vienna (the daughter of famed violinist Arnold Rose and niece of Gustav Mahler). She studied with distinction at the Vienna Conservatory and the Vienna State Academy, and consequently enjoyed a very respectable and successful musical career. In 1932 Alma formed a women's orchestra (Vienna Waltzing Girls) and toured throughout Europe. But like so many others of her class and background, she was totally caught off guard by the Nazi onslaught. Courageously assisting her family's flight from the Nazi's antisemitic pogroms, she was nonetheless caught and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. There she took a group of terrified and untrained women and transformed them into an orchestra whose music saved them from being summarily gassed by their Nazi captors. Forty women were to survive that horrific place because of their participation in Alma's prisoner orchestra. But Alma herself was to die of illness in the camps before they were able to be liberated by the Allies. A welcome contribution to Holocaust studies, as well as a brilliantly presented biography of a gifted musician, Alma Rose: Vienna To Auschwitz is a memorial to a gifted musician and a testament to Alma's personal struggle to help as many women survive as she could. It is also a damning indictment of the Nazi horror and an effective counter to the pernicious attempts of historical revisionists to suppress both the atrocities and the courage of those dark times.

Richard Newman has spent many years working on this book and it paid off, there can't be a biography on hardly anyone that is better researched. And he has written it in a way that doesn't judge the person, he relates the facts but doesn't try any psychological insight. He leaves this up to the reader. A beautiful, compelling book on a woman that used a difficult position to save as many lives as possible. If ever anyone deserved a monument, it is Alma Rosé. Richard Newman`s book lays the foundation. I will publish the German version in Fall 2002.

My review is best expressed in a letter to the authors. While the letter speaks little of the content of the story, it does the reflections of the reader:

I have just finished your book, Alma Rosé, Vienna to Auschwitz and felt compelled to write a word of thanks for such an excellent book. I have lived in Vienna for 23 years and in our early years I walked by the Rosé house in the Pyrkergasse each day, taking our oldest to the Volkschule. Of course, at that time, I had no idea the importance of number 23. Through your book and others of Viennese history I have gained a profound sense of history that a midwest American, growing up in the suburbs, rarely has a chance to learn.

We have since moved from the 19th district, but each time I am in the city the enormity of life that has gone on before me deeply tugs at my soul. The stones I walk on have carried the lives of so many, each woven into a history of joy and often of utter loss and evil.

I believe your book was one of those that has allowed me to enter into a life past. Through it I have gained new perspective that the joy and beauty I now enjoy is not without the marring of tragedy and sorrow of many who were innocent. I was also able with my family to visit Auschwitz this summer. The visit has left a lasting impact on our minds and it certainly allowed me to have even deeper sense of personal presence as I read your book. The immensity of the tragedy leaves one lost for thoughts and words. The life of Alma Rosé puts a reality to that part of history that seems unbelievable, yet was played out in the very places I have lived and walked.

I visited the Rosé grave in Grinzing last week and noted that Alma's name is inscribed on the headstone (unfortunately, the date is 4/4/44 and not 5/4/44). In honor of her courage and for the lives she most certainly helped spare, I left a memorial candle on her grave. I did not seem fitting to leave the grave without some acknowledgement and sign of respect of her family's life.

Again, thank you for the fine research and excellent presentation of her life. The book must also be considered a memorial not just to one life, but to many who's stories will never be told.

The importance of this book cannot be overstated - it is still the most exhaustive effort to date to document every aspect of the black American condition, from medical history to birth rates to the black church and social clubs. Myrdal systematically shreds the institutions of segregation and racial indocrination. As for providing groundwork for changing these systems, however, he falls short. Myrdal is too vague in his theories of white morality and causation of black poverty and never draws solid conclusions. There is also no mention of actual contact or conversation with any black people - Myrdal fails to see blacks as much more than a palimpsest of the white experience. I think he would have done better to push the white psyche aside and interact more with the focus of his study. Ralph Ellison noted, "Can a people live and develop over three hundred years simply by _reacting_? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?"

Writing against the backdrop of WWII, Myrdal confronted the contradiction between the US belief "All men are created equal") and the reality that African-Americans earned less for the same work as whites, lived in atrocious conditions, died at an earlier age. He argues that if Americans had believed that God made some poor, others rich, this contradiction could have been acceptable. But because Americans believed "all men are equal," the fact that African-Americans were manifestly living in worse conditions lead US society to seek a justification in the doctrine of racial inferiority. This book grasped the contradiction in US society, and foresaw that change was imminent, but Myrdal did not see that it was those under-educated and overworked African-American men and women themselves who would form the backbone of Civil Rights Movement. He expected that the white elites in power would have to change in order for the situation of African-Americans to improve. One reason this book is relevant today is Myrdal's theory of cumulative causation, which suggests that government intervention will be necessary to reverse the tendency of white race prejudice to maintain a low standard of living for African-Americans. In days where economic theories attacking the logic of affirmative action are widespread, here is an eloquent statement of the logic behind the original ideas for affirmative action.

During the long course of our studies of social trends that undermine our collective humanity, we have frequently come across significant research studies that provide critical keys to our understanding. Such is the case with AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND MODERN DEMOCRACY. The Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal, under a grant sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, produced this landmark study which was published in 1944 by Harper and Row publishers. Some fifty years after its publication AN AMERICAN DILEMMA still stands as perhaps the most comprehensive, and unsettling, analysis of America's relationship with its African members. At nearly 1500 pages, including footnotes and index, Myrdal's study is awesomely comprehensive. Disturbing revelation follows revelation as the scientist, trained in economics, explores every imaginable aspect of Negro life and at various times even proposes methods by which America might eventually relieve itself of its longstanding "problem." From the beginning of this country's history, at the heart of America's ethnic crisis lies the very real potential of sustained and systematic planning to manage Blacks as a material resource as opposed to human beings in all their potential. I will take this thought further to state that Myrdal's study stands as a virtual blueprint for a contemporary campaign to undermine the aspirations of the Black citizenry. The ultimate form of this repression can only be described as systematic genocide--by every definition of the word. By Myrdal's own words, his study is quite thorough, encompassing not only every aspect of Negro life but examining the varied attitudes of the dominant white majority.

From Martha Stewart to Walmart...everybody's going to the intternet. I did,too! I bought all my Christmas gifts online...Sorry, "Mom & Pop" stores in Atlanta! Y'all should order "Retail to Hell" to see the foresight of Richard DeRose! Scarry stuff!

Strange days, indeed! Most peculiar, mamma! This both is on target... I never would be writing a reader's review if I had purchased this book in a Retail store! Retail is going to Hell...I closed my small business recently. The Super Stores are eating us alive...and here comes the Internet... WATCH OUT!!! Buy this one and get ready!

We are drowning in the sea of information but are thirsty for knowledge. This book quenches your thirst for knowledge about the fate of retail business in the near future!

Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose put all of their many interviews to good use in War and Secession (Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh). They present all sides of the various complex relationships of this region, as well as presenting the fascinating international views of the situation, predominantly China, USSR, and the US. They are careful to remain unbiased (perhaps sometimes a little too unbiased in the case of Bhutto, in my opinion) and present the misperceptions that all sides were using to base their decisions upon. This book will also be a joy for the general reader as they make all the issues understandable and unravel all the tangles between the various personalities. The authors provide a defintive account of the creation of Bangladesh that will both entertain and inform.

The authors provide a well-balanced, unbiased historical account of the accounts leading to the war of 1971. The book is very well researched with numerous notes on various sources of information.

The book describes the genesis of the problems in East Pakistan, beginning with the partition of India and the formation of Pakistan's two wings. Carefully collected economic data demonstrates the lop-sided distribution of wealth in Pakistan with more government spending and foreign aid going to the West than to the East, despite the latter having a greater population and suffering from severe natural disasters. Also cited are the differences between East and West Pakistan over confronting India over Kashmir. The East did not share a penchant for confronting India over Kashmir - a territory that lay over a 1000 miles away. There were more pressing problems at home then (circumstances that are eerily similar to those today in Pakistan!).

These differences came to a height in a war fought over Kashmir in 1965 (instigated upon Bhutto's advice to Ayub Khan) when East Pakistan was left virtually undefended against any potential Indian military advances. This further contributed to its sense of insecurity.

The politicians of West Pakistan, most notably Z. A. Bhutto and Yahya Khan, are blamed unambiguously for their role in canceling a session of the first democratically elected national assembly in Pakistan that precipitated in a crisis in March 1971. India's role in contributing to the crisis until March 1971 was minimal, if any, but was to assume greater importance in the months to follow. The failure of all political processes to placate the demands of Z. A. Bhutto led to the suspension of the National Assembly, and subsequent events.

However, once the crisis resulted in millions of refugees flowing into India that threatened to upset the delicate demographic balance in the affected states, the problem also became one of India's. The authors fault Indira Gandhi for not trying harder to achieve a political settlement of the problem. It is highly unlikely that India could have mediated a problem between West and East Pakistan. After Indira Gandhi concluded that the problem could not be resolved politically by Pakistan's leaders, India began to play an increasingly larger political-military role, beginning in the summer of 1971 and concluding with a lightning military campaign in December, 1971.

Sisson and Rose present a highly informative account of the events leading to the independence of Bangladesh. As a Pakistani, it proved depressing reading as one sees how events unfolded in what would almost be a comedy of errors had the human cost not been so high. The actions of key protaganists leave one disgusted at their short-sightedness and venality. Much as we may like to think that it was 'all India's fault', the authors make it quite clear that while India acted to take full opportunity of the chances it had, its role in precipitating the Crisis was negligible (if at all). Similarly, while Yahya Khan and the Army must take the blame for the ultimate decision of the Army action, the behaviour of the prominent Pakistani political leaders, especially Bhutto (who, from the events narrated in the book, seems to come away with the most blame), beggars belief. A must read for anyone interested in the events of 1971 free of the baggage that subcontinental writers bring to the subject.