This is an excellent book on inclusion! It touches on restructuring of schools, relationships, curriculum modification, behavior management, and an appendix full of additional resources. Good for any regular or special educator.

Under the expert editorial guidance of Robert Cherrry and William Rodgers, Prosperity for All? provides an in-depth set of articles on the economic boom and Afro-American experiences. While employment among blacks has risen to an all-time high, the book questions whether one type of disadvantage has been replaced by another, and examines what types of jobs are offered to Afro-Americans, and by whom. Excellent survey of the realities of the new prosperity for the underclass.

33 stories of enlightenment, straight from the horse's mouth. Thirteen of the enlightened persons in the book were born in the 20th century, and photographs are included of many of them. This in itself helps me overcome the sense that these folks are completely "other."

The stories of enlightenment cover as wide a spectrum as you could imagine, from 16 year old boys in India who suddenly attained enlightenment, to middle age businessmen, to the very troubling story of Suzanne Segal, a young pregnant women whose mind suddenly disengaged form her body one day as she stepped onto a bus. For some, their experience was the culmination of a long-sought spiritual release. For others, it was spontaneous and not entirely pleasant.

The absence of Jesus in this book is regretable, but perhaps the lack of any first-hand account of His experience excuses that (though I think John 14-17 would have made a nice addition). Several Christian mystics are included however.

Apart from the absence of Jesus, the editorial choices are excellent. The editorial comments, however, leave something to be desired. Often the little introductory blurb simply pre-tells the story that is told quite clearly in the excerpt to follow. There's no point in quoting what someone is about to say! In general, however, enough biographical information is provided to place the writings of each enlightened person in context.

If you have read (or experienced) some mysticism and wonder where this is all going or how enlightenment actually comes about, this book is for you. If you want a theoretical or philosophic introduction to mysticism, look elsewhere. For me, this book was very-- well pardon the pun, but very enlightening! The variety or paths and yet the commonality of experience does lead to some conclusions. The honesty in including some experiences that were not all sweetness and light is also important.

The authors deliver exactly what they promise: descriptions of enlightenment itself, told by those who have lived it.

I read this book thoroughly upto about 120 pages and coudln't read any more. This is best kept for encyclopedia usage. If you are doing some research on religions and spiritual enlightenment, this book will come in handy. However, if you are planning to read this for fun, please don't buy this....this book is not intended for novel type of readers. If you don't believe me, read this book...I warned you.

Robert Ullman and Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman are naturopathic and homeopathic physicians who have also studied with numerous spiritual teachers. Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages: Stories of Enlightenment is their seventh book, in which their "intent is to capture the experience of enlightenment as clearly and succinctly as possible."

While recognizing that each individual's experience will be unique, the Ullmans believe that the stories of others will serve as models or signposts for those who are still seeking. They emphasize that "no one religion, country, socioeconomic class, or gender has laid special claim to enlightenment." They've chosen a diverse collection of stories, ranging from Buddha to St. Catherine of Siena to Suzanne Segal. A total of thirty-three stories are told.

Each story focuses on the moment of transformation in each individual's life. The Ullmans include a brief informational essay, describing the culture and times the individual lived in and his or her teachings. The enlightenment stories themselves are in the words of the masters themselves whenever possible; or from those closest to them.

An extensive bibliography provides a variety of sources for readers wishing to delve further into the lives and times of the individuals.

Although every enlightenment experience is different, the authors describe the common elements they discovered. These include interconnectedness and ego transcendence, timelessness and spaciousness, acceptance, beyond pleasure and pain, clarity, and shattering of preconceived notions.

In his foreword, His Holiness The Dalai Lama says "each human being has an equal opportunity to attain wisdom, happiness, and enlightenment by cultivating a correct motivation-a sincere aspiration to benefit all sentient beings-and engaging in diligent practice." He adds that Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages "is a valuable, inspiring book." It belongs in the library of all readers seeking spiritual insight.

Let's dispense with the formalities. Melmoth the Wanderer is a really long, really verbose book. However, it is a MASTERPIECE of gothic literature. Its best parts (and there are many) surpass Poe's nightmarish tales for sheer paranoia and fear, but the inordinate amount of time Maturin takes to reach the next denoument in the story took away from my overall perception of the novel. Very long, and gothic to the point of absurdity. (you'll love it!)

Published in 1820, Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" is usually named as the last of the Gothic novels. Gothic here implies the incorporation of Burke's elements of the "sublime", wherein terror and sorrow invoke in the reader a heightened sense of empathy with the events unfolding in the narrative. Maturin pulls out all the stops of his time in creating situations of hopelessness, fear, and both religous and social sadism. Melmoth himself has sold his soul to the devil (will these people *never* learn? ;-) and attempts over the course of scores of years to find someone so desperate that they will take this "bargain" off his hands before the devil comes for his due. The novel is constructed of tales-within-tales, depicting the awful conditions the people Melmoth seeks out find themselves in. For example, the "Tale of the Spaniard" is told by a prisoner of the Inquisition (although this tedious tale takes over 120 pages to even GET to the Inquisition), whose life is still not so horrible that he would willingly trade place with the wandering Melmoth. The narrative is infuriatingly slow and convoluted, and only a perseverance surpassing the average will reward the patient reader with the creation of atmosphere that keeps this book on the "must read" list of true afficiandos of the supernatural. A minor note: Patrick O'Brian pays tribute to the author by naming one of contemporary literature's most well-known characters after him: half of the "Aubrey/Maturin" team of O'Brian's 19th-century novels of naval warfare.

Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" is a brilliantly constructed work of gothic fiction. One hundred years after Jonathan Swift, Maturin takes up his Irish predecessor's gift for harsh, even malevolent satire against any and all offenders - organized religion, government, lovers, warriors - even making broad, devastating comments on humanity in general. Maturin and his characters are quick to point out that this is not 'Radcliffe-romance' gothic, in the direct style of works like "The Mysteries of Udolpho". They are right. Rather than the seemingly landscape-obsessed, rationalistic Radcliffe, Maturin takes his direct gothic influences from the claustrophobic psychological terrors of Godwin's "Caleb Williams," Lewis' "The Monk," and M.W. Shelley's "Frankenstein."

Unlike "The Monk," however, Maturin's novel does not rely heavily on Lewis' supernatural machinery (ghosts, demons, bleeding nuns, etc.). Instead, he offers several apparently unconnected stories that concentrate on families in desperate straits and individuals in extreme crises, pushing the limits of man's inhumanity to man. The connecting element, the wild card with the wild eyes, that pops up just when the characters most/least need him, is Melmoth the Wanderer.

"Melmoth" also draws heavily from Cervantes' "Don Quixote," which provides a great point of comparison for the main character. Where Don Quixote was a wandering knight, pledged to help the helpless, Melmoth is a wandering agent of evil, whose mission is to prey on the helpless. Melmoth has 150 years to tempt the indigent and desperate into selling their souls for wealth, power, or simple relief, and trading places with him.

Again looking backward to "Quixote" and forward to Stoker's "Dracula," "Melmoth" is also heavily concerned with it's own construction as a text. The various stories are pieced together by eyewitnesses, interviewers, and ancient manuscripts, often at several removes from their originals. There is even one gentleman in the novel who is collecting material to write a book about Melmoth the Wanderer.

This is not a book for everyone. Maturin often provides almost excessively long preludes before any action occurs in his nested narratives. The traumas he inflicts on Melmoth's targets can drive you to the point of insanity yourself. However, if you are a admirer of the psychological thriller without all the show of your standard gothic-terror text, "Melmoth the Wanderer" is sure to keep you busy for days, if not weeks.

Zane Grey was a fixture in American letters when it came to the Western. In fact, one might suggest that he invented the modern form of it (though, of course, there were writers of dime novel westerns before him, not to mention James Fenimore Cooper and his leatherstocking tales). But Grey certainly did someting memorable and lasting with the form, if this book is any measure. I had never read Grey before, so I picked this one up with some uncertainty. Thought I could not count myself well-read until I'd tried one of his books and this seemed to be the one with the most literary weight. It's certainly named well enough. As it happens, I enjoyed the book in the end, but have to admit that it is weak in a number of serious ways. Set in Mormon Utah in the late 1800's, it's the tale of a young Mormon woman who is the sole heir of her father and owner of the substantial ranch he has left her. Because of the significance of her ranch and because she is a rather headstrong young woman, the Mormon elders feel it essential to rein her in and get her married into the fold as quickly as they can. One particular Mormon Elder, a man named Tull, has his eye on her especially, with the support of his mysterious Bishop. But Jane, pious as she is, demurs, recognizing that becoming one more of Tull's wives (in those days the Mormons were still taking several wives) will only strip her of her freedom and clout in the little community (which she has inherited along with her father's extensive ranch). The story opens with Tull and his other pious brethren about to administer a sound thrashing to a young cow hand who has been working for the heroine, Jane Withersteen, and who Jane has been flirting with. Jane is powerless to prevent the beating and worse until the appearance, out of the hazy, distant horizon, of a man called Lassiter. Lassiter proves to be a hard sort and a known gunman with a special dislike for Mormons. His arrival proves salutary and the end of it is he stays on with Jane at the ranch while the cow hand heads out and the Mormons scatter, tails between their legs. Jane sets out to convince Lassiter that not all Mormons are bad while the Mormon elders conspire to bring Jane down by scaring off all her Mormon and non-Mormon ranch hands. Meanwhile, the esrstwhile cow hand (his name escapes me) stumbles onto the secret hide-out of the rustlers who have been robbing the honest folk in the area. There are lots of chases and hiding outs and some gun play. The cow hand finds his love in an unlikely place in the box canyon in which he holes up (hard to believe this man and his intended are together an entire week, feel the way they do about each other and yet never touch one another, but it was a simpler time then, wasn't it?), the gunman hangs around Jane who exerts her feminine wiles to get him to give up his guns before he can hurt anymore Mormons, and the Mormon elders continue their nefarious schemes to break Jane to the halter. Thoughout it all, Lassiter seems oddly passive and inert for the deadly, single-minded gunman he is made out to be. And yet, one of the remarkable things about this book is the rich prose in which the landscape is surrealistically painted, which gives it both its title and the feel that this is more than just a silly story about good guys and bad guys. And there is a strong sense of suppressed sexuality underlying the entire tale here as embodied in the highly visual rendering of the countryside, its canyons, its sage and its sky. The descriptiveness of the narrative is, however, somewhat repetitive and overdone as though apparently reflecting the turbulent emotions of the characters themselves, as though their innermost feelings are laid bare upon the landscape of their tale. The ending is a bit melodramatic too and rather predictable, but, in all, I can see why this tale has the good name it's got. It's intriguing and enthralling (it kept me reading through to the end -- a harder thing these days as my eyes are not what they used to be and I have less patience than I once did for the fictional word). But in comparison with many other works which I have read and enjoyed, I had to conclude that this one is not quite in their league.

Using the amazon "five star" system, I usually reserve five stars for the really good to the great, four for the pretty damned good to the good, and three to the "good but" category. This one is thus a "three" on that measure since it was strongly enough written to carry me as a reader and interesting enough in its unexpectedly powerful use of language but, in the end, that very usage went over the top and slid into the dream-like purple of the sage in which the characters cavort. And the characterizations, themselves, are rather stilted, the tale kind of flat and just plain contrived. I think it is the underlying sexual energy in the writing which really carries the day. "Good but . . . "

Zane Grey is one of the best-known and most prolific writers in the Western genre. Riders of the Purple Sage is perhaps his most famous novel. And deservedly so. The story starts rather slowly by today's fiction standards, and has a meandering story line that leaves one wondering what the book is all about--or whether it's actually about anything particular at all. But then with Dickensian brilliance he weaves a series of seemingly unrelated tendrils into one complex, exciting, and satisfying conclusion.

Rich and beautiful Jane Withersteen has inherited her father's ranch and cattle herds on the Utah frontier border. She resists the demands of church elders to marry Tull, a fellow Mormon, instead showing interest in Gentile sage-rider Ventors. This insubordinate behavior causes high tension in the Mormon town of Cottonwoods, already edgy from an insurgence of Gentiles and years of cattle-rustling mayhem led by the legendary Oldring and his mysterious Masked Rider. At the moment that Mormon ire peaks over Jane's intransigence, Grey adds the catalyst to a chain reaction of violent drama: the arrival in Cottonwoods of Lassiter, the infamous Mormon-killing gunman. The plot plays out with plenty of surprising revelations on the true identity and intentions of the various parties.

Grey's style is heavy on scenic description, with almost redundant recitation of the virtues of the purple prairie. But the book has a classic, literary quality to it, something the genre sorely missed until Larry McMurtry brought it back with Lonesome Dove. And horse-lovers will appreciate Grey's knowledge and detailed rendering of everything equestrian. --Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake Up Dead.

I had never read a Western, so when I gave it a try I thought I'd start with the best Western author -- Zane Grey -- and read his most famous work -- Riders of the Purple Sage. I think I made a good choice.

One, the setting is beautifully and gloriously described. Rock formations, plains, desert, sage....his descriptions evoke mental images as if you are watching a movie.

Two, the characters are unique, well-described, exhibit growth and development, and interact in deed and dialogue in realistic ways. By the end of the book, you will feel like you know these people.

Three, the plot is absolutely fantastic. It starts exciting, and continues to unfold realistically, yet unpredictably, throughout the whole book to the very last page.

From the opening pages, to the climax...very exciting. I was on the edge of my seat and could not put this book down. I practically cried at the end...it is that good. Highly recommended.