The shocking articles appearing in the news about random killings by a wacko gunman hit home several years ago when my son informed me a friend of his had been killed by a fellow student. I could no longer distance myself from such tragedy -- if Galen Gibson could be killed so senselessly, so could my son. How would I react under such circumstances?

Thankfully, Gregory Gibson, Galen's father, enabled me as a parent, to walk with him as he worked through the aftermath of this tragedy. The circuitous journey through his grief has at its core his fierce love for his son and family. Dealing with the expediencies of the legal system, an inept college administration, psychologists, the penal system, gun dealers, the media, his son's friends, and others show how frustrating a quest this was. Through it all, however, Gibson's humanity enlightens us all, bestowing a grace to all he encounters.

I thank him for the privilege of learning so much about the workings of the heart at its best and worst moments.

As an undergraduate at Columbia University Sturtevant worked in T.H. Morgan's famous flyroom. The book describes some of the early advances in genetics and the progress that Strutevant, Morgan, Mueller and others made. Remember this was before the world even knew what the genetic material was composed of and the genetic code. An amazing history lesson that puts the advances of Science in perspective and reading about these experiments and deductions it is little wonder that by "standing on the shoulders of giants," we have made so much progress.

This book is an interesting and informative work. It gives a brief overview of what the iron industry was like during the end of the 18th and majority of the 19th centuries. It discusses methods that were used in smelting the iron, and the importance that iron had in the daily lives of those who lived in that era. It will also give you a glimpse of what life was like during that period of time. It will increase your knowledge of a former day, and give you an appreciation of what those people went through so that things can be where they are today. This book is well written, and easy reading. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about the importance of iron and life in the 19th century.

Victorians are experiencing something of a comeback after decades of censure as the strange, repressed, half-crazy relatives we don't want to tell anyone about. We are discovering that the Victorians were not so different from us.

The Victorians did, however, produce their own brand of eccentricity and none are as delightfully eccentric as the Victorian/Edwardian writers for children discussed in Inventing Wonderland. Jackie Wullschlager starts with that greatest of all Wonderland writers, the master himself Lewis Carroll and ends with Jazz Age Pooh creator A.A. Milne.

The eccentricity of these Victorian writers is their confident, and sometimes troubling, obsession with childhood itself. Wullschlager assures us, correctly, that these writers' obsessions did not cross the line into pedophilic behavior. To 21st century sensibilities this seems scarcely creditable, especially after reading letters by Lewis Carroll to various girl children. Carroll, Lear, Barrie and Grahame's effusions about childhood can only be understood within the context of the Victorian age, the age that produced and adored Wordsworth's overly quoted (then and now) "But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home" (Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood).

Wullschlager is, I think, a bit too dismissive of Milne, who is regarded in the text as a has-been, clinging to the last remnants of the Victorian celebration of childhood. Wullschlager's overall point in this regard, however, is well made. The Victorians invented and took seriously the concept of childhood as a wonderland. Consequently, they produced children's writers of a truly magnificent stature. When the concept of childhood=innocence & pleasure was abandoned, in the early 20th century (thank you, Freud!), the result was an almost tongue-in-cheek parody of the earlier writers. It just wasn't possible to take childhood that seriously anymore.

Writers for children have of course continued to produce masterpieces, largely in the fantasy area, but that particular brand of unself-conscious Victorian nonsense and idyllicism may be lost forever. The Victorians are not as strange to us as we may like to believe, but they are certainly unreproducable.

Recommendation: Interesting, well-written, well-paced. Not the most complete biographical sketches but a complete analysis of biography and art. Give it a try.

Lewis Carroll was of course one of the greatest and most influential children's writers who ever lived. He was also a mathematics lecturer at Oxford who wrote excellent books on logic. It has been said that these were two halves of a split personality, but this book is proof that they were not. Here are some wonderful puzzles that unite the children's writer and the mathematician, and will appeal to everyone who has the slightest trace of mathematical ability. Edward Wakeling, a noted authority on Lewis Carroll and himself a mathematician, has done a good job assembling this book.

I have read this book from cover-to-cover twice and found that it is a good leaping-off point to do further research on any of the topics covered. Anybody who wants to do more in-depth study or just wants a place to go to to do a Sunday school would do well to purchase and read this book. Since this is a book in the Bible Mystery Series, I can not wait for additional books to be published.

This is certainly not a book for the casual Lewis Carroll fan, but a book for the hard-core, already-own-the-complete-letters-and-diaries kind of fan. It's a fascinating look at Dodgson's Oxford writings, including many previously unseen by the public.

Charles Dodgson's Oxford writings are full of items that the average person, having not been to Oxford in the 1800's, might despair to understand, if it were not for the helpful explanations supplied by the editors of this collection. These explanations make these writings accessable, allowing us to explore a microcosm of collegiate life. Dodgson expresses massive displeasure with the architectural and staff changes going on at the college, often with satire so biting that you wonder how many friends he must have lost with these little publications.

There are also a couple more serious papers about doings at the college, followed by a tremendous amount of circulars about the common room at the college, which Dodgson was curator of. These circulars are very dry, sometimes amounting to no more than lists of wines in the cellars. These papers take up almost half the book, and present a problem: Surely every Lewis Carroll fan wants a complete collection of his writings, but is this simply too much? However, if they weren't included, the readers would be left wondering if there was anything worthwhile in these papers, and the answer is that yes, about 5% of these papers are worth reading.

Once again, this book is for the truly hard-core Carroll nut. If you enjoyed all the writings in, say, the Modern Library "Works of" Lewis Carroll, then you might enjoy this. But it is not for casual fans, especially at the gold-plated price of [money].

Graphic and well-written, this book held my interest--most of the time. The different stories are extremely interesting, and at times, completely horrific. The maggots and lice had me swallowing bile. A wonderful look into what doctors and nurses REALLY deal with. I only have two complaints about the book. One is that it really slowed down when we weren't in the E.R. I skimmed over a lot of the doctors' personal and office life. My other complaint is that the book is outdated. Obviously, this can't be helped, but it was still annoying. In the 13 years since this book was written, so many medical advances have been made in different areas like AIDS and drug overdoses. If you don't care about all this, then the book will probably be a good read for you. I'm sure that the medical problems doctors see have remained the same, it's just that the treatments have changed. You'll still get a good idea about the horrors that show up at the emergency departments.

I like medical novels and found this one a really good read. Good beach book.

A very enjoyable, quick read. What struck me the most about this book was the differences in perspective since the time of it's writing (1987)--it mentions patients that complain about doctors wearing gloves when that is now standard, and expected, procedure. It describes the infancy of managed care and all it's depersonalization of those it's supposed to protect and care for. And most of all, it describes doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff who always put the patient first, who see their jobs as noble and go about it completely humble and without ego. Perhaps exposure to such tv shows as ER and Chicago Hope in more recent years have given laymen a more cold/cynical view of things, but some times the professionals in this book seem almost too good to be true. On the other hand, the emergencies described are fascinating and compelling.

This is an accurate accounting of how Welch ruined the very heart and soul of a wonderful company--one which employees were proud of their association before Welch. I worked many years for GE, both before Welch was CEO and after, and the book read like "this is your life". It is so sad that other executives appear to be on the edge of their chair waiting for every word spoken by Welch and to learn from him the theme of the year or the latest corporate slogan to espouse. I do hope this book becomes a best seller as it would give me confidence that more people would understand the depth of the problems Jack has created. And lastly, I would hope that our business schools would make this required reading to best illustrate how NOT to run a business.

The public perception of Jack Welch's tenure at General Electric has been that he focused business effort on his company's core competencies, and thus rewarded the long term shareholder with great financial returns. Tom O'Boyle peers behind the curtain to reveal the darker side of Wizard Welch and his disastrous tenure at one of America's great industrial treasures. Yes, Welch increased GE's stock value; but Welch did it with a draconian management style that failed to pay all of the bills along the way. It is easy to look rich when you don't pay your bills.

O'Boyle identifies some of the unpaid bills, including:

1) The human cost of GE's massive layoffs througout the 1980's. Welch embraced and greatly popularized the "layoff" approach to business: lay off bodies, save money, show more profit. But for every dollar the company profited, others lost. Much of the cost of the layoffs fell on individuals, families and communities that saw jobs at US-based GE operations vanish. This caused untold hardship to both families and governments, which had to rebuild shattered lives and communities. Not all survived, literally.

2) Welch took a rich and deep GE culture of research and development into technological fields, and utterly gutted it. GE's R&D abilities formerly covered a spectrum from steam turbines to appliances to jet engines to railway locomotives. Under Welch, GE's R&D arm became so weak and atrophied that the company's product lines lost the once commanding technological lead they formerly enjoyed. The company's future is betrayed. (Not satisfied with merely gutting GE's R&D, Welch purchased RCA and stripped its assets as well. Only NBC television remains in the GE fold as a major, former-RCA asset. Shockingly, NBC spends more each year to broadcast basketball games than GE spends on R&D. It is so sad, when you think that the only man-made object ever to leave the solar system, Voyager spacecraft, carries a camera that bears the RCA logo.)

3) GE's continuing failure to clean up the PCB's and radioactivity it has left behind in its numerous manufacturing operations; while at the same time making a business unit out of cleaning up PCB's and other pollution for other customers. The unpaid bills also do not include the people who remain afflicted with industrial illnesses from their exposure to chemicals in the GE workplaces over the years.

These are just a few of the topics. The book is profound, and will shock the unitiated. O'Boyle is a historian of American industrial history. He takes the reader on a trip through time, from the laboratories of Edison; to the early workshops of Ford; to the mills of Carnegie; to Tom Watson's IBM; to Rickover's nuclear navy; and so much more.

O'Boyle spent eleven years with the Wall Street Journal, and he knows how to dig out the story and tell it in the best journalistic style. Also, as the notes reveal, O'Boyle has met and talked with many of the luminaries and leaders of American and European industry of this era. O'Boyle has captured the essence of an American tragedy, which was GE's abandonment of its research-oriented, manufacturing legacy to satisfy the ego of one man.

Jack Welch started at GE selling plastics, and he has become his own product. It seems that Jack Welch, who came into control of one of the nation's greatest industrial enterprises, really wanted only to run a credit card company as his life's ambition. Today he has his wish, but the nation has lost.

Is the most profitable and valuable US company spiritually dead? That seems to be Thomas O'Boyle's thesis in "At Any Cost." His riveting book is the first that I have read which chronicles the dark side of Jack Welch's restructuring of the General Electric Company. In an introductory note, O'Boyle expresses regret that Welch and other executives "were unwilling to be interviewed" or to respond to his serious efforts to solicit their comments to issues and concerns raised in his book. His note is to explain the extremely negative views of Welch and GE that O'Boyle gleaned from mountains of court and government records and from interviews with restructuring and down-sizing loosers. Predictably, corporate and business reviews dismiss the book as "muckraking." It is also predictable, however, that this book will have an impact on the eventual replacement of Welch and re-restructuring of GE.

Although O'Boyle closes his book speaking of Welch and GE in the past tense, I believe that his objective is to help. If O'Boyle and Welch haven't, I urge these Irish-Catholic gentlemen to read "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" by Michael Novak, a leading Catholic theologian. I am not a student of such matters, but Novak's and O'Boyle's books arrived on my bedstand almost simultaneously as result of absolutely unrelated activities. The possibility that this confluence of books was ordained prompts me to share my observations.

letter to Mr. Bart:

Is Hollywood that boring that you have to collect old essays to tell us Who Killed Hollywood? Your laziness is exactly what you criticize people in Hollywood for, doing things for the sake of a profit. I was exepecting a new book with your views of what's going on in Hollywood not old essays from Variety and the dreaded GQ. Shame! Shame!

Bart's book is essentially an amalgamation of his Variety and GQ articles, rather than the more thought provoking discussion that the title implies. Nevertheless, Bart's articles are compelling and extremely well written, not to mention easily digestible with their 3-6 page lengths. Bart has some intriguing insights and his popularity in Hollywood has given him extraordinary access to his subjects. However, Bart seems to waver as to whether the Hollywood blockbusters he evicerates in his prologue are really killing Hollywood. In some essays, he longs for the days of Hollywood past, saying that the integrity and purity of these simpler times is long lost. Doubtlessly true. Yet, at other times, especially when talking about studio executives, Bart champions the idea of blockbusters and "summer tent-pole" movies. Rather than proposing a solution to Hollywood's woes, he sometimes champions its current status. With Bart's insight and the promise of the prologue, one should expect more out of this book. Yes, it is entertaining and insightful, but it would have been interesting for Bart to have given more extensive elaboration inbetween his articles. Too often, the seams show.

Here are articles that offer insights into the way the entertainment industry really works and what the stars and directors are really like. It provides an antidote to celebrity journalism which is just a collection of puff pieces. It's a fascinating read.