My 2 year old son is semi-obsessed with vacuums right now so naturally, I looked for a book that would incorporate his current passion into our night time reading. I was so excited to find this book online and anxiously awaited its arrival. The story is not at all what I expected. Jake is not merely mischievous - he is a downright brat. When his mom tells him to vacuum, he sucks up everything around the house including her. The book ends up stating that Jake is never asked to vacuum again, which was his goal to begin with. I realize this is just a fictional story, but I can really do without Jake's attitude and so can my son. What a disappointment. I will exercise my library card instead of my credit card from now on.

Jake is a little boy who flat out doesn't want to help out around the house. Without candy coating, Simon James offers some unabashed mischief. Jake is naughty. Everything ends up ok and it's lots of silliness throughout.

Well, this books seems to me as the process to finnally admit, that there was a time when Celts were a Great Power and Culture.

That even Romans couldnt vanish at all, by reducing their cities to ashes with man, woman, elders and babies inside, "PAX ROMANA".

Proudly for Irish, they have been strong to resist.

Sometime When people understand that Rome was a destroyer of cultures, maybe people will understand why Jews where so affraid of call the roman attention to them.

By now, We have advance a little, Their is no anger now, This author just denies the existence of other ancient cultures.

I hope that with Celtic Cultures other Cultures will be rescued from the ashes.

Mr. James latest book is another example of the British state of denial concerning their Celtic heritage.

Mr. James asserts that the idea of a "Celtic" people is a modern invention and does not apply to the Iron Age population of Britain. This is baffling in light of the fact that I have personally witnessed Mr. James referring to the aforementioned population as "Celtic" repeatedly in documentary programs for the History Channel. This also flies in the face of information presented at the British Museum, for whom he does archaeology work. Currently, on the BBC webpage, there is an article by Mr. James where he also uses the word "Celtic" repeatedly while describing the Iron Age Britons, ironically while talking about this very book. Why the sudden change?

Mr. James asserts that although the Iron Age Britons spoke Celtic languages, worshipped Celtic deities, produced Celtic art and shared a Celtic culture, this does not make them Celts. This is exactly what makes them Celts! Incredibly, he further goes on to use these exact same criteria to label later Britons as Romans! Mr. James states that these people (Britons) would not have referred to themselves as "Celts", that they were never a unified political entity and that they were ethnically (racially) diverse (and so, are not "Celts"). This is all true. So what? Ancient Native Americans didn't run around saying "hey, we're Native Americans", nor did the Anglo-Saxons (in their many small Kingdoms) for that matter. Most of the countries of Europe have only achieved their current forms of political unity in the last century or so, yet we have no problem using the terms, Italian, Austian, French German or even British. Since when is pure ethnicity the mark of what makes a legitimate cultural group (oh yes,perhaps in the 3rd Reich). I assume you've heard of a place called America?

Sadly, this book appears to indicate a bias prevalent among many members of the English intelligentsia. They have no problem refering to their ancestors as "Roman-Britons" or "Anglo-Saxon", but simply cannot extend the same logic to face a valuable contribution to their past (and present) by the 'barbarian hordes of European Celticdom'. Hell, then they'd have to admit they shared a degree of commonality with the Scots, Welsh, French and (God forbid) Irish!

Dr James's book is not intended as a "denial of [British] Celtic" ancestry, but as a presentation of a well-known approach to British history in academic circles. Dr James clearly explains that academics' reluctance to talk to the general public about their latest findings has resulted in a serious gap between academic and public views of the past.

The book comes to no firm conclusions about Britain's ancient past, but points out clearly: that the finds for the era are far fewer than on the Continent; that the finds are open to multiple interpretations; that the competing theories of mass invasion, the imposition of an elite group's culture on the populous, or that some aspects of Continental Celtic culture were enthusiastically embraced while the British retained their own identity/ies cannot yet be resolved; that cultural and ethnic identities are complex; that the current concepts of Celtic identity were formed in opposition to English domination of British politics and power.

None of this is new - I was taught precisely the same by the [native Welsh-speaking] faculty of the Department of Welsh History at Aberystwyth over 10 years ago. In fact, Prof Geraint Jenkins gave a marvellous lecture on how Celtic Studies came to be, which closely matched Dr James's explaination. Prof Ronald Hutton explains in 'The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles' (an oldy, but goody) that the modern concepts of Celtic and Saxon national traits are traceable directly to the 18th century, and that we've been unconsciously living up (or down) to them ever since.

None of this is to deny modern Celtic cultural identification, and Dr James is explicit about that; what IS vitally important to us all is to be able to look clearly at the evidence for how our ethnic identities may have been formed, and to accept that some of our dearly-held beliefs may not be as firmly rooted in hard fact as we would like, and that the ancient past is still "an unknown country".