In general, we human beings will do nearly anything in response to our spiritual teachers - except pay attention to what they do and say. Brother Francis, like his master Jesus of Nazareth, is a perfect example. We have made Francis a saint, built a basilica to house his body, and have sentimentalized him into a quaint animal-lover, a medieval nature mystic, or a proto-flower child. We've even sold his image (in the form of concrete garden ornaments) around the world - but listen to him? We'd much rather create a Francis we can live with: one that edifies and amuses, without disturbing how we live our lives.

Chistopher Bobin's book is the latest development of this fine, old tradition. Here, the historical Francis is so submerged by a tidal wave of literary rhapsody and fine writing that he would scarcely recognize himself were he to read the book by some miracle. He will be scarcely more recognizable to those of you who know the historical sources - and this is the heart of my criticism. Bobin's treatment of the Francis stories is cavalier and irresponsible. Many events and episodes essential for understanding him are omitted and those included are edited freely to serve the author's purposes, which are purely literary, not biographical, historical, or religious. Worse, the author adds much nonsense that cannot be countenanced by anything we know about the real Francis. The result is a false portait of the Poverello that leaves out nearly everything that is puzzling, inconvenient, and challenging for a modern audience, and includes much that is misleading. Playing so fast and loose with the facts may be acceptable in the realm of creative literature, but it is it a major disservice to Francis himself, for whom the truth ALWAYS mattered, and for those of us who wish to get to know him.

If you want to learn more about St. Francis of Assisi, look somewhere else. If you want to have your heart lightened and gain a wonderful new perspective on God and His relationship to His creation, this book is a great source. It's worth buying just for the description of the Bible in the first chapter.

This book is a meditation from start to finish and should not be misconstrued as a biography, but if you aapproach it without expectations, it will lead you through a wonderful wandering.

This is an amazing book that sparked a wonderful peace deep within me. I would describe this book as an epiphany between two covers. It is written in the style and beauty of a poem that speaks very deeply to the soul. Do not by this book if you are looking for a historical account of the life of st. francis. This book is a meditation. Do not read this book with a critical heart, the truth it speaks of isn't historical it's spiritual.

This book has excellent photography, and a decent text. The writing does suffer somewhat from a flowery style in some (not most) parts. The book is not very long, there is a lot of white space on each page, and the excellent photography takes up a lot of space. Still worth reading. At the end is a good annotated bibliography. Geist is extremely respected in this field, and he does a good job of sharing his expertise.

Everything Michael Gilbert has written is either on my "looking for" list or my "already read" list. Only a few other authors, including Andrew Garve and Edmund Crispin, rate that distinction. How can I describe a Michael Gilbert book? There is, above all, a sense of relaxation caused by the feeling in me that here, after many mediocre books by other authors, one is in the hands of a master. Perhaps it is akin to hearing the opening notes of a new concerto and realizing that what will follow will be special. Or the feeling that the superb appetizer from a great chef will be followed by an equally excellent entree and dessert. Michael Gilbert's books impress me the same way.
In this book, set in modern-day Florence, Gilbert spins a tale of Etruscan treasures, unscrupulous art collectors, some VERY villanous bad guys, several colorful expatriate Brits, and a soupcon of romance. Along the way, we learn about Etruscan values, Florentine and Italian politics, Mafia methods, and even English crossword puzzles. It's all done with a delightful flair that makes me think Gilbert really enjoys writing.

I had to read this book as part of a theology course(St.Ignatius H.S. Cleveland. It was a valuable tool to relating to the course I took. While I didn't agree with everything in the book, I admired the strength of Doc Pennock's beliefs and I fully reccommend this book to any school with a Morality course. The book also has great debate questions that can give a teacher or other students valuable insights on how others think.

This is a very clear and readily assimilated translation of what may be considered the manifesto of the scientific revolution. Translating a seventeenth century Englishman, writing in latin, back into english: should it be the english he would have written at that time, or is a more ahistorical rendering ppropriate? Sometimes I wondered if the translation might be a little too up-to-date in its sensibilities and I found myself returning to the latin original to be reassured that Bacon's original intent had been rendered. Although the text is admirably clear a few more footnotes would have been welcome. Those provided are either somewhat cryptic and brief notes of textual readings, or on the other hand, notes on personages that seem to pander too much to the ignorance of today's students - vero media est. Though the second part of Novum Organon seem but little removed from the alchemists den, Bacon's first part is as relevant to the scientific enterprise today as it ever was - modern physicists and geneticists should consider carefully whether, as aphorism LXIV warns, empiricism may be a greater danger than sophistic dogma ever was.

This book is surely worth reading. It is a cultural substent within the artistic subject of the late 1600. The famous painter is right now one of the most quoted ones around the world. It talks about his distorted life which can be interpetated in a mad manner from somebody who doesn't really understand that mabie all artists can be different from the mass of people that we all know today. It can help us understand how really life went like in those days. At last I can say this book is good but it doesn't fulfill my art identity. I have surely read better books.

Finding materials to teach religion to middle schoolers is not always easy. This is an excellent text that I use with eighth-graders.

My goals are to present Jesus as both fully human and fully divine, challenging students to begin to see how Jesus wrestled with the same difficulties that they do; to encourage self-analysis of students' relationships with Jesus; and to open their minds to the problems and possibilities of God's world. This book contains materials that help with all of these things. There is factual information about Jesus' birth, early life, ministry, and legacy. Information to help students understand the time and place in which Jesus lived and taught is an important part of this book. Included as well are questionnaires to help teens evaluate their own relationships with God, with Jesus, and with other people. There are journal entry questions and thought-provoking poems and stories. In addition, one finds the usual summaries of the chapters and some questions about factual material. A teacher's guide is available with excellent supplementary materials.

Basically, this book addresses not only the factual information one needs in order to grow in awareness of God, but also includes many opportunities for stimulating the development of faith by stirring the emotions.

It is published by Ave Maria Press and so is based on the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. However, I teach in an Episcopal school and found only two things I felt I needed to point out to our students as doctrine of the Roman church which were not part of the doctrine of the Episcopal church.

The gritty underbelly of the streets of the Middle Kingdom is always something that looms just below the supernatural feeling most Kindred of the East games have. Forget the fact that your characters can walk up walls, create hurricanes, and walk into the Umbra. Get to the reality of the game, the true settings of a chronicle being run in Asian cities. Crime, drugs, prostitution, white-slavery, sweat-shops,these and more make up the real cities at night. Triad and Yakuza protection rackets, smuggling rings, BDSM shops, those are the Scalet Screens almost every wu, young and old, run from the shadows. It doesn't get any more real than the context of Killing Streets. Crime, decrepitude of living, the squallor outside of the glorified cities, the hopelessness in the slums of the more rural areas of China, the gangs that own the streets, the ever-so-fatal downward spiral that draws in the forces of Yomi so close, that the Wall is dissolved and Hell leaks onto Earth -- a broken Mirror is created, a sign that the Sixth Age is nigh upon the heads of the Devil-Tigers and the other followers of Dharmic enlightenment. A must-buy indeed.

Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens (and Mr. Calder's dog Rasselas) made their debut in "Game without Rules." These stories show why, in late middle age, this team is still working for MI-6 [Not that MI-6 exists, of course]. Older than James Bond, they still display all of the ruthlessness associated with British Intelligence. The second story in the book for instance shows how Rasselas became part of the team. And is there anything more chilling than Mr. Calder counting backwards in "One to Ten?"

The first story is different from all the others and gives the reader more background on Mr. Behrens. The last story, written in the late 1960s, is taking place in the mid-1980s. The rest are contemporary with their writing. Calder, Behrens, and their chief, Mr. Fortescue, are all quite conservative. But none of them is a stick in the mud nor are they reactionary. Morally, they follow their own lights and do not always obey the strictures placed on them by Queen and country.

This book is well worth the search to find it.

Dick Francis writes with authority, but his plot tended to drag at times. Twists near the end were very good. Francis is a masterful manager of plot, although how exciting can a main character who is an accountant be? Worth reading but ultimately forgettable

In many ways this is a quintessential Francis novel, with a fairly normal, likeable hero put into a situation where he is subjected to physical and mental challenges. The plot here is pretty good, although somewhat far fetched. However, this novel varies from the typical successful Francis formuala by having a sexual interlude between the hero and a female supporting character quite early on in the story. This is unusual, since Francis' characters are typcially fairly chaste, but this has the addes uniqueness of having the supporting female character be an older woman who wants to experience sex and chooses the hero, barely recovered from a dangerous brush with criminal types, as her man. This is diverting mostly because it seems to me that it is so different from the norm! I was quite taken aback by this!

Dick Francis has a winning formula: he writes books about a young man of around 30, in a career most people might think is boring, but which turns out to be exciting. His hero is usually taken for granted and under-appreciated by his family, and under-employed, but in the course of the book proves he is far smarter, cleverer, and more observant than anyone supposed. Usually, there's a highly intelligent middle-aged career woman who recognizes his worth and helps him along. It's a formula, but the details that Francis provides makes it work every time.

In this case, our hero is an accountant, an auditor. Many people would start to snore at the thought that auditing could be an exciting job; as a former auditor myself, who has since traded it in for the relative calm of a desk job, I was pleased to see him show how varied and interesting the job can be. Auditors have to know a great deal about a variety of industries, do a lot of travelling, and have highly analytical minds used to investigating small details and discrepancies that most people would not notice. (There might be a bit of bias on my part, of course.) All this means that an auditor winds up making a good investigator of mysteries, as well.

Along with the details of Roland's regular job, and the details of horse-racing that are in every book, we also happen to find out a great deal about yacht-building. Such details are all through Francis's books; he seems to know about every possible job, and must collect details as much as most people collect lint. I always enjoy learning these details!

In this particular book, we have some ambiguous people who turn out not to be bad guys, the person captaining the yacht that Roland first is stored on when kidnapped. Then, the bad guy turns out to be a total surprise, someone we don't suspect at all till the end is revealed. Nonetheless, once the details are pointed out, one goes "Of course!"