What is there to say? It is a collection of classic short stories used by English Composition Students. Better than most texts.

This IS the definitive work on the arcane world of closed-end fund (CEF) investing. CEFs provide an excellent method to target particular investment sectors -- especially international markets and fixed income. I like using CEFs for part of the fixed income component of an investment portfolio. When properly managed, they will enhance your dividend yield and supply capital appreciation potential. CEFs can provide greater yields by deriving dividends from portfolio assets at net asset value (NAV), but pay them based on the share's market price -- which can be at a discount to NAV. Simply put, you can buy dividends on $10 worth of assets for only $9. The investor (or their advisor) must, however, monitor the CEF's discount to premium spread versus NAV on a regular basis. CEFs can be tricky. I recommend all new CEF investors start out with this book -- it's a little dated -- but the principles remain true. Note Steven Samuels' advice: Never buy a CEF on the IPO -- and I would add, never buy one at a premium.

As a Canadian I find that this book is an excellant example of what can be achieved through exploring our multi-culturalism. The children's artwork, coupled with the text make this book very informative to others so they can understand a little about other cultures, and see the differences and similarities. What I find to be an added bonus is that the text is written both in English, and the writers native language! An excellent read for children mostly, but still enjoyable to adults.

After a slew of books about 70s Punk, American kids in the 80s get their due. I am one of those "ageing punks" refered to in one of the above reviews. The author gets my thanks for documenting a most forgotten and neglected part of our musical/
cultural past.Sure he left some bands out,misspelled some names-so what? The book could have been as long as WAR AND PEACE,and still stepped on someones toes.I don't totally agree with all Blush says,but he wrote it-not me. Punk,like religion is a pretty subjective,messy thing.The book is fair,in that it dosn't
indulge in hero worship,or name checking.A lot of "scenes" get covered,including ones that I never knew of,or knew little of.
Aside for a few bumps,Blush takes you on ride down to a dark place,Reagan-era America.The only thing that made being a teenager not totaly [bad] was Hardcore.This book seems to be pretty much the way it was(as I remember it).If your like me,and
you want to relive those crazy,drunken days-or if you are 2nd,3rd
waver,whatever, and want to know what you missed out on-you should pick this up.

Finally, there's a book that attempts to seriously chronicle 1980s hardcore punk rock in the United States! "American Hardcore" documents American hardcore punk rock between 1981 - 1986.

Its structure is very similar to Legs McNeil's and Gillain McCain's "Please Kill Me" and Clinton Heylin's "From the Velvets to the Voidoids", in that it's an oral history of the movement, with interview snippets propelling the story along.

Blush deserves major credit for trying to cover all the major (and many minor) punk rock scenes during this period, from the obvious (L.A., San Fransisco, and D.C.) to the less obvious (Detroit and Texas). However, in being so broad, many people will undoubtedly say there is a lot of detail left out and/or that their favorite band / scene is either ignored or not chronciled enough. To which I would say, you're absolutely right. However, this is not the intent of the book and if you're looking for more detailed histories of individual bands or scenes, I recommend checking out some of the other more exhaustive and specific histories that have been released (i.e. "Dance of Days," "Get in the Van," "Our Band Could Be Your Life") that focus on specific scenes and bands.

"American Hardcore" provides an excellent overview of the period and is highly recommended, not only for punk rock fans, but cultural / social historians as well.

This is, quite simply, the most complete book on Hardcore Punk EVER made.
Every scene is documented and each chapter represents a different city or region. Whether it be New York, Boston, Detroit, Austin, or San Francisco, no area is missed. Each section is also loaded with interviews from surviving band members (some of whom havent been heard from in years) and detailed accounts from the fans who saw it first-hand.
And the Bands? My God!
From the big dogs such as Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, to the smaller guys like the Necros or The Sluts, they're all there.(In Detail!)
More importantly, though, the average Punk fan finally has a One-Stop reference guide for all things Hardcore. The attention to detail is nothing short of amazing.

ALL OF THE BANDS
ALL OF THE GOSSIP
ALL OF THE HISTORY

In a nutshell, this is the ONLY book on Hardcore you will EVER need.
It also just might be the best.

This book is not for everyone. If you wish to understand, as I did, the politics and economics of the era, you will be disappointed. You will learn more about George's amours and clothing than you ever wanted to know.

George IV has always fascinated me as one of those monarchs who both impress and disgust. He was born George Prince of Wales eldest son of King George III and Queen Charlotte of England. to a world which offered all possible luxury and inherited a country which looked up to its royalty, yet poor george was to die for the most part despised. Mr. Parissien writes a sensitive and readable biography which shows both the causes and results this king's life. Realtionship with his parents were always strained and lacking in complete love or affection. No wonder George was only too eager to enjoy his power as regent when his old father the king was pronounced mad. Geroge's spending habits were phenominal, he would only have the very best no matter what it cost the country. Yet George was respected and loved by those in the arts especially admired by the architects of his time. One only has to look at the enterior of Carlton House or the Brighton Pavillion to realise this man's astetic sense. George's marriage was a disaster and events leading up to his niece Victoria becoming queen was nothing short of a miracle. A true caricature of his own self he gave his name to an era where good taste went hand in hand with infidelity and corruption. A highly readable book with some excellent illustrations.

It is often said contemporary French philosophy mistakes obscurity for profundity. There is more than a kernel of truth to that statement when applied to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on Hegel. As far writing goes, Nancy's musings on Hegel are not altogether displeasing when taken as poetry but, philosophically, Nancy has not given us much. This is a shame because Nancy's work on Lacan, _The Title of the Letter_, (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) is a rather ingenious interpretation. This should not surprise us, however, considering the body of Nancy's work, taken as a whole, is not very philosophical but rather really an exercise in aesthetics. (Perhaps this is why American literature departments rave about various French posties while most actual philosophers view French "play" much like Bismark viewed Napolean III's statesmanship: erratic, ill-conceived, and ultimately without the substance necessary to sustain itself.)

Hegel of course was (and still is) considered quite obscure by many, but taken to be philosophically formidable and rigorous. The French philosopher that initiated contemporary interest of Hegel in France, Kojeve, managed to put together a few positive concepts on Hegel's philosophy of negativity. Nancy does not. He is content to remain, despite his own best deconstructive efforts, in the world of Nietzsche's last man--endlessly searching in vain for an answer to the demise of the Enlightenment and taking the search itself to now be the best option available. Such nihilistic gamesmanship is appealing to disaffected lefties because they, like Nancy, will not move beyond the liberal naivetes no longer tenable in a post-Nietzschean world. They wish to promote a Kantian style ethical practice by invoking an unstated catergorical imperative of unconditional equality and toleration. The fact that there is no ground or reason for their political project is taken to be somehow supportive of "radical" equality; their hope being that by supporting epistemic skepticism they can institute a paralysis of the bildung that make the hierarchies of social systems possible. Of course what they have actually done is given themselves a way to advance an extreme version of the Enlightenment project of political emancipation while rhetorically denying the other positive claims of the Enlightenment. Hegel himself did his best to put a good face on the aporias exposed by Kant's reaction to Hume's skepticism but was not, in the end, successful. Herein lies the problem for Nancy and his ilk. They would be better served to strike a more truly Hegelian pose rather than languish in the death throws of a long since faded Enlightenment. Such political tactics are philosophically transparent. If you are looking for an actual philosophic treatment and explanation of Hegel's thought I would suggest Stanley Rosen's book on Hegel.

After the death of both Deleuze and Levinas in 1995, the mantle of "greatest living philosopher" presumably went to Jacques Derrida for a while. But Derrida has always refused to be a philosopher other than in the sense of not being a philosopher (which is also being a philosopher). So his cohort and quasi-follower Jean-Luc Nancy had to take the real philosophy from Derrida back to the question underlying all post-modern thought, namely how to deal with the empty space left behind by Heidegger's deconstruction of the tradition. With this little book, Nancy himself has become "the greatest living philosopher" - that is to say he has done to Hegel what Heidegger did to Nietzsche in the 1930s and 1940s: presented him as the key thinker of the break of modernity, and, unnoticeably perhaps, stepped beyond him. This book is indeed a marvel - one gets slightly dizzy reading it. Its intensity is at times (no: always) well-nigh unbearable. Nancy, like Heidegger with Nietzsche, takes a drill to the concepts of Hegel and allows them to shine in ways hitherto unthought(see the editorial review above, no need to repeat the details). In the end, this is the overturning of the boring old French Hegel of Kojeve and Hyppolite and the most exciting discovery in philosophical reading of another in sixty some years. I had always thought of Hegel as the great synthesizer. But Nancy's Hegel "returns" Hegel to pre-Socratic instability and shaky difference, where the restless thought-in-process constitutes the sense of the world, and philosophy is as alive as it ever was. A friend of mine says that Nancy reminds him of the color of the LED on alarm clocks: well, he's right, 'cause Jean-Luc Nancy is very much a phenomenon of a new morning. The owl is disoriented but it is all a marvel. Yes, I guess that is what you could say.

The title of this book turns out to be a good deal more descriptive than one might believe. Take what the authors have to say about the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster. This is from the heart of their discussion on pages 153 and 154:

"The [Vincent Foster] death was reported as a suicide, but many Clinton bashers still don't believe it, even though numerous investigations have so concluded.

"Even Ken Starr has ruled it a suicide. His report on Foster's death concluded that Foster was seriously depressed about his work at the White House, specifically the Travelgate 'crisis,' took a revolver from a closet in his home, placed it in an oven mitt, and on the afternoon of July 20, drove to a Virginia park and shot himself.

"The report contained new forensic details that refuted the conspiracy theories that surrounded Foster's death (more on those in a bit). As part of the investigation Starr consulted renowned medical and forensic experts, including Henry C. Lee, a crime expert made famous in the O. J. Simpson trial, who determined that the condition of the body and other physical evidence unequivocally demonstrated that Foster shot himself. Alan L. Berman, an expert in the field on suicide, found that 'to a 100-percent degree of medical certainty, the death of Vincent Foster was a suicide.'"

Surely it would take a person of low mental wattage to believe that a psychologist such as Dr. Berman could pronounce upon the "medical certainty" of anything, much less upon a person's addled mental state, the principal evidence for which is the writing in an obviously forged note.

The authors, as we see, draw heavily upon the final report on Foster's death by Kenneth Starr. That would mean that they would have to have obtained a copy to read. Having done that they could not have helped but notice that it was accompanied by a 20-page addendum, ordered included by the three judges who appointed Starr, over Mr. Starr's strenuous objections. The addendum is a letter by the lawyer for aggrieved witness, Patrick Knowlton. That letter, ignored by the national news media, using publicly-available evidence, utterly destroys the suicide conclusion. The complete story is available from FBICover-up.com.

The "demolished" "conspiracy theories" are red herrings put out by phony right-wing critics, and these authors would most dishonestly have us believe that they constitute the sum total of the reasons to reject the cover-up story of suicide.

They really do take us for idiots.

My husband and I read the Complete Idiot's guide about the impeachment of the President of United States. We have disagreed about issues surrounding this subject for months. We decided to read the book together and discuss it as we went along. The authors spoke volumes to the issues giving my husband and I plenty of points to discuss. We enjoyed the book very much and have passed it along to our friends. We hope these two authors will continue to write more books along the same vein...we look forward to reading more.

I have just finished reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to theImpeachment of the President. I was anxious to know more and makesense of all of the media mess, but found the newspapers and the television reports so predjudice in their condemnations. I found this book in the bookstore, and felt it was just what I was looking for to help sort things out. The authors brought the evidence to light in a clear and concise manner without beating around the bush. Unfortunately, that sort of hard hitting, non-bias fact finding, isnt what a lot of people want to hear. I found the book well thought out and very straight forward. I also found it to be an easy read that finally made sense of all of the confusing media mess. I would recommend this book to any student of political science or the lay person wanting to know more. I give this book four stars! END

If you know nothing at all about Steven Spielberg, this book might be a good summary of his career. But if you are looking for personal insights, new depth or detailed film analysis, invest your book-buying money elsewhere. I was also put off by the fairly frequent denigrating remarks about various actors, screen writers and directors many of whom have careers that would seem worthy of some degree of respect.