"The Job" is often brutal, always controversial, and possessed by the author's inimitable knack for nailing his target. This is an unforgettable plunge into one of the 20th century's foremost countercultural intellects.

"Kill Me Tender" is a pure fiction "murder mystery" featuring Elvis Presley. Well, why not? There are many "fact"-books written about Elvis that are playing more or less fast and loose with those facts. At least the cover of this book states that this time it is fiction.

Elvis playing detective is not a strange idea at all, because it is a well-known fact Elvis had the hang of the police enforcement. Overall it is clear that the writer studied his main character pretty well. He does not only recommend Peter Guralnick's works, but it looks like he actually read them.

Daniel Klein took some liberties with stipulations as to time that catch the eye of the reader immediately, at least when the reader is an Elvis-fan. To the less fanatics those stipulations are just "Elvis-facts" that may seem in place. We can safely place the story in 1960, because most "facts" point to that. Elvis is home for just a couple of months after returning from Germany and "Elvis Is Back" is his latest album. Being a couple of weeks from the filming of "Take Me to The Fair" is in contradiction with this, because this movie (which became "It Happened At The World's Fair") was not filmed before the last quarter of 1962. Also a statue of Elvis in a jumpsuit and a TCB-belt do not really fit in the 1960-picture, because it took another decade before those things showed up. On first sight it looks strange that some of the Elvis-related people are mentioned by name, like Priscilla, Vernon, The Colonel and The Jordanaires, while Elvis' close friends are fictional.

Here we'll stop the hair-splitting. Assuming you like murder-mysteries at all this book is a nice read. It is fast, but demanding: it forces you to read on, even when you know you should go to sleep, because you have to go to work again the next day. The mystery starts when two young girls, both presidents of local fanclubs find an untimely death. Elvis gets involved and before you know it you are reading about P.I. Presley instead of G.I. Presley. There are some tender, touching moments, of course there is tension too and even humour can be spotted on several pages. In other words we enjoyed the book very much and therefore we won't say anything more about it, especially not regarding the story line. Not to give away the clue and to be sure we won't spoil your pleasure reading it!

You learn of what happens when a dictator is the ruler of a country and/or the military has all the political control of a country. It is horrible and upsetting.

This book will help you appreciate the U.S.A. with all of it's flaws. Thank God I was born in the United States of America.

Wilkinson's early focus is on the 1950 presidential victory of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. He then explains the daring 1952 implementation of a far-reaching Agrarian Reform law called Degree 900. The author reaches out to Guatemalan students who favored the reforms and declared that peace, "required greater equality and greater equality required a redistribution of land in the countryside."

Wilkinson then flashes back to 1892 when twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Endler leaves Germany for Central America. Endler eventually becomes a large coffee plantation owner and it is through him the author explains the historical struggle with poor illiterate workers who provide the labor that builds a coffee nation.

From there Wilkinson flash forwards to 1954 and the carefully choreographed CIA overthrow of democratically elected President Guzmán. Shortly thereafter agricultural students protested, "We who receive an education paid for by the people have a debt to the people! We who have the power to analyze have the responsibility to criticize! An agronomist should carry, in one hand, a machete...and, in the other, a machine gun."

The remainder of the book is a painstaking tale of documenting the State terror of the 1980's when 200,000 Guatemalans perished. Quite frankly, parts of this book are brutal. Nevertheless, the author must be commended for risking his life and traveling to the interior and urging the poor to testify before the Guatemalan Truth Commission that officially investigated the atrocities of the armed forces.

In conclusion, Daniel Wilkinson courageously points a finger at Washington for being so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that they rationalize away qualms and uneasiness. He even quotes an American embassy official who was uneasy with early military abuses and wrote in 1968, "the record must be made clearer that the Untied States Government opposes the concept and questions the wisdom of counter-terror; the record must be made clearer that we have made this known unambiguously to the Guatemalans; otherwise we will stand before history unable to answer the accusations that we encouraged the Guatemalan Army to do these things." Unfortunately, no one in Washington was listening. This is a tier-one book...buy it.

Bert Ruiz

Although it is intended to be a textbook, the format and writing make the tome sufficient as a great general reference and a very good read. The illustrations are excellent, although I wish there were more color reproductions.

Anyone who enjoys fine art should have this book in their personal library.

Secondly, I detected the oh-too-familiar complaint of many writers - that they are unsung geniuses and anyone who criticizes their work doesn't know squat. (I noticed this with Stephen King's and Rita Mae Brown's books on writing.) Some critics don't know what they're doing, but some do. If most people who work in publishing are ignoramuses, how did your books manage to get published? Writers who can make a living doing what they love should ease up on the whining.

I've read other Pinkwater books. Some are great, some are so-so, and some are in dire need of editing.... In any case, whether or not he's a genius (yes, he actually discusses this) will only tell with time.

And, while I'm really on a roll, why this pathological reluctance to mention his alma mater? I went there. It's a decent school. Lots of flaky artists, but certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

Senator Moynihan applies his intellect and his strong academic and historical bent to examine the U.S. experience with secrecy, beginning with its early distrust of ethnic minorities. He applies his social science frames of reference to discuss secrecy as a form of regulation and secrecy as a form of ritual, both ultimately resulting in a deepening of the inherent tendency of bureaucracy to create and keep secrets-secrecy as the cultural norm. His historical overview, current right up to 1998, is replete with documented examples of how secrecy may have facilitated selected national security decisions in the short-run, but in the long run these decisions were not only found to have been wrong for lack of accurate open information that was dismissed for being open, but also harmful to the democratic fabric, in that they tended to lead to conspiracy theories and other forms of public distancing from the federal government. He concludes: "The central fact is that we live today in an Information Age. Open sources give us the vast majority of what we need to know in order to make intelligent decisions. Decisions made by people at ease with disagreement and ambiguity and tentativeness. Decisions made by those who understand how to exploit the wealth and diversity of publicly available information, who no longer simply assume that clandestine collection-that is, 'stealing secrets'-equals greater intelligence. Analysis, far more than secrecy, is the key to security....Secrecy is for losers."

In summary if you want to learn the concepts buy it. If you want to learn java or VAJ buy something else

I started learning from this book and other IBM Visual Age redbooks about 2 years ago. Although I wasn't new to java programming back then, but I still needed this book to complete AS/400 to web integration project. This book helped me understand the details of AS/400 toolbox classes and how to effectively use these classes. It gives in depth information about AS/400 Integrated File System(IFS), Qsh interpreter(AS/400 unix like environment). There are ample examples in the book about invoking RPG programs from java programs. It also explains subfile and other dds specific classes from Toolbox.

In a nutshell this book ushered me in the world of enterprise integration with java programming.

It is not a beginner Java book, nor is it intended for those with more traditional AS/400 skills (e.g. RPG, COBOL, etc.) But if you are familiar with Java and need to get it going on your 400, this is a great book to have.

The plague (H.F. writes) arrives by way of carriers from the European mainland and spreads quickly through the unsanitary, crowded city despite official preventive measures; the symptoms being black bruises, or "tokens," on the victims' bodies, resulting in fever, delirium, and usually death in a matter of days. The public effects of the plague are readily imaginable: dead-carts, mass burial pits, the stench of corpses not yet collected, enforced quarantines, efforts to escape to the countryside, paranoia and superstitions, quacks selling fake cures, etc. Through all these observations, H.F. remains a calm voice of reason in a city overtaken by panic and bedlam. By the time the plague has passed, purged partly by its own self-limiting behavior and partly by the Great Fire of the following year, the (notoriously inaccurate) Bills of Mortality indicate the total death toll to be about 68,000, but the actual number is probably more like 100,000 -- about a fifth of London's population.

Like Defoe's famous survivalist sketch "Robinson Crusoe," the book's palpable moralism is adequately camouflaged by the conviction of its narrative and the humanity of its narrator, a man who, like Crusoe, trusts God's providence to lead him through the hardships, come what may. What I like about this "Journal" is that its theme is more relevant than its narrow, dated subject matter suggests: levelheadedness in the face of catastrophe and the emergence of a stronger and wiser society.