My mom and I absoutly love this book! It's so cute how he's lonely and he wished for some company. So he goes out to the pound and finds the perfect cat. With similar qualties as him. From then on they do every thing together. They drink tea, eat muffins, sing opera, tell stories, garden, took long walks, take naps, and grow old together. Tabby knew just what Mr.Putter was going to do next. Mr.Putter knew exactly where Tabby was going to sleep next. It's just such a sweet story about the love Mr.Putter has for this cat and the love the cat has for him.

The Mr. Putter and Tabby series are the sort of books that I would have loved to have when I was a beginning reader. I know that I would have read them over and over again to no end, even once they began to fall apart from constant use. That's why I am so glad that Mr. Putter and Tabby are around now while my youngest brother is learning to read. The non-repetitious, non-rhyming storytelling contained within the books makes them a pleasure to read continually, unlike many other easy-reader books. And in my opinion, the Mr. Putter and Tabby books are a step in front of Ms. Rylant's Henry and Mudge collection, due to the fact that, in their own way, they create an appreciation for the elderly as the reader comes to love Mr. Putter, the aging main character whose only companion is his cat, Tabby.

In Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea, the first book in the series, Mr. Putter comes to know Tabby. During the first chapter, Mr. Putter expresses the feelings of loneliness and the desire for companionship that the elderly so often have. Thereafter, he chooses to adopt a cat, and the story continues to describe the affection they gain towards each other.

Mr. Howard's cartoon-style illustrations greatly enhance this wonderful story, which is written in such a format to be used as either a 3-chapter book for the beginning reader, or a bedtime story that is longer in length, opening into a possible discussion with your child about the significance of friendship in the elderly person's life. Either way, the Mr. Putter and Tabby books would be a great find for emerging readers' shelves. Like having a kindly old grandpa next door, they only make life richer!

With astonishing economy of words, Rylant sketches a life of solitude, then the beauty of companionship, in a way that can be appreciated by a young child, an adult, and everyone in between. All the "Mr. Putter and Tabby" books are good, but this one has an internal narrative power that the others sometimes lack. In effect this is a story of mutual redemption, with a happy ending but (for adults) a poignant aftertaste.

This was the first of Ransome's "Swallows & Amazons" series that I ever read, and it's still my favorite. We find the Swallows (the four Walkers), the Amazons (Captain Nancy Blackett and sister-Mate Peggy), and the D's (Dick and Dorothea Callum) headquartering at Beckfoot, the old Blackett house, while impatiently waiting for Captain Flint (the Amazons' Uncle Jim) to return from South America. "His mine wasn't any good," says Nancy, and she decides to fill in the time by searching for gold up on the high fells above the lake, following hints given by Slater Bob, a local miner. Complicating the program is the distance from Beckfoot to the target area and the fact that the Lake Country is seeing its driest summer in memory--and the presence of the mysterious lanky man the explorers call "Squashy Hat," who seems to be looking for the same thing they are. The book takes its title from the three homing pigeons the Blacketts own and resolve to use to keep Mrs. Blackett informed of their adventures while they camp nearer to the moors. The countryside is splendidly drawn, the children are unique individuals well sketched, their adventures and inventions are so thoroughly described that an American child could probably duplicate them, and there are thrills galore when the fells catch fire. What's more, the eight actually find...but that would be telling! Read it for yourself and find out.

Like most children's books of its period, this one is equally enjoyable by adults and would make a splendid family read-aloud. Highly recommended.

In this sixth 'S & A' adventure, summer has come once more, and the Swallows are back in the Lake District, together with the two D's, on another holiday with their boating friends, the Amazon pirates. This time, the children desert the lake and take instead to the High Topps, prospecting for gold.

While adult readers will be unable to do other than admire the children's enthusiasm (sufficiently infectious to draw most young readers into it wholesale), they will probably have a feeling of impending disaster from quite early on, in this book. The Amazons' impetuous natures, combined with the others' general inexperience and limited knowledge of mining and its chemistry, lead them all (except, perhaps, the more sensible Susan!) into more scrapes, as well as rather more dangerous situations, than usual.

This leads to a different (but no less absorbing) desire to keep reading this tale than that likely to affect the more naïve younger reader. Both young and old are, nevertheless, likely to spend much of the time on tenterhooks during this book, as the young prospectors explore old mine workings, try their hand at charcoal burning and build and operate a blast furnace in their camp, out on the tinder-dry fells! For once, one can only feel something of a sense of relief that times have changed since 1936, when this was written! One can't help feeling - and being grateful for the fact - that modern children would not be terribly interested in repeating some of the activities undertaken here.

In summary, then, "Pigeon Post" is every bit as exciting (and at times far more nerve-wracking) and educational as the other books in this series: another winner from Arthur Ransome.

Undoubtedly the best of Arthur Ransome's 10 book Swallows and Amazons series. Suspense, intruige and natural disasters keep children and adults alike on their toes throughout. The plausibility of the story adds an exciting dimension to the plot. Ransome's superb ability to develop distinct personalities for his characters is one of the most enjoyable aspects of his writing, and Pigeon Post is perhaps his best example of this.

I have just started working on this book recently. I've been reading through and working on the problems in the number theory section which are excellent so far. There is a good balance between warm-up/basic training problems and hard contest problems so you won't be discouraged too easily. I have browsed through the other sections and they seem very good. Must have if you are preparing for math contests!

it was really good book to read and the solution of them are really good. i enjoyed to read these books:)

I am best at mathematics. I have won several national titles in my country. I am at brink of discovering solutions to several unsolved problems in mathematics. I got good by competions against good young mathematicians. I think this book is very good for intelligent people, not dumb people. If you want to improve your problem solving you will buy this.

When I unexpectedly came across a picture of Buckley on the first page of the book, and after hearing the other reviews of how difficult and advanced the techniques in the book were, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was surprised to see the face of a handsome teenager, of which my previous impression was COMPLETELY the opposite to the one I held in my hands. And this guy was a professional card magician at the age of 18, and able to do tricks infront of hundreds of people on-stage in 1908!

I have a feeling that this guy's mystery and skill probably gained him significant success with girls his age. The mysterious effects of these difficult to execute sleights are priceless and dazzling beyond belief. If a 3 columns card trick can make girls believe in magic.. then Buckley's stuff probably knocked their socks off... literally! Believe me, this guy would be able to blow David Blaine out of the water and make him look like Bob Longe.

That being said and out of the way, the book itself is amazing. There are very clearcut photos of Buckley's hands and very impressive card tricks, or as he calls them in the fourth section, "Card Experiments". Best of all, this book isn't like most others where the authors seem to purposely be vague (S.W. Erdnase) and not give the best descriptions. Mr. Buckley gives you every detail and is your friend throughout the book, showing you exactly how everything is done without any confusion.

And there is SO much different good stuff in here, that you'll probably never need another book for advanced materials.

It is a great book and a great reference to help you on your way to card excellence and showmanship. You will not be disappointed with this purchase.

If you've mastered Hugard and Braue's stuff, if you can do 60 classic passes per minute, if you have all the time in the world to devote to card sleight of hand, then this is the book for you! Seriously, this is a truly excellent book. Buckley's sleights, though not for the faint of heart, are superb. (He must've been one heckuva cardician!) This is a serious, serious card magic book. But if you are serious yourself, you'll get it. Of course, you'll overlook the antiquated prose and Buckley's tremendous ego throughout. (When you read this material you'll forgive Buckley's self-congratulatory tone.) This is a splendid work for those who want to be the best...

I've yet to see a bad review for this book, and there's a reason. This book is terrific. There is however one issue to be addressed. This book is hard!!! Definitely not for beginners, it has some of what I believe are the greatest but hardest card manipulations out there. I definitely recommend it however to the serious card magic enthusiast. There are enough valuable ideas in here to last you a lifetime.

This amazing treatise on human knowledge has one little fault. The editors at Open Court left out eleven words in the Tranlator's Introduction. This omission should gratify present-day philosophers in that it turns Schopenhauer's words into modern-sounding nonsense. I will surround the omitted words with parentheses. On page xx, Schopenhauer is quoted: " ...so that I cannot hope ever to find a more correct and accurate expression of that core of my philosophy (than what is there recorded. Whoever wishes to know my philosophy) thoroughly and investigate it seriously must take that chapter into consideration." You see, the occurrence of the word "philosophy" twice in close proximity utterly confused them. I notified Open Court but did not receive an acknowledgement. Other than this, I have to judge this book as one of the few life-changing writings that occur a few times every century. For laughs, read Heidegger's "Principle of Reason" and compare the two.

The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a theory of cognition. It is a vision of the homo cognoscendi. Inexplicably, unjustifiably, it still remains largely unknown.

Schopenhauer first wrote it as his doctorate dissertation, improving it substantially more than thirty years later when his entire system of thought, the philosophy of the world as will and representation, was already established. It is this second edition that since 1974 was made available to the English-speaking world by his excellent translator, Eric F.J. Payne.

A true machine-gun of clear connections, thinking and giving to think in all directions, the book takes on the greatest thinkers of the western world up to its time, challenges long-established truths, religious dogmas, and sets the stage for one of the most - perhaps the most, apart from psychoanalysis - far-reaching metaphysical tours-de-force the human mind has been able to make unassistedly, that is, abandoned by the gods and fate. What we find in this little treatise is a most valuable source of insight into psychology, epistemology, physics and all present sciences.

There is a second merit in it, and this brings us to its quantum leap. The treatise does not only present a theory of cognition tout-court, but indeed a Kantian theory of cognition. Kantian in its ambition, Kantian in its method; Kantian in recognizing that outside its reference to that who knows, namely the subject of knowledge, the entire knowable, objective reality becomes a contradiction in terms, and cannot be even conceived of.

Still, its most impressive feat is its objective itself. In the less than 300 pages of the treatise, Schopenhauer does have the ambition of exhausting the entire reality and all possible objects of experience. If he succeeded in achieving this, the cohesiveness of his entire system of thought can and must be studied in its timelessness. On the other hand, even if problems and challenges are left in relation to what mankind has discovered and concluded ever since, there still remains the legacy of his method, an all-time gem, and the insight that by means of the principle of sufficient reason the entire sensible reality can be surveyed.

Now, the reader of this review may ask him or herself: but how could it be possible that someone exhausts the totality of reality and knowable objects in one single, small book? If we allow ourselves to think that the world is a sum of its facts, events, and objects, this enterprise would seem to be an utter absurdity even if we considered the knowledge mankind had in the early nineteenth century, the year of 1813 when its first version came out. But then... There is the Kantian secret, 'the world is my representation', and this insight no one can take from modernity. Content implies form, and for transcendental philosophy, this is what truly matters.

Along its eight chapters, the book is focused on the four manners in which man can, according to the author, know reality, infer causes and consequences, conditioning and conditioned, associate concepts, and ask for the whys of the world. At the same time, Schopenhauer provides a detailed account of the human powers and faculties at work: the understanding (Verstand, which in the main work is nicknamed after Indian philosophy as 'the veil of Maya'), the faculty of Reason (Vernunft), pure sensibility (here we have a most interesting restatement of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, and a critique of Euclid's axioms), and inner sensibility (the magic track on which the riddle of the world could, according to the philosopher, be solved). The Fourfold Root is a crucial book also in the discussion of pure reason, in attempting to prove the apriority of causality (against David Hume), in consolidating man's active place and role in the process of knowledge, and in answering Kant's question 'Is metaphysics possible, after all?' An additional remark, in my view, is that it also provides a most precious criterion for the demarcation of the sciences: according to the way we know objects in them.

Professors of philosophy and philosophers alike, it is high time we study Schopenhauer, in all his immodesty, in all seriousness. One may wish to dismiss the central construction of his work, his metaphysics of the will, as a theory of voluntarism, of utter irrationalism, or of unnecessary pessimism. In other works, when we see his comments on women and on theism, our first impression may well be one of rebuff. All these questions can and must be treated on their own merit; in the case of women, I judge Schopenhauer as unfair; in the case of theism, as right and noble.

But what will we do with the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, the most thorough and ambitious investigation of 'the mother of all science' in the history of philosophy? Will anyone be able to challenge this basic claim?

I apologize to the reader if my review seems to be too promising, too euphoric and optimistic about this book. However, after having read it, I do trust that he or she will agree with me that it should be handled with the care a most unique specimen deserves. In addition to the 'Critique of the Kantian Philosophy', appended to the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, seriousness in making oneself clear in regard to foundations and connections in one's work present themselves undeniably, though still controversially in its main claims.

In the end, one wonders whether it is our time (with all the sound and fury of its technology, barions and genes) that challenges Schopenhauer's teachings or the reverse. And even if his claims seem to be unsustainable, we still get to know in a direct way, and without a shadow of a doubt, what human excellence in philosophy really is.

This work is well written, like the rest of Schopenhauer's books, and many of its arguments stand strong today. That the understanding is active in perception, that percpetion is intellectual, is a huge step beyond Kant. Furthermore, Schopenhauer's claim that causality is necessary for sense experience, though not proving the a priori nature of causality as he thought, is strong and holds true whether one is a realist or an idealist. In the case of realism, sense experience is gotten by the affectation of objects upon the body, and in the case of idealism, sense experience is the production of the individual, and thus causality is necessary either way. One may object to Schopenhauer's attempt to rationalize everything down to human action - that he makes the entire phenomenal world deterministic. But he has strong arguments for this as well which are further explained in On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will. Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers I still enjoy reading, and rather than finding gaps in his system... people would do well to learn from him. While this work prepares the way for his whole system, and is essential to understanding particulary Book One and the Appendix on Kant of his magnum opus, this work should make any openminded empirical realist uneasy, though it does not prove the radical kind of Berkeleian idealism to which Schopenhauer subscribed.

Small boat or dinghy sailing, camping out, excitement, nice people and strong writing: what more could a reader ask for? I first read this book at the home of a boyhood friend about ten years after it was originally published, and I count the series (this is the second of 12) as responsible for my lifelong interest in camping and sailing. More than half a century later, I acquired a set and found to my absolute delight that they read as well and are as powerfully satisfying as ever.

Here, within the covers of a very well-written book, you'll find a group of charming children and a few adults, spanning a wide range of ages and character types. Swallowdale is by turns funny, thoughtful, insightful and so well written it is a distinct pleasure for readers of any age.

Did I mention the writing? It's better written than most current novels.

One year after the events of "Swallows and Amazons," the four Walkers return to the Lake to spend the summer holidays, looking forward to more thrilling adventures with the Blackett sisters and their uncle, Captain Flint. To their dismay, they discover that the Blacketts' Great-Aunt--a strait-laced and somewhat tyrannical person who brought their mother and uncle up--is staying at Beckfoot and badly cramping the two pirates' style. And then the Walkers' boat "Swallow" is wrecked on the far side of the lake, forcing them to find a new camp. In dealing with these challenges the six show their mettle once again--and even manage to get away for an overnight climb of Kanchenjunga, as they christen the tallest of the nearby hills. Along the way Roger and Titty get lost when a sea-fog rolls in over the moors, and the outwitting of Great-Aunt Maria furnishes a fair share of suspense. Once again Ransome tells his tale without talking down, seeming to assume a child's viewpoint with an ease matched by few writers. Another excellent family read-aloud that should be owned by every household even if they don't care for boats or camping.

"Swallowdale" continues very much where its predecessor, "Swallows and Amazons", leaves off, with the Walker children returning to "that remote lake in the north of England" one year after the events of the first book and looking forward to another couple of weeks of fun, sailing with their friends, the Amazon pirates. Plans quickly begin to go awry, however, and Ransome turns events away from the anticipated activity of sailing on the lake to an altogether different sort of fun, as the children take off camping and exploring in the surrounding fells and mountains.

The book has all of the fine qualities that make its predecessor such an excellent read for children (and adults) of all ages. Ransome's prose is a delight throughout, his characters engaging and the events that befall the children entirely believable. As in all of the other books of this series, simple pen and ink drawings by the author add considerably to the enjoyment. If only the world (and the Lake District!) was still like this!

Incidentally, although this was the second of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazon" books to be published, it is best read after the third volume, "Peter Duck", because it is set chronologically after the events of that book, and makes occasional back reference to it. You will enjoy "Peter Duck" much more if you read it BEFORE you read "Swallowdale". And if you enjoyed "Swallows and Amazons" you will certainly enjoy this.

The road, the escaping, and the self-examination all add up to a familiar theme, but one that is executed brilliantly. The book is rich and dense, but not at all off-putting. Recommended.

I got the book and finished it in a matter of days. I was very disappointed, however, by this book. I expected something along the lines of Rosenfeld's very good "Diamond Eye." I was wrong. The story lags in so many places, I found myself skipping full paragraphs. Try as I did, I couldn't make myself feel anything at all for Mercury or Umberto. I know I should probably have pitied them, but I could've care less.

The lack of quotations is something that completely threw me. I don't know what Mr. Rosenfeld was trying to accomplish with this tactic. It was distracting and forced me to take my mind out of the story far too many times.

I don't recommend this novel. If you're in a fix for a great road novel, buy "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman, which actually does manage to turn a road trip into a spiritual journey without resorting to cockamamie ghost stories.

Two men from different pasts come together under the most incredible circumstances. Mr. Rosenfeld has made the main characters credible and absolutely captivating. From the very first paragraph, you will be drawn in. You will never forget Umberto Santana, Mercury Gant, or any of the other players in this story thats part road movie and part Pulp Fiction. Thanks you Mr. Rosenfeld.

I admit it: I am a sucker for time travel stories. They don't even have to be any good. I'll still read them, and probably like them.

This book, however, is quite good. It takes the time-slip convention and turns it into a scientific "fact" by giving it a fancy sounding name: dechronization. Just the fact that it uses a pseudo-term like that would make it a favorite with me even if it was written in gibberish, but I have a thing about neology. Since reading this book, I have started slipping the word "dechronization" and all its variants into conversation whenever possible. It is my hope that one day this word will be common koine.

The other notable point of this book the reaction of Magruder to the dechronization. Since he is a chronologist, he knows that the chances of his being re-dechronized are beyond impossible. So he has absolutely no chance of seeing another person. Ever. But he doesn't give in to the hopelessness that I know I would feel. He continues to live. He takes a lesson from Robinson Crusoe, and makes a good life there in the middle of nowhere (or in this case nowhen).

All in all, I think this is a must-read for wannabe time travelers like myself. Or maybe just anyone who likes the linguistic oddities inherent in time travel.

In the year 2162, the eminent chronologist Sam Magruder mysteriously disappeared while running an experiment. Some years later, while arguing about the possibility of being totally alone, the evidence is produced that Sam Magruder did not die in 2162, but was transported back in time some 80 million years! Engraved upon sandstone slabs, found in a bed of shale, is found the story of Sam Magruder's existence in the late Cretaceous period. Alone, with no hope of ever seeing another human being again, Sam survived, and this is his story.

The famous paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson penned this short story, apparently for his own amusement, but it is a masterpiece. Considering Dr. Simpson's field, I would have assumed that this story would be entirely about what Sam found in the Cretaceous, but that's only part of the story. As the opening chapter tells, this is the story of a modern (OK, future) man's coming to grips with his situation, one containing only danger and isolation.

I am sure that my words do not do justice to this story. This work is complex and fascinating beyond some lengthy works produced by noted authors. I recommend it to everyone.

The Dechronization of Sam Magruder is an intriguing story of science and adventure. It is about a scientist who constructs a time machine, is accidentally transported to the dinosaur age and is, as you may have guessed, unable to return. The story is an account of this journey through his eyes and the eyes of the future...

"I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubator ... and left the children to die on the cold floor."

Casual news observers will recognize this quote, or at least the essence of it.

During the build-up to the Gulf War, this story, told by a teen-age Kuwaiti girl, was repeated again and again in the news media. As much as anything else, the anecdote softened public resistance to American intervention in Kuwait - a huge military undertaking that never completely shed its mercenary hue, but which enjoyed broad public support nevertheless thanks largely to a media that seemed ill-equipped or unwilling to get beyond the veneer of official proclamations and gee-golly techno-wizardry to the tough business of covering a war.

Less casual observers might know that the story was a pure fabrication. In fact, it took two curious reporters relatively little effort during the war's aftermath to discover what the entire Washington press corps had missed - not only was the story not true, but the girl who told it was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador.

What very few of us probably realize to this day, however, was that the tale was just one piece of a coordinated propaganda campaign conducted by PR flacks on behalf of the Kuwaiti royal family. All told, the Kuwaitis spent $11.5 million to win the hearts and minds of their American saviors, most of it paid to Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest public relations firms in the world. For that relatively modest sum, Kuwait was able to summon the sympathy and might of the world's most powerful democracy, despite Kuwait's own questionable commitment to human rights. And going along for the ride the whole way were the American media.

The victory of public relations over reportage prior to the Gulf War is just one of the fascinating nuggets found in Arthur E. Rowse's Drive-By Journalism: The Assault on Your Need to Know, a blistering indictment of the current state of American journalism. A veteran journalist and media critic who has worked for National Public Radio, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, Rowse writes like a man who knows how the sausage is made and isn't too pleased about his grandchildren having to eat it.

His book chronicles a spate of journalistic cardinal sins and exposes a rogues'gallery of media decision makers who have turned the sacred business of informing the public into a scramble for ratings and profits.

Elian, Monica, O.J. and JonBenet are just the tip of the iceberg, and, in Rowse's view, symptoms of a much more pernicious dynamic than just the public's demand for sensation and scandal.

At the heart of the media's current reliance on fluff, trivia and sensationalism, he argues, is the trend toward corporate ownership of media outlets. While journalism has always been a business, the profit motive was once far more balanced by - even subordinate to - journalistic standards.

In the 1960s, when CBS head Bill Paley was questioned by a member of his news division about the cost of his ambitious plans for news coverage, his response was more typical of that era: "Don't worry about that. I've got Jack Benny to make money for me. You guys cover the news."

Since then, says Rowse, mainstream media outlets have fallen all over themselves to slash staffs while favoring grislier, more sensational, more irrelevant coverage. Thus, crime reporting has become more frequent and more strident even as crime has dropped, while stories with emotional impact like the Elian Gonzalez saga supplant coverage of policy decisions that affect millions of Americans.

And instead of discussion about candidates' qualifications or stances on pressing national problems, campaign coverage is dominated by trivial horse race issues like who's raised the most money.

This hasn't just made us more uninformed, argues Rowse. We've also become much more susceptible to disinformation. Eager to fill the hard news gap left by the media have been special interest lobbyists, public relations flacks and think tanks - well-funded and well-organized groups with agendas to sell.

Rowse also explores the well-worn canard that our mainstream media are predominantly liberal. Not only does the prima facie evidence - that media are increasingly coming under the control of profit-driven corporations - suggest a conservative tilt, a look at the opinion pages of daily newspapers, where aggressive spin is encouraged, tells a different story as well. Of the top political columnists in the nation, the far-right Cal Thomas, with 537, is syndicated in the most dailies. George Will is second with 450. In fact, based on client numbers, Rowse counts a 3-to-1 advantage for conservative columnists over liberal ones. Add in talk radio, which is almost exclusively the province of right-wingers, and the liberal media myth explodes.

Other disturbing trends cited by Rowse are the increase in "gotcha" journalism; a snowballing, media-fueled cynicism about government's ability to address national crises; and a tendency to tilt reporting toward advertisers and affluent readers at the expense of broader coverage. (If the stock market is this strong then inflation-adjusted wages couldn't possibly have fallen in the last 20 years, right?)

If there's a criticism here it's that Rowse is woefully short on solutions, and those he does offer feel like spit in the wind. Perhaps the only real recourse, then, is for us as individuals to simply smarten up. Drive-By Journalism is a good first step down that path.

In Drive-by Journalism, Arthur Rowse makes a convincing case that a lack of reliable news is crippling American democracy.

As a result of deregulation of the news and entertainment industries, a steady series of corporate mergers has concentrated the media into a five-firm oligopoly of unprecedented power. We may think we have a lot of channels to choose from, but they all come from the same handful of sources, all of which are more interested in satisfying corporate investors than in producing an informed electorate. Rather than compete, the media conglomerates collude like mafia bosses, divvying up the available markets, using every available second of air time to sell us products, services, and a consumer lifestyle. This does not speak well to the likelihood of our getting trustworthy news.

Rowse deftly slaps down the ridiculous yet pervasive myth that the mass media are liberally biased and demonstrates conclusively that quite the opposite is true. Although many reporters have liberal tendencies, they are not the ones who determine which stories get reported. News networks have become lap dogs for their parent companies, and these media giants are as conservative as they are powerful. Moreover, they respond to advertisers, not the viewing public. NBC, for example, wouldn't dream of reporting on General Electric, the most notorious polluter in the nation, because GE is now NBC's parent company. The same is true of ABC and Disney, CBS and Westinghouse. In fact, every major network is now owned by the biggest advertisers in the nation. Don't think that isn't affecting what gets reported on the 6 o'clock news.....

According to Rowse, about 40% of what we see on the news these days is not even the product of investigative journalism; it is pre-packaged propaganda "donated" to the networks by political and corporate public relations firms. By accepting these gracious handouts, the networks can reduce the number of expensive journalists they employ. The result, of course, is that networks no longer investigate; they merely serve as conduits through which powerful organizations deliver their pre-fab images to the public.

Perhaps Rowse’s most frightening point is the link he makes between poor news reporting and citizen apathy. With nothing but info-tainment and scandal stories on the news, Americans have no viable means to choose between one candidate and another, between one policy and another. So they don’t bother. With voters thus sidelined, well-funded corporate lobbyists have the undivided attention of our lawmakers, whom they outnumber 40 to 1.

This book is well-documented, well-organized, well-written, and vitally important in our times. Better still, it’s truly interesting. Rowse provides fascinating insider anecdotes that bring all his statistics to life. Very highly recommended.

In Drive-By Journalism: The Assault On Your Need To Know, Arthur Rowse sets for a compelling and persuasive argument that we are being lulled into political and social apathy by the steady beat of media produced "news-amuse" journalism. Rowse points out that media mergers are rapidly creating a huge news cartel with just five conglomerates controlling what most people see, read and hear in television news broadcasts and major urban center newspapers. Profit-at-all-costs pressures have created a kind of "drive-by" journalism with an emphasis on trivia and tragedy ("If it bleeds, it leads!). News producers must nowadays showcase information in a recreational or entertainment framework that prefers sensationalism over substance, sound bites over insights. That's why such critical matters as health care, gun control, tax equity, campaign reform, and the environment are made subservient to personality and horse race style coverage. Drive-By Journalism should be on the shelves of every community library in the country, and required reading for journalism students, media activists, and those charged with the responsibility for gathering, analyzing, and disseminating the news of the day.

I'm a recovering Alcoholic, and also a recovering Mormon.

This book is the absolutely best book ever written explaining why we are here in the first place. I've given this book to many people in "AA" as one concept of God (one of which suits me). A great many people have a lot of "trouble" with God, and this book clears up a whole buch of that.

Thanks Arthur and Kathleen (I've met you both and your great people) I' m lookikng forward to your next book.

In a nutshell- the Game of God is the description of the entire creation of our universe in a brilliant, simple and hilarious nutshell. Nobody has been able to do it better than the authors of this book. I have hundreds of self-mastery and higher-consciousness books in my library and this one is on the top of my reading list. As a teacher and counselor I require everyone I work with to read this book, and read it well. It is the official book of my healing practice. There is no reason to complicate the truth behind our reality, as complex as it already seems. The Game of God has managed to hit the nail on the head and will keep you laughing all the way. Every other page of the book is a corresponding cartoon animating the well written script that has been arranged into word sculptures. This is by far my favorite book ever and 5 stars doesn't compare to the infinite stars I would give it if I could.

The Game Of God is one of the best books I've ever read. It tells you why the universe was created and why all the "good" and "bad" things happen in the world. It's written very simply with cartoons on every other page describing the concepts you read about. By the time you've finished the book, you've become concious of some heavy duty concepts. I cannot disagree with any sentence in the book and it's so logically written, each idea just flows into the next one. I've read many, many books, but The Game Of God really explains almost every question I've ever asked.