Dr. Todd presents us with clear, easy and very logical ideas of how we should live and build our cities. This book should be a required reading for most professionals that deal with development. I would like to see a second book with more hands on examples.

This book is quite clever and has some really cool party ideas. The book provides invitation, recipe, craft and game ideas for each of the 12 themes. While I think the themes are fun & very cool, they are really geared more towards the gay crowd. I enjoyed the book but gave it to my gay friends -- they are having much more fun with it than I did!

No one knows how to throw a party quite like Todd Merrell. I am a heterosexual female, and my friends and I have had an amazing amount of fun with the innovative ideas in this "fabulous" book! I had the remarkable opportunity to meet Mr. Merrell after reading this book and having several parties themed around ideas in the book, and I must say, he is the epitome of a great host. I believe any host can get enough creative ideas from this book to make it pay for itself ten fold!

From an intimate Valentine's Day party for two to a all-out throw down, invite the town Breakfast at Tiffany's cocktail party this book has it all for the fabulous host. Although, some of the touches may seem over the top--mini-closet invitations for a "coming out" party--to the not so crafty. This book also contains a good deal of straightforward party planning wisdom (e.g. you can never have too much ice!) that is helpful whether you are starting from scratch or a seasoned entertainer. Party Fabulous is a great book for jumpstarting the creative juices when you are getting ready to throw your next bash!

The odyssey of the Todds began during a tumultuous period in recent human history marked by intense political and economic strife and destructive military conflict. Over a number of years through careful experimentation, the Todds developed ten key principles of ecological design in an attempt to guide, or as they say, steward, the planet towards a sustainable future. Ecological design is quite interdisciplinary in scope, and seeks to integrate biological principles into agriculture. By blending agriculture, renewable energy and architectural concepts, the Todds seek to create sustainable mini-ecosystems, as opposed to communities, which incorporate humans while at the same time mimicking the larger biosphere. As such, the Todds have made the first viable and quantifiable attempt to employ scientific principles that will ultimately allow 'humankind' to become 'one with the environment'. These scientists recognized early on that humanity depended on nature for its survival, and that any attack on nature is ultimately an attack on all of humanity.

With this in mind, the Todds lament humanity's wholesale movement away from the cosmological towards mechanistic approaches to existence. Using their ecological principles, they have successfully redesigned homes, ships, and communities to achieve a more balanced, sustainable, and ultimately environmentally friendly and caring lifestyle for many people the world over. As such, this book expands upon the principles and concepts put forth in their previous book, Tomorrow Is Our Permanent Address, and gives the reader conceptual and fully actualized examples of self-sustaining structures and communities firmly grounded in ecological principles. Throughout the book, concepts such as permaculture and passive solar design are integrated into existing structures, forming the basis for growing, self-sustaining communities.

I see many philosophical similarities between this book and Masanobu Fukuoka's enlightening books The One Straw Revolution and The Road Back to Nature. Although the Todds and Fukuoka started from different points in time, space and experience, both have achieved the same goal albeit with different methods. On the one hand, Fukuoka criticizes the modern human predicament from the standpoint of Eastern philosophy and religion, and uses natural farming as a means to bring man closer to, if not completely back to, nature. On the other hand, the Todds approach the problem of sustainable human economic and social development from a scientific standpoint and bring the precepts of ecological design to bear in an attempt to realign humanity with the natural world. For both, the concept of equilibrium, referred to as 'balance' in the case of Fukuoka and 'homeostasis' for the Todds, is critical in both their respective philosophies and approaches. Moreover, both also realize, like many other astute interlopers on the mortal plane, that it is folly to attempt to improve upon nature; rather, human beings should strive to work with nature and allow nature to form the basis for all life. Finally, the Todds explicitly emphasize what Fukuoka deftly implied in his philosophy and approach to living- that all organisms, including humans, are simultaneously independent and interdependent entities.

In conclusion, as urban planners and engineeers increasingly look to nature as a basis for product and community design, this book will form the cornerstone for these endeavors.

You'll love this book if any of your ancestors were Cornish miners. It explains the conditions in Cornwall during the 19th century that forced so many to emigrate and gives endless documentation of the people who came to Wisconsin, California, Nevada and Colorado to mine lead, gold, silver and copper. If your roots are Cornish you'll be proud of their grit, hard work and skill.

On one hand, Jack Todd's story is a good one. He tells it well. While I respect (and was stirred) by his apparent honesty and bearing of some stupid decisions, I can't say I really liked him. His vagaries and depression and struggles were moving, but for some reason I wasn't entirely convinced of his desertion-on-moral grounds rationale. He justifies it with a series of rants that seem to ring a little hollow. I wish they didn't.

Although the war was wrong, I have a hard time accepting the notion that it's better to desert than to sell-out behind a desk in a comfortable army post in Germany.

Like the rest of us, Jack Todd is both courageous and cowardly. At times I felt as conflicted as he was . . . wanting to second-guess him. I felt sorry for him on one page and got angry at him the next.

One more thing: I felt a chapter was missing that explained how he got from low-rent writing to Montreal columnist.

Jack Todd had always assumed he would have to fight in the Vietnam War - all the men in his family had fought in WWII or Korea - except that he was getting more & more troubled by America's role in this one.

When Jack's oldest school friend returns from the jungle & urges him to dodge the draft, Jack stuffs down his disquiet & enters the army. He almost completes basic training when the love of his life does a long-distant rejection that sends him into a tailspin out of which he makes a fateful decision.

It has taken this writer 30 years to come to terms with the guilt & shame of his desertion, to break his silence & tell his controversial, important & profoundly American story. Perhaps becoming one of Canada's most successful journalists & remarkable writers has given him the perspective & strength to tell this most difficult of tales.

If you are at all interested in how a deserter made his decision & then went along with it - read this book!

If, on the other hand, you have an aversion to anyone who deserted during the Viet Nam War - you had better avoid it!

Not an "easy" read although this author does have a way with words & scoops you along for the ride of a lifetime. It's like seeing inside of a man's mind - how he saw the world then & what he did about it.

If you want to read a master storyteller - then grab a copy - it is one disturbingly powerful memoir of a strange & dangerous time.

Between 50,000 and 100,000 young men and women fled northward to Canada during the Vietnam War era. Yet, their voices have remained largely silent during the past three decades while a significant body of literature concerning the war experience has been evolving. Jack Todd has broken that silence with the publication of Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam, a moving memoir of a young man who followed his conscience to Canada in 1970 and waged his own private "war" as an exile in search of himself in an unknown land.

This intensely personal account follows Todd from childhood growing up in a small Nebraska town to a promising career at the Miami Herald to basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. Six weeks into basic training, Todd begins to contemplate flight northward as the dehumanization of the military experience and a growing antiwar conviction convince him to reluctantly leave his country. The decision is not made without Todd's painful acknowledgement of loss ("family, country, career, the woman I love") and moral agonizing over leaving his homeland of 23 years ("It's not that I live in America or that I am American. We are indistinguishable. You grow up the way I did, you don't know where your country leaves off and you start."). Ambivalence haunts him ("One instant I'm leaning one way, the next moment I've swung in the opposite direction. It's like watching a compass needle waver back and froth, back and forth, until it settles on true north.") until the morning early in 1970 when a friend escorts him over the Canadian border to freedom, and there is no turning back.

The memoir concentrates primarily on Todd's life as an exile in a country "that is so much like home that every morning when you get up you have to remind yourself that this is not home, that home is now a place where you can no longer go." Starting in Vancouver he drifts from city to city, on the verge of homelessness much of the time, never staying in any one place long enough to make lasting relationships or discover the security of stability. "The only constant seems to be this endless flight, running on and on and getting no place at all," he writes.

Even as Todd attempts to create a new life in this strange territory, he struggles to write about the exile experience in prose that is both poetic and poignant. "I worry at the theme of exile," he writes, "the meaning of existence on what is, for me in this endless winter, the wrong side of a three thousand-mile border."

By the time the war ends in 1975 Todd feels as if he has been "fighting it one way or another" for the past eight years since becoming a "late convert to the antiwar movement in 1967." Although draft dodgers and deserters are granted amnesty after the war, "it is too late for me," writes a deeply regretful Todd, who earlier made the "absurd decision" to renounce his American citizenship during a period of deep disillusionment. "I have given up my country, my citizenship, my profession, my family, my belief in myself, my true love, everything but my life. For this I will be called a coward," he writes, "and perhaps the people who say that are right. I feel it's the hardest, bravest thing I ever did, but it's not for me to judge." Todd stops short of claiming to be a casualty of war, but does place himself among many others of his generation who were "very different people after we had passed through that fire."

Today Todd is an award-winning journalist for the Montreal Gazette who has "spent half a life on each side of the border" and feels both American and Canadian "in roughly equal parts," although the Wildcat Hills of Nebraska, where he returns to visit as an outsider, will always be considered home "even if there aren't too many people out here who would care to claim me."

Todd's compelling story has waited more than a quarter of a century to be told and undoubtedly took much courage to write. Desertion is a different kind of war story than many that are included in the Vietnam War literary canon, but it is nevertheless a war story. Breaking the silence of desertion, Todd has created a story of conscience, bravery, remorse, and ultimately, hope.