If you ever thought that you were alone and that no one else in the world suffered from a shy bladder - or paruresis, this book is for you. After living with this problem since junior high, I was amazed at how much information this book book contained on how to finally get your life back to normal.

The nine chapters contained in this book are well written in easy to understand language that is a must read for anyone that suffers from paruresis. Starting with a brief overview of how the mind and bladder work (or don't work), this book leads you down a carefully laid path that shows how to regain control of your life.

Filled with true stories and first hand accounts from real life paruretic's, this book puts a very human face on something that is usually shrouded in secrecy and shame. If nothing else, simply reading this book will make anyone living with paruresis feel human again -- and not so alone. Thousands of people will read these stories only to be amazed at how similar their situation is to those in the book.

The best part, however, is that this book offers a successful plan to overcome paruresis that has been tested and successfully used in workshops around the world. After using the methods in this book, I've seen a dramatic improvement in my ability to use public restrooms with success.

If you're reading this review, you probably need this book or know someone that could benefit greatly from its priceless advice. Get this book...get it now...get on with life!

Looks like a plan !!!

What surprised and pleased me most about this book is the imprint of Fraser's own personality and strong opinions --- Flashman he is not. He's an old man now, and has grown more conservative and just a little cranky, but he's no less sharp an observer, resulting in a voice that's perfect (for my tastes) for first-person narration of and commentary on witnessed historical events. He indulges in some sentimentality that his famous character Flashman would have mocked --- about the characteristics of "Englishmen," for instance --- but knowing what he experienced in Burma you feel that he's more than earned the right to sentimentalize. Toward the end he leaves his narrative to defend the use of the atom bomb against Japan; he says that to protect his grandchildren he'd "gladly throw the switch on the entire Japanese nation," and that if you can't say the same you've got no business being a parent. I was shocked and delighted with the honesty of that sentence, and of this book as a whole.

The final few chapters are particularly sobering. Anyone who questions the necessity of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan would do well to read this book (and E.B. Sledge's "With the Old Breed"). We owe so much to the men and women who fought and served in this war, and we have failed them in so many ways. Our world of psychological gibberish and moral ineptitude is not what they fought for. Fraser's book has many important and enduring lessons for all of us, but particularly for those of us born in the postwar boom. Highly, highly recommended!

The author, Mara Leveritt, takes the reader from the time the two boys are killed, through the complete story of what Ives goes through to try to find out the truth (and she still hasn't found the truth about what happened that night). First, we encounter the unbelievable and outrageous behavior and incompetence of the Arkansas State coroner, Famy Malek, who is protected countless times by top state officials despite absolutely false determinations he makes. Malek rules the boys deaths suicides from drug intoxication, and it takes the Ives family a long time to prove this false due to lack of cooperation from Arkansas officials. Only this is just the beginning of the obstructions of justice the

Ives face.

Then we see that, at least in part, practically the entire state of Arkansas's legal and law enforcement agencies are rampant with corruption, to the point that felons hold high-level positions in government and law enforcement. Clearly these state officials will go to any length to prevent the truth of the boys's deaths from being revealed. A very prominent figure in this aspect of the story is Dan Harmon, a county prosecuting attorney. Harmon brutally beats people up, incl. his wives and ex-wives, and even steals confiscated drugs, and yet is held completely unaccountable for his actions and is returned to office again and again. Harmon is eventually and surprisingly convicted of certain offenses, but any crimes related to events around the time of the boys's deaths are deliberately ignored. Oddly enough, though not at all surprising once you read the unbelievable things revealed over and over in this book, Harmon is initially depicted as an ally of Linda Ives!

Of course the biggest, most outrageous part of this story is the cover-up of large-scale drug smuggling done through the Mena Airport, incl. the Barry Seal story, which is never dealt with by Arkansas officials. The details of this horror story are so phenomenal that you have to wonder how the people involved in these crimes can take part in such corruption and hypocrisy, and do their misdeeds with such impunity!

If you want the complete story, this is undoubtedly the book to read. If you don't have time to read this very well-written, 300+ page book, see "The Clinton Chronicles" and the more accurate (according to the participants) "Obstruction of Justice" videos.

This story and the events surrounding the Mena airport in Arkansas are unknown to most Americans, due to narrow-minded journalists and partisan political hacks on both sides.

This story and the whole story of Mena is very real, and will haunt America for years to come.

It is a true story of a parents worst nightmare. And a nightmare for the nation that few are aware of--our government and system of justice has become corrupt and lawless.

I would deeply recommend this book for anyone who is interested in getting the word out about Mena and the "Train Deaths" and who is interested in helping reclaim our system of justice to prevent it from failing our children again.

Polya's consideration of the Various Approaches to problem solving hangs on several key structural bands that take the forms of a teacher's questions: Do you know any related problem? Do you know an analogous problem? [Parallelograms are considered.] Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Can you use it? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?

These ring true to this recently mustered parental pedantic.

Polya's actual treatise is just 30 pages; the associated 'dictionary' definitions section is quite extended, actually, making up some 200 pages. He describes going back to first principles in problem solving. January 1, 2003 is a day perhaps to remember such back tracking is sometimes in order.

How to Solve It is the most significant contribution to heuristic since Descartes' Discourse on Method. The title is accurate enough, but the subtitle is far too modest: the examples are drawn mostly from elementary math, but the method applies to nearly every problem one might encounter. (Microsoft, for instance, used to and may still give this book to all of its new programmers.) Polya divides the problem-solving process into four stages--Understanding the Problem, Devising a Plan, Carrying out the Plan, and Looking Back--and supplies for each stage a series of questions that the solver cycles through until the problem is solved. The questions--what is the unknown? what are the data? what is the condition? is the condition sufficient? redundant? contradictory? could you restate the problem? is there a related problem that has been solved before?--have become classics; as a computer programmer I ask them on the job every day.

The book is short, 250 large-print pages in the paperback. Its style is clear, brilliant and does not lack in humor. Here is Polya's description of the traditional mathematics professor: "He usually appears in public with a lost umbrella in each hand. He prefers to face the blackboard and turn his back on the class. He writes A; he says B; he means C; but it should be D." Behind the humor, though, lurks a serious complaint about mathematical pedagogy. Fifty years ago, when Polya was writing, and today still, mathematics was presented to the student, under the tyranny of Euclid, as a magnificent but frozen edifice, a series of inexorable deductions. Even the student who could follow the deductions was left with no idea how they were arrived at. How to Solve It was the first and best attempt to demystify math, by concentrating on the process, not the result. Polya himself taught mathematics at Stanford for many years, and one can only envy his students. But the next best thing is to read his book.

I remember what a Political Science professor told me about a book we had to read for his class. The book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, by Eugen Kogan, was about life in the Dachau concentration camp. He said, "This book should only be read while you're out in the cold, sitting on a concrete slab, with inadequate clothing and starving." The same holds true for Infantry Soldier. Mr. Neill can't do any better in making the reader understand the horrors, dangers and tragedies of war. The reader is propelled into the middle of battle and can actually feel the cold and hunger experienced by these soldiers. We have no idea of what these men went through, even by reading accounts of the war by others.

No other author comes close. Nothing by Shirer, Manchester, Tuchman, Pyle or Eisenhower can hold a candle to this book. Even All Quiet on the Western Front pales in comparison. It is a must read! My hat is off to Mr. Neill! A splendid work!

For anyone who has witnessed the inanities of warfare this book will serve to revive the joys, frustrations, suffering and anger of infantry life in battle. For those who have been spared these unreal experiences this book is a "must" for insuring that such needless, even criminal, waste of life is never forgotten--and, hopefully, never repeated.