I didn't think this was a bad book. It just wasn't very in depth. Captain Schirra lightly hits on the areas that most readers would be most interested in . I would reccommend this book to those interested in the early space programs but only after you read such books as "Moonshot" by Alan Sheppard and Deke Slayton, et al. I know that test pilots, fighter pilots, and astronauts have to have a big enough ego to handle all the challenges they face, but sometimes Capt Schirra's ego gets in the way while reading "Schirra's Space".

It seems bewildering to me that so few books written by or about the great space pioneers display anything resembling spirit. Wally Schirra's, on the contrary, is a triumph. For starters, he delivers (with the help of Richard Billings) the pace and flair of a thriller, and tops it off with a humanness you can touch. Above all there is brilliant wit and the blend of admirable self-possession and panache that got those heroes out beyond the frontiers in the first place. Schirra is solid role model stuff. He did it (Mercury's Sigma 7, then Gemini and Apollo) - inspired by the daring individualists like Lindbergh who went before him - and implores all independent-thinking readers to take the torch. Our future hopes, the hopes for humanity, he contends, rest not with politicans but with the drive of free spirits. A pilot and a pirate, God bless his socks!

One of America's first astronauts and the only one of the original seven to fly in all three pioneering space programs - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo - Wally Schirra inherited a love of flying and spirit of adventure from his World War I-ace father and barnstorming, wing-walking mother. In this revealing autobiography, Schirra takes an inside look at the early days of spaceflight and the men who captured the heart of the nation."--

The first chapter of this book was interesting, well-written, and basically did everything a first chapter is supposed to do: it made me want to keep reading. Unfortunately, the book becomes more and more a summation of the years gone by with lots of implausible plot turns, paper-thin characters (even by stereotype Hollywood standards), and repeated, stale jokes.

Being a professor at UCLA, I expected a lot more from Richard Walter. The sad truth is this book lacks a lot. There are some funny lines and quirky scenes but in the all I found it almost annoying. There are no characters I like nor any that are believable. The plot is flat and in the end I questioned what the book was even about. Maybe some people do care about the hollywood scene and what it's like to be a "writer," but I think even those folks are going to expect more from this novel than it offers.

"Escape from Film School" is a refreshingly funny and original novel even down to the unique way Walter conveys time shifts. Just when you think - aha! - you know what's coming next, the plot curves in the opposite direction. Walter has a sort of Byronian wit coupled with Keatsian attention to detail. His language jargon changes as smoothly as the decades do, giving the novel a time-encapsulated realistic edge. The plot progresses forward at an exceedingly fast rate - you simply cannot put the book down. However, what I love best is the strength of Walter's women characters. They positively beam with purpose and charisma sharply contrasting the male lead, Stuart. Poor Stuart's only aim is to please. And who could forget that coat rack - its Freudian implications and the way it keeps popping up in the weirdest places is haunting, but I'll leave that for the readers. If someone were smart, they'd buy the rights to this book and make it into a movie!

Having grown up with Richard Scarry's books, I naturally wanted to find out more about him. The book gives a well detailed background to his beginnings and some interesting vignettes. However, I wished there were more information on how he had developed his characters, in particular Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm. Did you know that Huckle Cat started out as a bear? I had a hard time explaining this to my daughter. Wished the book had explained this. But, nonetheless, for those who grew up with him, it is well worth the buy.

Although the book is chock-full of beautiful Scarry artwork, the text is dry and not very kid-friendly.

I was doing a research project for school when I stumbled upon Richard Trenton Chase. I read the reports of his crimes and assumed him to be Schizophrenic. Most people would look at his acts as disgusting, but I can totally understand the logic behind his reasonings which drove him to kill. I think the book couldve been written better, but as far as Richard himself, people shouldnt look at him as a murderer, but more as a victim. His whole life he was scared and there was never a time when he wasnt paranoid. He took his own life because he couldnt handle it anymore. If youre interested in psychology or criminology then this might be a good book for you to read.

This story full of blood is very terrible. But the author may be lack of skills to describe this thing clearly!

In a recent review of two books from the Subtext collective (some sort of Seattle based poetry commune), Stephen Thomas, wrote, "Wallace Steven remarked somewhere that every successful poem expresses a theory of poetry... Every serious poet has had to come to terms with the power of language to express its own meanings apart from, or even in opposition, to the poet's own intention. The Language poets seem to start with this experience. It is not too much to say that they cultivate a distrust of language and that their poems often frustrate the 'basic' function of language to narrate, to explain, to describe and to import knowledge or wisdom."

I should point out that every serious poet should be burned with a Buick Regal's cigarette lighter and thrown into the Duwamish until they learn that the basic function of the human throat is to howl. The 'basic' function of language is to frustrate this impulse.

Eighty years ago, in Zurich among a population of international outcasts and deserters from the Great War, a group of artists exploded what had been German Expressionism. They protested Western Civilization (the whole ball of wax), a society whose devotion to a coldly analytical and rational language had wrought Verdun and the Somme. Remembered largely now as the foundation for Surrealism and trivialized for their jokes, such as Marcel Duchamp's urinal, La Fonatine (1917), The First Texts of Dada revels in the serious anarchy and the subversive antics that gave birth to Dada.

Hugo Ball -- one of the principal perpetrators of Dada and the author of the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, included in this book and which of course bears absolutely no resemblance to what then passed for a novel and often doesn't bare clear resemblence to any known language -- believed that under the "influence of Kant and German idealism, as well as Lutheran sobriety, that language had been made abstract and thus had been debased into a utilitarianism that allowed it to be plundered by jingoism, literary professionalism, journalism, and intellectual vacuity. It had become a tool for upholding the ruling value system." Ball made it his mission to purify the word. He saw Dada, which was initially performed at the Cabaret Voltaire as a fusion of sound, drama, and painting; a cacophony of contradiction, music played on found objects (known as Merz performance, the philosophy that any sound or text can be incorporated as material into a performance), monologues of gibberish, that is an art free from any concrete constraints.

This book charts the inception of Dada and more importantly presents three texts in their confounding entirety. This is not a book about art history; it's a handbook for subversion and a champion of the vitality of art as terrorism. It is not much to say that Dada cultivated a mistrust of language; they burned every scrap of it they could find.

While the book does present an accurate and unbiased view of world religions, the text itself is less than gripping (the writing is dry), and the book's organization is a little confusing. This may not be the best text to use if you are interested in getting a clear, overall picutre of a particular religion. It includes studies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

This is a typicl example of a poor level of production in an AP review book. The practice tests are neither accurate simulations of real AP tests or reflections of the AP curriculum. I found most of the questions easier than real AP questions, and many questions supplied formulas or hints that would never appear on a real test, thus spoiling the opportunity to gauge what you need to review. Review materials themselves are disorganized and too brief to be worth reviewing (anyone who doen't already know whats in this book shouldn't be taking the test.) The "Red Alert" study plan can be summarized as "read two chapters of this book a week, and then take some practice tests."

Not recommended at all.

I highly reccommend this book. It was a great review of what I had learned over the past 9 months and helped me learn what I hadn't.

I found the book to be dull and not very informative. It was a waste of money. There are much better books out there. Did not help me prepare for the exam. Answers to questions were simplistic and not complete.