One of the best baseball books I have ever read- easily on my top ten list and maybe even in my top five. I was not aware that the book was written by Johnson's great grandson until I began reading; this certainly gave the material a lot of credibility.
Walter Johnson was, without question, the greatest pitcher in baseball history. Along with Al Stump's work on Ty Cobb, Robert Creamer's work on Casey Stengel, and the recently published Cy Young biography (author's name escapes me), this book establishes a lasting legacy of Johnson on and off the field.

Henry Thomas seems to have inherited the Big Train's genes. One gentleman does a big service to another (his grandfather)as Walter johnson is depicted in this well researched and written biography. If you are an avid fan of great pitchers, dead-ball era ballplayers, or just enjoy a heartwarming story of a well respected gentleman baseball player, this book will not disappoint. Walter "Barney" Johnson was more than just the second winningest major league pitcher of all time with a blazing fastball. First and foremost he was the sports main ambassador of goodwill as well as the idol of Washington Senator fans and the entire baseball community. The only matter that the book did not clear up with me was how he derived the nickname "Big Train." In other aspects, the book was extremely well done.

Written from the heart, and it shows. Truly a magnificent piece of work from Henry Thomas. I loved this book from beginning to end. Follow Walter Johnson from beginning to end through the eyes of someone that actually cares about Walter Johnson, his grandson. I cannot say enough great things about this book. Such a teriffic treat about a wonderful character in the history of baseball.

I visited the Huntington Museum in Pasadena last July not expecting all that much but was most impressed. I particularly enjoyed the scope and variety of their botanical gardens and so bought this book to remind myself of what I'd seen and also to learn more about the background of the gardens and how they came to be.

I was disappointed in no respect. The book provides historical photographs as well as an account of how Henry Huntington both earned his wealth and used it to establish this marvelous place. It goes on to provide sumptuous photographs of all parts of the gardens, covering both what's there and how they were established. Detail on the desert section and the Japanese section (my two favorites) were particularly appreciated. My only quibble is that a chapter on the notable trees is saved for the end, rather than covering the trees along with the location they belong to. This seems rather odd but is a minor note.

All in all, this book is a splendid souvenir and resource for the gardens of Huntington.

As author you have listed the photographer instead of the writer. The author should be Walter Houk, as you will discover on the title page.

With each chapter written by an expert, plus beautiful illustrations, this is a great anthology for those seeking a bird's eye view of the World's myths and legends. It is also fun to read and is not dense to the point that it cannot be read from cover to cover. I took off a star because there was nothing on Finnish mythology. Also, the mythology of Persia was just one page long, which I felt was too little.

I was doing a paper on Greek Mythology and found this book in the Reference section of our library. There was so much great infomation in it that I had the librarian xerox half of it! The layout includes vivid pictures of ancient artifacts and art work on just about every page. The book also has sidebars and "boxes" of information that are helpful--kind of like the impulse buy section at the check-out! As the title says--it shares myths and religious practices from all over the world; each country is broken down into logical topics. I really enjoyed this book and had to own it! It's ideal for anyone taking a Humanities, Literature or Anthropology course! I know I will use it again in the future!

Hazlitt analyzes the broken window fallacy as applied to everyday economics and economic policy. The basic idea of analyzing the consequences of economic policymaking on every group in society instead of just certain special interest groups is sound. But there is much more to this book than that. The Keynesians are decried and the book is essentially a tribute to laissez faire capitalism. This is fine except like Von Mises and the rest of the crowd there are implicit assumptions which are never addressed on every page. That is the basic problem with the deductive approach to economics: it is not deductive. Nobody ever points out that Hazlitt assumes virtually every curve in economics is linear or at best only very slightly nonlinear. That simple assumption despite what Hazlitt says is critical. The shape of these curves probably change over time and are deeply related to whether the "free market" or Keynesians are mostly correct. I suspect very strongly that which is best changes over time and that extremes either way are detrimental to the population and government. It has always been fascinating to me that although a large free market school has developed over time none of them appear to do any real mathematical or economic analysis ( If they did they would understand what a bunch of hooeey much of the content of this book and others is.) and that one notable free market proponent i.e. Greenspan may be getting ready to do a very Keynesian thing to the economy. In the long run objectivism and laissez faire capitalism have become interwined and confused over time and suffer from the same problems. I am not a government controls proponent. I have the same problem with the government intervention policies: it is essentially knob-twiddling and I have a congenital disorder which causes my rear end to seize up whenever the knob-twiddlers start up. It would be different if they actually knew what they were doing but even the stupid realize that they really don't and even Greenspan freely admits as much. Nor am I Keynesian in outlook. I noticed recently they are trying to justify themselves in textbooks by pointing out that inflation may not really cause much damage to the public and that what actually causes the damage are some of the things that occurred concurrently with inflation in the past. There oughta be a law against this kind of tripe. Inflating the economy just for the fun of it has caused all kinds of damage this century. There may be times when inflating the economy a little may be the way to proceed. But the hyperinflation of the 1965 - 1985 timeframe did many people in the population a great deal of harm and yes much of it was due to phenomenon which accompanied inflation instead of the inflation itself. But that may be the character of inflation. Many of the neo-Keynesians were in diapers during this time and the record is not as objective as a scientist would like. The truth lies somewhere out there at any given time and I suspect that economists that are not too tightly glued to any one school of thought are the most likely to find it. Let's hope someone is looking.

Henry Hazlitt, one of America's greatest economists, presents the best refutation of socialist and Keynesian beliefs. It is a tremendous pity that such a brilliant thinker is rarely considered among the greatest economists. He certainly is more rational, realistic, and correct than Marx or Keynes, and I would even go as far as to say he provides a better constructed argument for free market capitalism than either of the celebrated neo-classical economists, F.A. Hayek or Milton Friedman. Both men are brilliant thinkers and economists as well, but they have never been able to convey their ideas in such an concise manner. Hazlitt's "brick through the window" analogy is the best economic illustration since Adam Smith's pin machine. It displays the fundamental fallacies of controlled economics, which always misses the secondary and future consequences for the short term gain that may be incurred. For anyone interested in why minimum wage laws, price controls, tarriffs, taxes, and inflationary policies have failed to provide the social justice and economic progress promised by radicals and leftists and has instead caused economic decline and stagnation, this book is a must read. It has stood the test of time and deserves to be regarded as the finest inquiry into the nature of economics since Adam's Smith "The Wealth of Nations".

Want to know more about economics -- and economic policy -- but don't want deal with math and complicated graphs? Then this is the book for you.

Almost all of the most important things you need to know about economics can be explained in plain language, in just a few pages, and that's exactly what Hazlitt does here.

The fact that the book is over 50 years old shouldn't scare anyone away. The issues addressed by Hazlitt are the same ones in the news today. Were the September 11 attacks actually good for the economy because they created new jobs for cleanup crews and builders? Will President Bush's decision to protect American steelmakers from cheap foreign steel be good for the economy? Should Congress raise the minimum wage to help poor people? Should Alan Greenspan lower interest rates to get us out of the recession? _Economics In One Lesson_ will give you the tools to analyze all of these questions and much more.

This book was very concise, helpful, and to-the-point about each topic in its content list. The items are (for the most part) helpful tips that are boiled down from more complex strategies for the games discussed. A few of the items are redundant and/or are just too common sense to be part of the numbered title. But most are appropriate, important, and well described. I would have liked more general detail on money management and casino details, but it's a good beginner's primer on many games and a good supplement to other more thorough books.

Walter Thomason who wrote the excellent "21st Century Blackjack" has assembled a who's who of gambling writers to give tips on all the games. The book works! Anyone interested in a quick-hit course in casino gaming will do well to buy this book. A very good job.

Walter Thomason and other experts such as Frank Scoblete, Henry Tamburin, and John Grochowski have written a very good book. Each piece of advice is short and to the point. The book is very well designed and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to get a good grounding in most of the games.

This book is a good introduction to Buddha the man. There are times that it drags a bit, but in general it was a fast read and provided the fundamentals of Buddha's life and a beginning understanding of his teachings. I liked the discussion of the Four Noble truths and the Eightfold path which made the teachings straightforward. All to often we get mired in the ennumerable teachings that exist in a religious/ philosophy/ psychology such as Buddhism or Yoga and forget that the purpose of these teachings was to make our lives simple, balanced, honest and it is not all that hard to do. Reading a book like this brings us back to our essence.

In man's "fathom-long body," the Buddha observed, lies the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world. I read this 133-page biography of Siddhartha Gautama today, absorbed, and in a single sitting. (It has been many years since I read Hesse's classic, "Siddhartha," which I also recommend.) Here, Nelson examines the extraordinary life and inner struggle of Siddhartha, from his birth in 563 BCE, to finding enlightenment at age 35, to his final words just before death at age 80, "work out your own salvation through diligence" (p. 120), while also offering an overview of Buddha's teachings. Along the way, Nelson includes many revealing anecdotes about Siddhartha, such as his pre-"Enlightened One" encounter with an injured lamb, whereupon Siddhartha observes that it is "far, far better for a man to comfort even one small animal, than to sit and watch the sorrows of the world, passively among the praying priests" (p.72). I enjoyed reading this book. END

I used this book to study for the ID boards in 2001. I found
it well organized and thorough enough for most topics. The travel medicine sections were excellent as were the sections on
bacterial infections. The chapters on viral infection could
have been a bit more thorough but were for the most part adequate. The sections on parasitic diseases were very well
written and appropriate for board review. Overall, I recommend
this text for ID fellows and ID practicing physicians but not for physicians in other fields.

I had always thought of Sir Walter as a rather rational, stodgy, Brit - then I came cross a copy of this book - now I'm not sure what to think. Sir Walter actually seemed to believe many local superstitions (the Banshee, for example). The odd thing is that he seems to have "scientificly" weighed all the evidence. But I guess that if you were sitting around the fire on a cold Scotish night being told ghost stories, your objectivity could be expected to drop at least somewhat.

This is a handy if somewhat eclectic little collection, with works by some poets who are hard to find elsewhere, such as Henry Howard. If you don't have a copy of the long-out-of-print Hebel and Hudson anthology of English Renaissance Poetry, pick up this.

Isaacson operates on the level of a "gotcha" analysis and revels in endlessly reporting Kissinger's little idiosyncrasies, his daily turf battles and therefore never comes close to touching upon how Kissinger succeeded. Isaacson fails to do this because he is more concerned with attacking Kissinger's character than with explaining how Kissinger's theories and practices made him--which Isaacson occasionally admits--a great player on the world stage. For the student of history and philosophy, which are the disciplines Kissinger himself tells us are indispensible for the statesman, the fact that a statesman is not totally forthcoming or honest in the way that an everyday common man thinks of the terms is far from surprising, and certainly not desirable--not if you want the statesman to be effective, especially in a republic. Socrates and his pupil Plato were proponents of the noble or salutary lie. "How, then, might we contrive one of the opportune falsehoods of which we were just now speaking, so as by one noble lie to persuade if possible the rulers themselves, but failing that the rest of the city?" (_Republic_ 414b-c) This may not be what the uninitiated like to hear but it is reality. Appeals to universal "rights" do not change tens of thousands of years of human evolution. The "divine right" of kings legislated in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe has its source in the same place as the "natural rights" of man: the metaphysical hinterwelt, alternately used to legitimize political power. Whence the noble lie of our great philosophers. "It is not for nothing that you were so bashful about coming out with your lie." (_Republic_ 414e)

Isaacson constantly tells us what he believes are Kissinger's shortcomings and occassionaly admits that Kissinger was a diplomatic genius and often quite successful at achieving his ends. There is virtually nothing in the way of actual analysis--geopolitical, or, as the more humane like to preach, moral (and there certainly are both geopolitical and moral arguments to be made on Kissinger's behalf)--of how Kissinger's manoeuvers gave the United States the upper hand with the Soviets, pushing them back in Asia and, especially, the Middle East, basically laying the groundwork for the demise of the Soviet Union within a generation. (The Russians are still trying to get back in the Middle East. Kissinger is responsible for them not being there.) This, you can be sure, was not achieved by appealing to Brezhnev's innate sense of morality and justice. Is it not necessary, as Mao Zedong, speaking of the Soviet Union, told Kissinger in one of their meetings, to use means that one would not otherwise employ when dealing with a ruthless bastard?

Doubtless Isaacson approaches Kissinger from the very perspective that Kissinger openly admits he disdains, that of moralizing Wilsonianism--a moralizing that lacks the courage of its convictions you might say. Of course Isaacson does not come out and tell us this; he just assumes the reader shares his populist view (after all, being in the majority makes one "objective") and will agree with him that Kissinger must have been a bad guy because he admired the political skills of Bismark and Richelieu. In fact, Isaacson is fascinated with what he tacitly describes as the nefarious German connection between Kissinger and Bismark and appears ignorant of the fact that Bismark was one of the greatest foreign policy minds of Modern Western politics. That is the side of the Kissinger story Isaacson does not tell us. Mere allusions to Kissinger's successes do not explain them. The result is an 800 page magazine article in the form of a book that never touches the genius of its subject because of the author's inability to move beyond the level of analysis you find in pop news magazines.

Biographies of complex, contemplative people tend to have a problem: the author of the biography isn't nearly as contemplative as the subject. And, the author is frequently an expert in a different space. I think that this biography suffers from the same problem with respect to evaluating Kissinger's positions in certain cases. This is especially tricky in making an "unbiased" biography. Given the span of opinions about Kissinger, the main question is: was he a bad guy or not? And, if so, how bad? Here, it seems, that the author has failed to understand Kissinger's self-defense (as made in his memoirs). The upshot of this is that some of the psychological evaluations that any biographer must attempt seem quite at odds with the nature of the complexity that seems apparent in other sources on the man. All things considered though, this is an excellent work that shows how to relate different parts of a very complex and important figure.

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book so much. Every time I put it down, I found myself thinking of when I would have time to pick it up and continue reading it. Mr. Isaacson has really grasped his subject matter and written a balanced book. It does not seek to praise or castigate Kissinger. His goal seems to be to present him as objectively as possible, yet not without assessment.

The overarching question that came to me again and again as I read this book concerned integrity. I kept wondering how anyone could believe anything that comes out of Kissinger's mouth. To say he is disingenuous seems to be an understatement. Isaacson brings out the fact that Kissinger would flatter a person and then insult him behind his back. Quite often this would come back to haunt Kissinger.

Isaacson does a masterful job in articulating the "realist" school of foreign policy and the "idealist" school. The realist view sees things in terms of balances of power, whereas the idealist school sees things in terms of promoting American values in foreign policy (like democracy, human rights, etc.). Kissinger, holding to the former school, had no feel for the latter whatsoever. This left his foreign policy open, and I believe rightly so, to criticism from human rights groups and from average Americans who felt we should put our best values forward in conducting foreign affairs.

Isaacson makes the point that Kissinger waited five years until he started his international consulting business. He has literally made millions as a consultant. He was also on the boards of major corporations. While there is nothing unethical in serving in those capacities, he was, at the same time, a paid commentator on foreign affairs for major networks. Just as a judge is bound to excuse himself in a case where he has conflicting interests, it seems to me that Kissinger should have done the same when it came to offering his views about foreign policy concerns. I think it reprehensible that journalists rarely, if ever, brought up his possible conflict of interests. Evidently his flattery routine worked quite well on journalists also. Over the years, I have never read or heard any meaningful criticism of Communist China from Kissinger. Quite the contrary, he seems to be their greatest apologist! Is this because of his realist view of foreign policy? Is it because he has business interests in China? I guess we will never know. So I take what he says with a grain of salt.

Which takes me back to the overarching question of how anyone can believe anything he says. Isaacson's book can't answer that question, but it makes the asking of it necessary.