"The Children of Herakles" has usually been considered a minor political play by Euripides. First performed in 430 B.C.E. it tells of how the children of Herakles were exiled by from their home by the murderous King Eurystheus of Argos (the one who imposed the famous Twelve Labors on the demi-god) after their father's death. The children and their mother fled from country to country in search of sanctuary until, of course, they came to Athens. At first, the Athenians are reluctant to grant asylum, since Eurystheus might bring political and military strife on the city. But Demophon, King of Athens, agrees to admit them. Indeed, the army of Eurystheus surrounds the city and the oracles declares that the safety of Athens depends on the sacrifice of a virgin. Macaria, one of the daughters of Herakles, offers herself as the sacrificial victim. There is then a surprising twist as Eurystheus is captured and Alkmene, the mother of Herakles, insists that the tyrant be put to death.

The play has usually been considered to be nothing more than a glorification of Athens, but, of course, in more contemporary terms it is worth reconsidering this Greek tragedy as a look at the problem of political refugees. This comes approach focuses on the debate the Athenians have over accepting the refugees. In this context it is not simply that Athens is a great place because it accepts the children of Herakles but rather that doing so is a political action of some significance; historically we know that the Athenians were not as generous as Euripides depicts them, but then we also recognize that the tragic playwright was try to inspire his audience. There is also a clear sense of the refugees as being heroic rather than pathetic, not only because of Macaria's willingness to be sacrificed but simply because they have survived. You can consider every refugee to be a success story because they have survived and made it out of their troubled homeland alive.

"The Children of Herakles" works well as an analog to "Medea," with the one play dealing with the topic of how Athens treated refugees and the other touching on how the city tolerated foreigners. However, as with other plays by Euripides, such as "Trojan War," this tragedy is also a meditation on the effects of war. This is one of the shortest plays in Greek drama, but it is arguably one of the most complex of the plays of Euripides. The play suffers from having a particular character dominate the action or a truly great heroic scene and this is never going to be one of the first Greek tragedies anybody is going to look at (indeed, it apparently was never performed in the United States until just recently). But even if it comes at the end of your study of Euripides, it is still a play worth considering for what it says about the playwright and his attempts to inspire his Athenian audience.

When Zak hears fire engines...he finds out there having a fire at the house of a boy in his class with a funny axent!

Will Zak relize that he can be a good friend...or will he be lost...forever?!

This book is worth the moeny, so buy it.

This book in a indepth lok at the struggles of the Darby Rangers and their missions during WWII. Should be required reading for every basic trainee in the armed forces today.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who admire's the genius of H.L. Mencken. Manchester has created an in-depth account of the "Lion of the Twenties," from his early childhood in Baltimore as the son of a German-American cigar company owner, to his acendence to the pinnacle of the American intellectual renaissance of the 1920's. Manchester sculpts a palpable and staunch profile of the self-described "conservative anarchist," who made his mark as the editor of the influencial American Mercury magazine, writer/editor for the Baltimore Sun, and author of The American Language, the penultimate chronicle of American English. Mencken was a prolific pundit, scholar, social critic, reader and writer, blessed with a caustic wit, a hair-trigger mind, and an impossibly contrarian nature. His voracity for reading was so deep that he was known to read a motor repair manual "just because it was another human being trying to communicate." No one escaped his crticism with socialists, Christian Fundamentalists, and politicians particularly targeted. Manchester's writing, as in all his excellent works (I also highly recommend "Goodbye Darkness," Manchester's memoir of his combat service in the South Pacific as a U.S. Marine in WWII, five stars)is wonderfully rich. Manchester's style also has a lot of Mencken in it, which is another reason I liked the book. I don't know if he was consciously attempting to pay homage through stylistic similarities, but the cadence, language and were reminiscent of Mencken's works, and gave me the feeling it was really Mencken telling his life story through the hand of Manchester. Not a bad guy to emulate, even when you're as good as Manchester.

This book consist primarily of multiple-choice questions about economics. I have used it during my undergraduate studies and it helped me significantly. Although it is not sufficiently challenging for postgraduate study of economics - I can recommend it to anyone who is still undergraduate.

This is the best work of Shakespeare that I have read. It contains jems of wisdom, such as the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, or the sympathetic speaches of Queen Catherine. These are also events of history, not far removed from Shakespeare's own times; tragic events which ultimately reshaped the world we live in.

Penton closes it French-for-commuters series with Level III. Although I give it high marks, consumers should know the following:

1. This course is not really textbook-free!! Its pamplet covers grammar & usage. You WILL need to study this pamplet: trust me.

2. It is much harder to know how to answer the questions in Level III than in Level II. This is because the sentences can be correctly translated in more than one way. Do they want you to say "On marche" or do they want "Nous marchons"? "Je vais marcher" or "Je marcherai"? You can't tell from your cue.

3. They didn't promise that you would be fluent after finishing Level III. You won't be. I personally am using Penton's Imersion Plus tapes to improve my understanding of spoken French. Next week, I start Living Language. Penton also offers VOCABULEARN, which I highly recommend.

These tapes provide (very mild) comic relief when an American guy from Indiana/Ohio announces the lessons. He pronounces "se" like Fog-horn Leghorn saying "sir": sUH!!! and makes you laugh by butchering "De" and other words you already know.

For the price, this course is a bargain!!!

I have recently bougth this book for my upcoming exams and thos book has given me alot of information.Thanks to this book my Grades have improved.It contains on General Chemistry.

What a fascinating contribution to American medical history! Weistrop succeeds in transforming one man's story -- Ogden was a pioneering figure in biomedicine in Milwaukee, a provincial Midwestern city -- into a window on the historical cross currents of 19th and 20th Century America. Through dogged archival research, Weistrop uncovered Ogden's voluminous correspondence, and his book weaves together the personal and professional dimensions of Ogden's exemplary life. Weistrop deftly portrays the emerging professionalism of medicine and the specific concerns of a provincial elite: both precursors to the contemporary contours of medical practice in many parts of this country. As I understand, Weistrop himself is a practicing physician, so his book can be read as both a historical document and an exemplar of professional self-consciousness.

This book has five complete novels for one comparatively low price! "Watch and Ward," is a novel that James himself preferred to ignore as a youthful indiscretion, but I found it a vastly entertaining and suspenseful love story. Roderick Hudson is a compelling cautionary tale. The American is a gripping story that cries out for a movie version (in my fantasy Peter Weir would direct, and it might star Tom Cruise and Winona Ryder, although I'm sure many others would do just as well). This novel has love, a duel, a frightful skeleton in the closet, blackmail, Carmelite nuns, etc. The ending should be adjusted along the lines of the play version that James later wrote. The Europeans did not grab me, but Confidence is a delightful novel with something James later tended to avoid--a happy ending. This collection provides a lot of great novelistic entertainment for the buck. The way the Library of America does it is that for one they are non-profit, and second they use top quality thin acid-free paper, which allows them to fit five books into the space of something slightly larger than one thick paperback. The book even has a silky little bookmark to hold your place. Classy!