Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" es a truly remarkable novel. Interesting throughout, it is the story of the rise and fall of a man named Mechael Henchard. Ay the beginning of the novel, Henchard is a volatile, twenty-one-year-old hay-trusser. He becomes drunk at a fair and sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in an auction, which originally began as a joke, turns serious.Upon realizing that he has sold his family, Henchard searches for them to no avail, and takes an oath to give up alcohol for twenty-one years. After the supposed death of the sailor, Michael's wife, Susan Henchard, and her daughter began a search for Michael Henchard, who has become the mayor of Casterbridge.
The novel proceeds as many soap-opera-like events unfold. The unique plot-twists made reading the novel a very entertaining experience. An unfavorable trait Henchard possesses is not letting go of past mistakes. Although he tries to atone for the past indiscretions, fate always seems to catch up to him. These factors and others contribute to the downfall of Michael Henchard.

Mayor Henchard was drunk when he sold his wife and child. This instance of reckless cruelty would come to haunt him in his later years. Overall a pious and good man, his downfall was his reluctance to face his past. His will dictated his epitaph. He will never be heard from again. (The will is on the last few pages of the book.) Fading into nothing, it challenges the reader to find a term for death. Is death the physical end of life, or the emotional end of life. Readers will be challenged to determine their own answers to Henchard's damnation.

When I was very young, I read somewhere that Wilson was the greatest swindler in human history. And Wilson has always been a mistery to me. Reading this book, I expected to learn the reason why Woodrow Wilson decided to lead America into World War I. But it was not a main theme of this book. And the explanation about it was not satisfactory to me. My misunderstanding about Wilson, however, is removed now thanks to this book.
Thomas J. Knox decidedly focused on the League issue. He meticulously studied the process of the formation of League of Nations. And his analysis of American political spectrum of that era - especially progressive internationalism & conservative internationalism - was excellent. It was very helpful in studying American history.

To End All Wars attempts to show where President Wilson's ideas on the League of Nations came from and why he ultimatly failed. A fascinating protryal of early 20th century poltics, Knock successfully intergrates both the domestic policies of Wilson with his international policies. The links between the progressive, pacifist leagues and Wilson's views are clearly marked and appear credible. What is not examined is the moral conflict between Wilson's anti-war views and the fact he lead the country into World War I. Further research into this inconsitency could have led insight into why Wilson treated his former progrssive allies with such contempt as the war progressed. The ultimate result was his political inability to convince the American people to join the League of Nations after he alientated his greatest supporters.

Professor Knock turned my head around on the foreign policies of Woodrow Wilson. This book takes the reader back into the 1890s, when Wilson was a professor of politics and history, in its quest to understand the evolution of his foreign policy thru American entry into the First World War. Nothing is sacred in this author's hands either. He devises a large-scale drama encompassing a spectrum of players--Jane Addams, William Howard Taft, Elihu Root, Eugene Debs, and more--as he dissects how and why Wilson failed to gain Senate ratification for the Treaty of Versailles. If it is a familiar story, Professor Knock's retelling of it is both original and compelling. I think this is the single most important book currently available on Wilsonian foreign policy.

This book is a good read and interesting for people who want to get a good overview on the topic and are interested in history. The author sticks to the facts and let Lawrence speak through his letters. This, however, lets many questions of his character open. The author avoids getting deeper into his personality and for those who are interested in the psychology of his character will be a littlebit disappointed. The author does not (like one of the reviewers says) clearifies whether he was homosexual or not, nor does he discusses deeply his relationsship his parents and so on. The book is complementary to the film which makes a better statement about his personality and after reading this book I even more impressed about the film.

Jeremy Wilson's bio of T.E. Lawrence is a great resource and, for a subject so riddled (more than any other I know) by ulterior motive by other authors -- whether it is hero-building or hero-trouncing -- and is probably the only worthwhile biography of TEL ever written.*

*I will give exception to Robert Graves, who's work has literary merit, but its age and rushed composition leaves it unfortunately incomplete and inadequate in points of fact.

Wilson does a great job of putting Lawrence's accomplishements and failures during the Great War into context: a great deal of the book is spent on the background policies and overall Eastern war effort to show us exactly where Lawrence fit in. A great description of Larwrence's time as a young idealist in Syria before the war is also provided. In these two areas there is no greater work provided on Lawrence. However, I find the work loses its scholarly charm after the war, where too much is spent dwelling on the possible pyschological underpinnings of Lawrence, and attempting to explain TEL's motives behind his erradic behavior. This kind of amateur science was handled responsibly for most of the work, but the temptation to delve into the pool of conjecture and broad speculation proved too great for Wilson, as with most authorities on the subject.

The work is well-researched, a bit thin in style, and full of notes and a helpful appendix. Not perfect, but definitely the best pick for a Lawrence bio out there.

I found this extremely readable, and written clearly (a relief after trying to plow through T.E. Lawrence's own murky 7 PILLARS OF WISDOM, a book he himself did not like after he learned that good writing is clear writing). I wouldn't have, and a lot of you reading this, wouldn't have come to this book without the movie, so I would like to mention some things that the movie was wrong about, according to this book. 1) T. E. Lawrence did have to execute an Arab with his pistol, but he DID feel remorse about it and did NOT experience a perverse pleasure at it. 2) He was not homosexual. He in fact asked a girl to marry him, who turned him down. It was standard in that era that an educated Englishman still be a virgin in his mid-20's, and the only reason he stayed a virgin until his death in his 40's was that he was raped by those Turks (as is obliquely referred to in the movie), and as a consequence was (tragically) repulsed by physical human contact thereafter. So he became, as he himself described it, "A lay monk." A first-rate book for anyone interested in the heroic Laurence. (I say heroic because after taking Aquaba, he was up for a Victoria's Cross, England's highest military honor. But he needed an English witness to the event, when only Arabs witnessed it. So he did not get a Victoria's Cross, AND LAWRENCE DIDN'T CARE. He perhaps, then, wasn't as vain as the movie portrayed him to be, either.)

A High Performance Team. We all want one or want to be a part of one. This book tells you how to develop one. It begins by developing a Mission Statement and Vision Statement, discusses how to communicate the goals and objectives, and then discusses techniques for achieving the necessary buy-in from the team.

I am a mid-level manager. I recently joined a young telecom company and set about interviewing and hiring staff and coalescing them into a Team. This book helped refresh the process of developing and communicating "management vision."

For a mature manager - a dozen years experience of managing 12 to 40 people - this is a good refresher. For a younger manager recently promoted or just getting started, this is a must.

This book should be coupled with Winning Management by Wolf J. Rinke.

I read this book from front to back and found it a very good read. No doubt I will get even more out of it when I look at it again. The authors propose a holistic approach to the creation, development and nuture of high performance teams through participatory management. I was so impressed by their argument I have commended the book to my colleagues as a model we might follow in our soon to be started business.

I CHANCED UPON THIS BOOK WHEN I WAS DOING MY CLINICAL TRAINING IN NEUROLOGY A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO AND I READ IT AND FOUND IT A FASCINATING EXPERIENCE. IT IS A VERY GOOD BOOK TO START ONES UNDERSTANDING OF CLINICAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY WITH . IT EXPLAINS CONCEPTS IN SIMPLE STRAIGHTFORWARD LANGUAGE AND IS EASY TO UNDERSTAND FOR THE BEGINNER CERTAINLY . THE BOOK DID STIMULATE MY INTEREST IN THE FIELD AND COMPARED TO THE OTHER BIGGER AND COMPLEX AND I MUST SAY MORE AUTHORATATIVE BOOKS THAT I WAS RECOMMENDED BY SENIORS IN THE FIELD , THIS WAS THE ONE THAT DEVELOPED MY INTEREST . COMING TO THE SPECIFICS, THE INITIAL SECTION ON THE BASIC LEVEL PHYSICS OF THE DISCIPLINE IS WELL BUILT UP FROM HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL AND WITH THE AID OF GOOD ILLUSTRATIVE DIGRAMS THAT FACILITATES UNDERSTANDING OF PRINCIPLES LEARNT MORE THAN A DECADE OR MORE AGO - IT CREATES THE BACKGROUND FOR THE LATER CHAPTERS.THE STAGE IS SET FOR THE DIGITAL ERA WITH THE EXPLANATIONS OF THE DIGITAL ANALOG CONCEPTS. NEXT FOLLOWS THE SECTION ON EEG. IT STARTS OFF WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF EEG GENERATION AND THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF EEG RECORDING. IT IS FOLLOWED BY INTERPRETATION OF NORMAL EEG AND VARIANTS AND ARTIFACTS AND THEIR APPRECIATION.AFTER THE SECTION ON ACTIVATION PROCEDURES THERE FOLLOWS A GOOD SECTION ON GENERALIZED AND LOCALIZATION RELATED EPILEPSY AND FINISHES WITH PAEDIATRIC EEG AND MONITORING. THE NEXT SECTION DEALS WITH PERIPHERAL NERVE MUSCLE EVALUATION TESTS AND LIKE IN THE EEG SECTION TAKES THE BEGINNER THROUGH THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF NCV/EMG PROCESSES. IT THEN EXPLAINS THE EVALUATION TECHNIQUES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF ABNORMALITIES.EMG PATTERNS ARE WELL EXPLAINED THROUGH GOOD DIAGRAMS AND ROUNDS UP WITH FURTHER COMMENTS ON SPECIFIC CONDITIONS. EVOKED POTENTIALS ARE IN THE NEXT SECTION AND I MUST SAY THAT AT THAT TIME WHEN I KNEW VERY LITTLE ON THE SUBJECT THIS WAS GOOD CLEAR INFORMATION WELL PRESENTED. THE BOOK ENDS WITH A SECTION ON POLYSOMNOGRAPHY AND SLEEP DISORDERS AND ONCE AGAIN SIMPLICITY OF APPROACH WITH CLEAR DIAGRAMS CONTINUES TO BE THE AUTHORS APPROACH. I HAVE MOVED ON TO MORE SPECIALIZED BOOKS IN CLINICAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY NOW, BUT I STILL REFER TO THE BASIC PHYSICS AND ELECTRONICS SECTION THAT ARE SO WELL WRITTEN AND EASY TO UNDERSTAND. THIS WILL BE A GOOD BOOK TO START A CAREER IN CLINICAL NEUROPHYSILOGY FOR MEDICS AND TECHS ALIKE.

Whils this book concentrates on Senator Hitchcock's role as de facto Democratic leader in the fight for the Versailles treaty, it does cover the whole life of its subject, who was the founder of the Omaha World-Herald, and a life-long Democrat--something today's readers of the World-Herald may be surprised by. Hitchcock won two terms in the U.S. Senate, and served from 1911 to 1923. Anyone who is interested in Senatorial biography, as I have always been, will enjoy this work. It gets only 4 stars because the editing is poor, with quite a few typos.

As the title suggests this is a book about Grace. There is not a simple definition of what grace is, rather these essays as a whole seek, through a variety of topics and disciplines, to define Grace in an expansive way, realizing this to be a term so loaded with meaning and importance that simple definitions will not suffice. Specifically, however, these essays are coming primarily from a distinct Wesleyan perspective, in honor of a man who has spent his life and career developing and pondering such a perspective, Thomas Langford. In his own book, Practical Divinity: Theology in the Wesleyan Perspective, Dr. Langford sought to show how deep thought, academic engagement, and varieties of methods and traditions are important only insomuch as they reach out to the common person, and result in transformed thoughts and lives. In the same way, the collection of essays before us seek to show how wide, deep, and meaningful Grace truly is. The book is divided in to four sections, each devoted to essays from a specific discipline or focus.
The first part focuses on Biblical essays, that is writings which seek to discover how grace is seen within the Biblical narratives and letters. The second part focuses on grace seen in history, the third on grace seen in theology, and the fourth studies grace from the perspective of culture.
All in all a very good, and valuable, text.

Published as part of the *Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series*, *Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book* is the definitive edition of a collection of about four hundred quotations Jefferson gathered from his more literary readings during his student years. It represents, according to the editor, «one of the few surviving documents from Jefferson's formative years» and reveals a transitional, private facet of a man most of us know through his mature, public years.

«Commonplacing » seems to have been one of the practices of the readers of Jefferson's time: it consisted in copying the most eloquent or profound passages one encountered in one's readings into a notebook one would presumably read over and over again. If I remember correctly, John Locke also commonplaced, and Jefferson himself left us more specialized notebooks, such as the legal ones he produced in the mid 1760s.

Most of the quotes in the present volume are from works of «imaginative literature»- mostly poems Jefferson enjoyed in his youth, from Homer to another favorite of his, «Ossian», whom he believed to be a genuine third-century Celtic bard but who was in fact a fabrication of his eighteenth-century «translator», James McPherson. Most of the quotes are in English, but a substantial number of them are in foreign languages Jefferson was fluent in: ancient Greek, latin and French, all of them translated in the footnotes. Two criteria seem to have presided to their inclusion: their felicity of expression and very often the little gems of wisdom they contain - on the law of identity: «If white, & black, blend, soften & Unite/ A thousand Ways ; is there no black or White ?» ; on the virtue of productivity: «without employ/ the soul is on a rack ; the rack of rest» ; or on objective reasoning: «He who has judged aught, with the other side unheard, may have judged righteously, but was himself unrighteous.»

Perhaps more interesting to the historian of ideas, this literary commonplace book also contains thirty pages of extracts from Bolingbroke's essays and letters, which almost singlehandedly shaped Jefferson's religious outlook and help explain the «self-evident» standards Jefferson applied in his heretical selective rewriting of the Gospels. Bolinbgroke's crucial influence on Jefferson's philosophical outlook is stressed by the editor in the highly helpful thirty-two-page «Register of Authors» which follows the excerpts : «the major tenets of Bolingbroke's philosophical program were ultimately adopted by Jefferson as his own: a thoroughgoing materalism; a rejection of metaphysics and all speculation that ventures beyond the reach of human apprehension; an uncompromising commitment to reason as the final arbiter of knowledge and validity; a disposition to regard churchmen and theologians as the corrupters of Christianity; a distate for the doctrines of Plato and his influence on Christian teachings; and a strong skepticism regarding the historicity of biblical accounts. » (p156)

In addition to being a window on the young Jefferson's soul (or lack thereof), this volume is remarkable for the thorough and careful work of its editor (except for a grammatical error in a French quotation from Racine, in §395) and will be beautifully complemented by *Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels*, published in the same series.

It's about a boy that bets other boys to eat fifteen worms for fifteen days. If he wins he gets fifty dollars. The characters are Billy,Alan, Joe and Tom. Billt really wants to win to buy a minibike. When Billy was ready, they fried the worm and put ketchup,mustard and horseradish.He ate all of the worm. After, he started acting sick. Tom and Joe were Billy's friends. The worm didn't taste bad. Billy coudn't think of the word "worm". So, Tom changed his mindand made him think of "fish", and Billy ate the worm. This went on until the eighth worm. The ninth was two feet long. Billy knew something was wrong. The worm was plain when he took 2 bites, and he knew that two night-crawlers were glued and that he was cheated. They were arguing. The next day, Joe and Alan droppedby Billy's house and gave him two worms wrapped. Billy ate and finished 11 worms. Alan didn't want to tell his father that he lost 50$. Alan played a trick on him.He took Billy to the Shea Stadium, and stuffed him with junk food. They took him to the car so that he will fall asleep. If he slept through the night Billy will lose the bet. Instead he woke up, blasted a siren to wake everyone up. He then ate the last worm. He won the bet by eating fifteen worms in fifteen days. It was a good book but somewhat silly.

My whole class liked the book but none of us wanted to make a similar bet.

I think this book is good it is about a boy named Billy who makes a bet with a boy named Alan. Alan bets Billy to eat 15 worms in 15 days if he wins he gets 50 dollars and with the 50 dollars that Billy mite win he will get a mini bike.I enjoyed this book and I hope you get a chance to read it.

It was thrilling, gross, exciting, funny, cool! and I liked it. It's about a boy called Billy and he makes a bet that he can eat 15 fried worms over 15 days to win fifty dollars, so he can buy a stylish new minibike.

(Note: I would actually give this book two and half stars!) Mr Wilson's book was actually his thesis for the university he was attending, and frankly, it reads like it. Stiff and academic. I was mostly disappointed because while he dug up a few rarely heard quotes from Flo from Detroit papers and the documents from the legal struggles she went through after her departure from the group, he really isn't covering anything that hasn't been said before in other books. And said better too. The book has an interesting selection of pictures, but they are grainy and hard to look at, which would have been a major redeeming factor. I wag a tsk tsk finger at the editor and proofreader of the book for an assortment of editing errors that should not have seen print. This book comes off more like a high-end 'zine than a book. If you are a Supremes completist, then Yes, by all means you need to have this book. But if you are a casual fan, stick to Mary Wilson's biographies or the numerous other books available about this wonderful group.

Short and to the point, this book was originally a thesis and it does come across in thesis/report-like format. However, it's very insightful and informative about Florence Ballard with her life before, during and after the Supremes. The content in this book is very thorough, yet the photos view the same as newspaper prints, very grainy. Aside from this, it's very much a must-have for the serious fan and/or collector of The Supremes. A discography is also included at the end of the book.

Thank you Randall for a book that appropriately takes sensationalism out of the life story of Florence Ballard, nearly 30 years after her death. So many authors try to "up" sales by "embellishing facts". That you chose to put out a book from a thesis makes it all the more credible for me and I write this at a time when I am only half way through it! That she is still "writable about" is testimony to the major contribution she played in developing the "Supremes" distinctive sound within the overall sound of "Motown". A sober and accurate writer. Thanks!!