WHEN I WAS IN JR. HIGH SCHOOL IN HOUSTON IN 1964, THIS WAS THE FIRST NOVEL I EVER READ. IT LAUNCHED ME ON A LIFETIME OF READING AND A LOVE OF HISTORY. IT'S TREATMENT OF THE "HERO" ALLOWS ALL OF US TO RELATE TO HIM. HE IS JUST A PLAIN YOUNG MAN WITH AVERAGE ABILITIES, AND HAS AVERAGE SUCESS IN THE COCKPIT, OTHER THAN THE FACT THAT HE STAYS ALIVE.

THE BOOK TRACES THE EXPLOITS OF CHARLES SELDEN FROM THE TRENCHES THROUGH FLIGHT TRAINING, THE LAFFAYETTE ESCADRILLE, AND INTO THE U.S. ARMY FLYING CORPS WHERE HE IS SHOT DOWN AND CAPTURED. THE BOOK CLOSES WITH HIS ESCAPE AND RETURN.

THE REGULAR MEN AND WOMEN AND THE HEROS OF HISTORY ARE VIVIDLY PORTRAYED TO THE EXTENT THAT YOU SEEM TO KNOW THEM ALL AND MAKE FRIENDS WITH CHARLES SELDEN. IT'S 1999 NOW AND I HAVE ONLY AVERAGE MEMORY, BUT I'VE NEVER FORGOTTEN THIS SPECIAL BOOK EVEN THOUGH I'VE NOT READ IT SINCE 1964. IT'S THAT GOOD.

For anyone interested in the air war of WWI, I have to recommend "Falcons of France." A wonderful read from the first page on. All the drama of friends, combat, capture and escape are in it. And when your done with "Falcons of France," you must read "Fighting the Flying Circus" by Eddie Rickenbacker. The two books parallel each other until the mid point and then go off in two directions. I got a better understanding of "Fighting the Flying Circus" after reading "Falcons of France." I highly recomend "Falcons of France."

Falcons of France is a novel of flying, World War I, growing up, and the moralities of the time. Written by two American veterans of the Escadrille Layfayette (who later wrote Mutiny On The Bounty), both the action of battle and the routine of the aerodrome are immediately believable. I first read Falcons of France as a teenager, barely younger than the novels characters. Having reread it numerous times over the years since, the saga still facinates, still captivates, and still ends sooner than I would wish. Reading this novel is the closest any of us will ever come to being a young World War I fighter pilot struggling to stay alive in the skies over France.

This book contains two dozen opposing viewpoints on the subject of "gun control". Chapter 4 asks "what measures would reduce gun violence?" and provides eight answers. Reading opposing views will educate you, but you should browse some of the books in your library for more depth.

Viewpoint 1 claims "gun control" will reduce lethal crime. The writer says criminal assaults and robberies are not higher in the United States than other developed countries, but the murder rate is much higher. (Actually, the rate of violent deaths in America is lower than in many European countries, and Japan.) Louisiana's murder rate is 20 times the rate of Vermont (which has little gun control). Cities have more murders than rural areas (with guns?). Page 130 mentions that none of the theories can explain this! But the writer claims that eliminating handguns would lower the number of homicides! Viewpoint 2 says gun control will not reduce violent crime; it is a failure in other countries. Japan's abolition of private gun ownership resulted in an increase of gun violence (p.132). This also happened in Australia and Great Britain (p.133). But in America violent crime continues to fall as the number of states with "shall issue" laws increase.

Viewpoint 3 claims gun control will reduce school violence, because guns were used in the 1999 Columbine massacre. Yet prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, most schools had rifle teams, guns were more handy, and no massacre ever happened! There were no monstrous high schools, MTV, video games, working mothers, and, less oppression of students. Viewpoint 4 says gun control will not reduce school violence, because firearms are obtained illegally. In spite of the corporate media attention, school violence is declining, and students are still safest in school (p.141). The Columbine killers illegally obtained their legally bought guns. Proposals made after this crime were flawed. Most gun violence is intentional, not accidental. Besides, the 1968 Gun Control Act was supposed to cure this! There are flaws in the criminal justice system (p.145). More people are deterred from crime by social standards, not laws (p.146). He suggests prevention programs need more funding (p.147). But there's big money in prison constructions and operation, and payoff to politicians that suggest early intervention programs will be skimped.

Viewpoint 5 claims gun manufacturers should be held responsible for gun violence. But manufacturers of automobiles, baseball bats, knives, etc. are NOT responsible for their misuse! The CPHV tries to use the tort system to prosecute gun manufacturers for misuse of their products. Isn't this barratry? The truth is that CPHV is using civil torts in an attempt to get guns outlawed since they can't accomplish this through legislation. This article has many half-truths and one-sided claims. It could be used as an example of sophisticated special pleading (p.149-153). Viewpoint 6 says gun manufacturers should not be held responsible for gun violence since it allows courts to make laws that should be enacted by legislatures. Product liability law says manufacturers are not responsible for criminal or negligent misuse of non-defective products (p.157). Viewpoint 7 claims gun safety standards should be mandatory, and suggests some solutions. He also tells of the problem with each. None will prevent human error. Viewpoint 8 says gun safety standards should not mandatory. There are risks in gun ownership as there are with flying or traveling in general. While 392 children were killed in gun accidents, 590 died from medicine poisoning (childproof caps?), 1063 from burns, 1247 from drownings, and 5503 from cars (p.175). And 200 from falls.

This book has four main topics, with two dozen opposing viewpoints. These were chosen for balance, and edited to fit 192 pages. It has a list of organizations that may be contacted, but not the number of their memberships (tells how broad based they are). It lists 25 books on this topic, but does not summarize them. You should know that Bellesiles' book was discredited as an historical work, and W. Weir's book is better than the others. Chapter 1 asks if private gun ownership poses a serious threat to society. It doesn't define "serious threat", or tell that every gun is "owned" by its user.

Viewpoint 1 does not list a real person as the author. It claims that a weapon is dangerous (!) and must be "regulated". It is an attempt to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. It admits the murder rate increased after the 1968 Gun Control Act even when no firearm was used (p.20)! Most gun deaths result from suicide, not murder (p.22). Viewpoint 2 correctly points out that gun ownership has increased faster than the homicide rate (p.27), so it is simple minded to claim the former caused the latter (pp. 26-27). Homicide rates fluctuate, and have tended to decline (p.28).

Viewpoint 3 uses rhetoric about an idyllic youth in East Orange NJ (before the Gun Control Act), but cites not facts in support. Page 32 suggests a biased outlook in the data collection by part of the CDC, and that some part of the AMA has a political agenda against handguns. What means will they use to reach their desired end? Viewpoint 4 says the medical and public-health establishment produced research that was biased, riddled with errors, and unreliable (p.39). Page 40 gives one example of bias in the 'New England Journal of Medicine': censorship of the report that the homicide rate went up 25% in Vancouver since the 1977 Canadian law banning handguns! Page 43 tells of the flawed methodology used by A. Kellermann (the "43 times fallacy"). Kellermann's article did not use deaths in non-gun homes as a control; in the cases of a non-gun home you are 99 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. (Most deaths in the home are suicides.) Between 25 and 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost by a gun (p.44). Guns prevent harm to people, and protect property every day. When the discredited CDC gun control research was defunded, corporate millionaires began to pay for this slanted research (p.46).

Viewpoint 5 is a good example of slick writing that doesn't really say much. The writer didn't do enough research ("dime-store novels"?). He mentions "the past three decades of gun violence" which echoes the fact that the 1968 Gun Control Act resulted in more crime and violence. Viewpoint 6 comes from a victim of a crazed shooter. This student of psychology has some insights into the "gun control" fantasy foisted upon the gullible who believe the corporate media. Who else has been exploited?

Note that "gun control" is a euphemism for "gun prohibition". An aristocratic ruling class will always try to disarm the common people in order to oppress them; see Aristotle's "Politics". After the Civil War the new corporate aristocracy attacked the Second Amendment. It took sixty years to destroy our "well-regulated militia" (1877-1934). Then they began to attack "the right to keep and bear arms".

This book provides edited articles that present opposing viewpoints. Chapter 2 asks if the Constitution protects private ownership. The obvious answer is that it did until the 20th century, when the newly powerful corporate aristocracy sought to disarm the people. The phrase "a well-regulated militia" means armed citizens who elect their own officers; this is how it worked from Colonial times onwards. "Well-regulated" also meant well-practiced. The "right of the people to keep and bear arms" also meant that people were required to own and carry arms, as in Colonial days. Note the word "arms"; there was no restriction intended on any type. Federal law still classifies all males (18 to 45) as the "unorganized militia". The Founding Fathers did not want a "select militia", one not composed of all the people.

Viewpoint 1 explains why private ownership is protected by the Second Amendment. In Presser vs. Illinois (1886) the Supreme Court proclaimed that "the State cannot ... prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms" (p.64). In U.S. vs. Miller (1939) the Supreme Court did not deny the right to keep and bear arms, except in the narrow sense of the recently outlawed type of weapon used (pp. 64-65). This was a fixed case, since Miller was not represented in court! Recent Supreme Court decisions have not denied that "the people" means just what it says (pp. 65-67).

Viewpoint 2 attacks the right to keep and bear arms. It implicitly admits this interpretation was created after the Civil War (p.70). The Miller decision was constructed to enforce the 1934 Firearms Act (banned sawed-off shotguns), another political decision. This introduced the concept of intent! It is dishonest to claim that Cruikshank does not apply to the Federal government (p.71), since the other Amendments do apply to the states (due process, equal representation, etc.). It is amusing to quote Hickman vs. Block 1996, since so many states have passed "right to carry" laws in the 1990s! Simmons speculates on the intent of gun advocates, but doesn't tell the truth about his own intentions.

Viewpoint 3 explains why "gun control" (meaning 'gun prohibition') is unconstitutional. The Constitution does not contain the power to limit the ownership of arms. The Second Amendment positively forbids infringing the right to keep and bear arms. The Ninth Amendment says the people retain all rights not listed in the Constitution, such as the right of self-defense. The Tenth Amendment says powers not delegated to the Federal government are reserved to the people. This proves Congress has no Constitutional power to prohibit the keeping of arms by the people.

Viewpoint 4 argues that gun control is constitutional. He admits that guns are not the root cause of violence, and, the news channels play up the tragedies. He admits the Founding Fathers wanted no limitations on the right to keep and bear arms (p.79). He claims "the correct interpretation" is to allow limits, but fails to see that this novel approach was created in the 20th century, once the corporate ruling class began to oppress the people (like any aristocracy in recorded history). The author tries to create fear and terror by recalling school shootings in a "gun free zone" (p.81). The obvious fact is that this never happened prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act.

While it is not listed in the Bibliography, read "The Minuteman" by Gary Hart for a history of the militia.

Stephen Hero is part of the now-mostly-lost first draft of Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The legend goes that Joyce, in a moment of disillusionment, flung the manuscript on the fire and his sister Eileen rescued it. Odd, then, that the MS shows no apparent signs of burnmarks. Either way, the first few hundred pages are missing, so what we have here is a fragment of what would probably have been a very long and rather insufferable autobiographical novel about a clever young man realising that he's too good for the society into which he's been born.

The remarkable thing about it is that even though Joyce is basically transcribing the events of his own life, he's impressively objective. Stephen Daedalus (it became "Dedalus" in the later version) is presented as a bit of a prig, almost comically outraged when it looks like he can't read out a speech to a college debating society, and for all his erudition and genius a twit when it comes to getting his end away with the luscious Emma Clery. Joyce obviously realised this, because when he rewrote the novel he made it not more objective but less so, forcing us to see the events from Stephen's point of view, modifying his method as Stephen grows from frightened boy to disdainful young man. Stephen Hero is all told in the same cool third-person that Joyce used in his early stories. He abandoned it when he realised that it was quite inappropriate for the book he really wanted to write.

So what are the virtues of Stephen Hero? For one thing, it shows a lot more of the life around Stephen; Joyce has a lot of fun recording the inane remarks of Stephen's fellow students and the dimwitted inanity of the college president. The family is presented as less of a threat and more of a slightly baffling background hum (Joyce seldom wrote as kindly about his mother as he does here, even if he made her death one of the equivocal emotional centres of Ulysses). Stephen's artistic theories are _explained_, rather than being _demonstrated_ as they are in A Portrait (and while this is part of how much better a book A Portrait is, it's nice to see them set down, as well.) But in the end you have to admit that if Joyce had published this as his first novel, he mightn't have had the reputation he has today as being a man who published nothing but masterpieces. Dubliners is the best starting point if you've never read Joyce before and want to see what the fuss is about. Stephen Hero, on the other hand, is no masterpiece, but it's perhaps the only book by James Joyce that you could recommend to people going on a long train journey.

Stephen delves deep into the error-trapping loops of Jesuit doctrine, sounding its minatory hollows, vivisecting its repressive will-to-venom. A stately young apprentice, equipped with esthetic tools he himself has made, Daedalus spends precious little time studying for his exams, paying knee-tribute in the entropo-oedipal chambers of the chapel, nor allowing himself to be terrorized into stupidity by fiction-blind men of the Church. EXILE TEACHES ONE TO SENSE AND VALUE. Stephen's rejecting passion strives to evade the conflict-spirals of "Irish paralysis," the decades-dead mausolea of a distant Papal dispensation. For the eroded statuary of Doctrine has been subsumed by the zesty rind of the Epiphany, a crystallization of the fragmentary present into a seeing-place for the exilic soul. In a fine irony, Stephen must reconcile his aesthetico-ethical ideals with a grave intellectual debt to that greatest doctor of the church, St. Thomas Aquinas; can Stephen ever truly purge himself of the Irish Catholic gene-machine? --*Stephen Hero* is a great task but well worth it, much in the vein of Beckett's *Dream of Fair to Middling Women*, an apprentice-work with all its warts intact, a revelatory gem far beyond juvenilia. For here we are granted an unprecedented view of Joyce the youthful escape-artist, of the traumata which sustained his greater odes, the dark italics of literary Exile.

Stephen Hero, the latter half of a rejected first draft of Portrait (apocrypha: Joyce flung his manuscript into a fire only to have Nora save part of it), offers Joyce fans a glimpse of his literary style and development as a young buck of nineteen to twenty-four. Portrait, written ~7-12 years later, is a condensation of the initial thousand pages of Hero with several layers of symbolism and effects added. Portrait shines the spotlight of Stephen's intellect upon the dim world of his own perception; Hero sets an objective reality in the plain light of day in simple, effective prose. Hero's style allows Stephen's arrogance to come across much more clearly than in Portrait. His adolescent conflicts are more easily relatable to the reader, whereas in Portrait those conflicts are arranged dramatically to occasion his birth as an artist, complete with his moderately original neo-Aristotelian, applied Aquinas heuristic. This text is NOT suitable as an introduction to Joyce (Dubliners is obviously the way to go in that respect). Those who are already committed fans of Portrait should with a little patience find Hero an engaging read.

"She would most certainly always love Alex,.....but with Charlie, it had been love at first sight...." Imagine yourself as a sixteen year old girl, living during the Civil War, and having two beaux (boyfriends). Your only confidant, a journal. Pretty tough life! One minute, everything is fine, the next, life isn't worth living. That's how Becca, from Becca's Story felt.

Becca likes her life the way it is, but when the war breaks out, she knows life will never be the same. Because she hints they should support their country, both of her beaux, Alex and Charlie, join the army. She feels she is now responsible for what happens to either of them.

Before they part, both Alex and Charlie ask for her hand in marriage. Becca loves both of them equally, but she must make a decision before, or if, they come back.

I believe this is a very interesting book. Forman did a great job combining history with a love story. Although there was a bit too much history, this really is a great book.

I like it. The old time, Civil War story. The letter that went back and forth among Becca and the two guy was so lovely. I reccommended this one to anyone that enjoin old time book.

Dougy is a superb novel that gives the idea of the racist concern of Aborigines in Australia. When Dougy's sister, Gracey, is chosen for the State Athletics Championships, people in their small town was not all pleased. During the fight between the whites and blacks in the town, Dougy learns to be a leader for his family. It is up to Dougy to save his family, from the war and the mysterious Moodagudda. Dougy is the first book in James Molonely's trilogy. Must read all of them.

Dougy, the first book in James Molonely's trilogy ( the other two are Gracey and Angela, both of which a terrific as well! ), is a fantastic novel which clearly states the racist issues facing Aborigines these days. It also looks deep into Dougy's personal life, especially when his sister, Gracey, is chosen for the State Athletics Championships. During that difficult time, Dougy must learn to stand up for himself, his family and the whole Aboriginal body. A terrific book with both thumbs up!

This was the first book I read about postmodern ministry. As such, it was very useful. It is simple and pretty accurate in its descriptions. I would recommend it to someone with little knowledge about postmodernism and postmodern ministry. If you already have experience in the field and knowledge of the generation, then don't waste your time. You already know the stuff here. I would move on to Leonard Sweet's books. This book is good, just not too meaty. Accept what it is and use it accordingly.

Unlike most writers on the subject of "GenXers" and their (our) relationship to God and the church, Kevin Ford refrains from the condescending tone that characterizes so many books on the subject. He even suggests (gasp!) that some of the perspectives and strengths of this generation may have something to offer the church. Although the extensive narrative in each chapter was probably intended to illustrate one of Ford's points -- that personal narrative is the medium which will be most effective in communicating with Xer's -- I found the stories, particularly the dialogue, rather artificial at points. While it is important to remember that this is a generation that has had its share of neglect and abuse, resulting in subsequent dysfunctions of our own, we don't want ministry "to" us that doesn't also call us to ministry for others. We know the world is a messed-up place, and that we share in those faults. Give us hope. Give us a place and a purpose, and all the statistics will fade in contrast to remarkable narratives of our own

The book offered good information but really basic information. The book also didn't have any tips for getting started except make a flyer.So i recommend getting another babysitting book.

This book gives you all you need to know about babysitting and is fun to read. I think it is quite descriptive on the processes of first aid and so on. I think everyone will enjoy reading this book, kids who are just starting to babysit or who already babysit but just want to brush up on stuff.

...I have very little education about religious topics. I'm reading this in one of my classes right now and I think it's wonderful. I give it four stars though because it can get boring at times. Otherwise, it's great if you don't want to read the bible... My favorite passage in this is Jacob's Ladder.

This book is about biology, rearing and care of young primates, at least that's what the title is refering to. But if you are looking for feeding schedules for youngsters (or color pictures) than this is not a book for you. However it's a good book with lots of info in it. Every chapter in this book in divided in the following subtitles : Species, Status, subspecies and distribution, Sex ratio, Social structure, Breeding age, Longevity, Seasonality, Gestation, Pregnancy diagnosis, Birth, Litter Size, Adult weight, Neonate weight, Adult diet, Adult energy requirements, Growth, Milk and milk intake, Lactation and weaning, Feeding, Accomodation, Infant management notes, Physical development, Behavioural development, Disease and mortality, Preventative medicine, Indications for hand-reading, Reintegration and References.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The way that it intermingled history of the time period, geography, strong moral values, and the tale of the quest for gold held my interest throughout the book. It even threw in a few unexpected twists and turns in the high seas adventure.
This book is appropriate for adult readers and young readers alike. It has spurred me to want to read more about history and ocean adventure of the time period.