I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China. The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books. He went back to his hometown after some thirty years. I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou, China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a huge scaffolding. Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different from Dreisers. I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to read certain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once in my lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart. Dreiser and me are only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt. Kai Lai Chung

Theodore Dreiser is one of America's great authors, but he is also an enigma wrapped inside a contradiction. Forever in awe of the "great social forces" lurching mankind forward, and inspired by the great financial titans and clever capitalist geniuses who attempted to reap the whirlwind, Dreiser nevertheless embraced communism late in his life as the antidote for the injustices plaguing mankind. He was a spirited social rebel, railing against orthodoxy and Puritan "Babbitts" who would foist their Midwestern morality down upon him, but at the same time, as he demonstrates in this book, his idealization of the small-town Hoosier philistines in Warsaw, Sullivan, and other whistle stop towns far removed from the Broadway footlights he had known intimately by the time this epic journey to the Heartland commences. Dreiser devoted hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages of prose to attacking the small-town "Babbitts" sharing the views of another world-weary cynic, Henry Louis Mencken. And yet, for all his caustic attitudes toward rigid conventions, Dreiser swoons in near reverie after catching first glimpse of the mundane streets, the old grammar school, feed store, and the simple folk he remembered from his youth. In other passages,examples of plain country living he encounters along the bumpy, dusty backroads of America circa 1914, are ridiculed and scorned as one would commonly expect of Theodore Dreiser and his war against society's religious and social conventions. Nevertheless, Dreiser's personal observations on life are often more engaging and inciteful than in some of his later novels. He is an American master; a pioneer of literary realism, and despite the contradictions, this is a fine and engaging volume exploring a vanished American landscape. Mr. Brinkley is to be commended for presenting it to the reading public again after all these years.

This book has an interesting storyline, but there was no suspense or action, really. A quite good read for Hardy Boys fans

This book was great! I think solar cars are our future so it provides information on the topic. There was a lot of action. I think this book was great!

Besides having wonderful illustrations, Hurry Up Franklin, wonderfully illustrates a great lesson for children and adults. I am a special education teacher and I use this book to teach children not to procrastinate. Hurry Up Franklin, teaches them to do what they are supposed to do and not stop and play along the way and it comes from one of the most trusted characters in books today...Franklin.

This is a good book for kids. I'm always telling my son to hurry up. Franklin is trying to get to a birthday party, but on the way he meets his friends which delays him. He found some nice things on the way though. He does make it on time to wish Bear a happy birthday.

This book is divided into three parts: The Person of Jesus, The Power of Jesus and the Glory of Jesus. In each of the 14 chapters, the author describes an encounter with Jesus by various people in the New Testament. Most of the stories are taken from the Gospels.
Skip's knowledge of ancient Jewish customs and culture is probably the most helpful part of the book. This information makes familiar Gospel stories even more meaningful.
In each chapter, an encounter with Jesus is described. Skip shows that Jesus used different methods with different people. He did so because the people who came to Jesus had different requests and different motives. Some readily believed and some held back.
Skip also uses stories of his own to further make the points of each chapter. And he attempts to make the lessons learned relevant to the reader. In the second half of each chapter, the author appeals to the reader to apply to his life what has been shown.
Chapter 13, about the Apostle Thomas, is particularly interesting. It describes the differences between doubt and unbelief.

This book is a wonderful way to get closer to Jesus. Written in Skip's practical yet spiritually insightful style, the reader gets the true picture of what Jesus is really like. As you finish reading each chapter, take the time to truly reflect on the discussion points. They are very thought-provoking and will strengthen your walk with Christ.

In The Juggler, Warren Kimball attempts to paint a new picture of FDR's foreign policy. Warren Kimball's thesis is that FDR had a vision for his foreign policy and did not merely react to events but attempted to craft a post-World War II world. From Lend-Lease to World War II, Kimball argues that FDR was consistent in his beliefs and desires. As a politician, FDR (unlike President Wilson) was willing to compromise to ensure his dream would come to pass.

The tragedy was the FDR's vision was beyond humanity. Like Communism, he thought that the utopian ideal would allow humanity to transcend our weaknesses. War would no longer be profitable so nobody would want to wage it. This vision went beyond his grasp to attain. He did succeed (whether it was he doing or merely the geopolitical realities of the Russian threat) in ensuring that the UN would be founded and that the US would continue its presence in world affairs.

Warren Kimball wrote an important book to dispel the preconceptions of FDR's foreign policy. Despite contradictions and vague notions, FDR did have a larger vision and didn't spent his Presidency merely reacting to foreign events.

An outstanding contribution to World War Two diplomatic history, Warren Kimball lays to rest one of the old chestnuts common to most people - that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the domestic reformer, had no consistent foreign policy, merely reacting to events. Weaving humour, deft insight, an unparalleled knowledge of the sources (Mr. Kimball is the editor of the FDR-Churchill correspondence) and diplomatic history together wonderfully, the Juggler is one of the central texts for anyone looking at the wartime Grand Alliance.

This book was great. It was full of suspense and irony. Except for the very beginning it keeps you in the story the whole time. You can never predict who the stealer is. I think anybody can read this and understand it.

This book is really cool, there's lots of action and it is in Italy. It seems scary at first but the end is very exciting and impressive. I would recommend it for kids of all ages.

As a homeschool mother, I want my child to enjoy the learning process. I have been delighted with the Step-Up series and Benjamin Franklin has been no exception. They are written in an straight forward, but not dumbed down, manner. My daughter and I got the high points of Franklin's life, as well as the ideals he stood for, in a lively, interesting format.

I would have preferred more pictures; but that's just me!

This is a great book for any child from 2nd grade to 4th grade to read. It is in large print which makes it easy for children to read. This book highlights all the main accomplishments and events of Benjamin Franklin's life. It is very interesting and will hold a young child's attention from the begining until the end of the book. I really enjoyed the way it covered his whole life, not just when he started making great inventions, like most books. It was one of my favorite books when I was in elementary school.

I found this is the excellent book for anyone to understand bond yielding calculation. Whether you are experienced bond market player, or just beginner, you can always find something useful in the book. I would rate this book 4 stars.

Most people take for granted the calculations used to generate a yield, duration and other fixed income statistic. These values are, more often than not, taken as being absolutes by the people who should most know that they are not always absolute and that yields in one market sector are not always comparable to yields in other market sectors. This book, a long anticipated follow-up to "Money Market Calculations" codifies in a succinct manner the basic conventions used to calculate bond numbers for various market sectors. While the book is certainly not a page-turner, it is a very important reference that should be found on every buy and sell-side trading desk.

It's a neat bit of history, told well for kids in a bite-size package. It takes one of those obscure facts that we all have rattling around in our heads from High school ("Yeah. Gulf stream.... warm water...") and fleshes it out into a nifty little story with excellent illustrations.

My second grader could read it (though I think she missed some of the historical context).

This is an important subject that is only mysterious because people think it's boring or too hard to understand. Deborah Heiligman changes that with a very interesting story that will have your second-grader knowing more than even a lot of scientists.

If one is interested solely in the political career of Richard Nixon, then this would be the book to get. That which we learn about Nixon's life before politics and after Watergate was only mentioned as it pertained to his days in office. Kurz was remarkably evenhanded as he described a politician who had some tremendous strengths, and some even greater weaknesses. In fact through most of the book, Kurz almost seemed to have some genuine warmth for his subject. It was something of a surprise to see Kurz reveal near the end that he had rooted against Nixon when the President's troubles were mounting.

Nixon was convinced that there was a vast copnspiracy of liberals aligned against him. On the one hand, this should have been hard to believe given that Nixon's domestic policies were hardly right wing except for where domestic communism was concerned. On the other hand, Nixon really had generated a lot of antipathy because of his heavy-handed tactics in dealing with his rivals.

Kurz was occasionally a little repetitious, but at least part of that was due to the complexities of telling a detailed story that spanned several decades. Overall, this book was informative and hard to put down. It was a fine piece of work.

Ken Kurtz is an excpetional historian! And a wonderful professor!