The Silver Desoto is an excellent book about a young girl who is caught between the small-time life during the depression and the Hollywood - characters she worships. Vividly portrayed are the people and friends she knows who are in high school and the lost loves and the consequences that occur.

If you can get this book, read this book. It is worth it!

An unforgettable journey into adulthood...rich with a sense of place and an understanding of human nature. A beautifully cut gem displaying a cameo of life during the depression years...there is humor...earthiness...irony.
We feel our own lives enlarged, deepened, matured as I read this book. Sometimes funny, always honest, and often deeply moving book.

THIS AUTHUR IS A GREAT WRITER.THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST WORKS I'VE EVER READ.IV'E READ IT TEN TIMES.FROM START TO FINISH,A RIVETING STORY WITH GOOD SOLID CHARACTERS AND A GREAT PLOT WITH GREAT SUB PLOTS.TREMENDOUS DIALOGUE THROUGHOUT AND A GREAT GREAT ENDING.THERE IS TREMENDOUS CLIMAX FOR THE GREAT ENDING.IT DOES NOT TURN OUT THE WAY YOU THINK.THE SITUATIONS PRESENTED RELATE TO OUR OWN SOCIETY IN MANY WAYS.THE LOVE STORIES ARE WELL DONE.ITS JUST A BOOK I REALLY ENJOYED READING.OVER AND OVER.THERES JUST SOMTHING ABOUT IT.ALMOST LIKE YOU WISH YOU COULD EXPERIANCE WHAT THE PEOPLE WERE GOING THROUGH.LIKE HOW WOULD I HANDLE THAT SITUATION AND THAT EXPERIANCE WOULD BE INTERESTING.ALL THE HUMAN EMOTIONS AND EVILS ARE THERE,LOVE ,HATE,GREED,ENVY AND GOOD QUALITIES,KINDNESS,GENTLENESS. THIS BOOK WILL BE A BEST SELLER. BUY IT

This book is hilarious, and the art is perfect. If you like Dave Barry, but love the west, this book is unmatched and unmatchable by anything else I have seen. The publisher is the same one that did "Don't Squat With Your Spurs On," but this is a better read. My sixty-year-old father-in-law, who is not easy to please, about rolled out of his chair Christmas night reading it. It's short, it's cheap, and you can't shoot wrong wth this one.

I didn't realize that this little book was published by the National Park Service until coming to the end, where there is a section of brief descriptions and photos of a few of our national parks named after early explorers. These include deSoto National Memorial in Florida, Coronado National Memorial in Arizona, Pecos National Historical Park in New Mexico, and Cabrillo National Monument in California.

The first part of the book is a synopsis of the explorations of these conquistadores, all from Spain, who searched the New World for riches, in particular, gold. What they encountered were Native Americans, some friendly, some ferocious. Although the Spaniards suffered physically through hardships of difficult terrain, shortage of food, and battles with natives, they also inflicted injustices on the native peoples.

This book offers a brief but important understanding of the history behind the names of places we often take for granted. It is the history of the U.S. before the English arrived and created the colonies. The Spanish were here first, and as maps show in this book, traversed much of the land. Unfortunately for the Spanish, they were disheartened about the lack of gold, and did not pursue its other natural resources. How different the U.S. might have been if they had not given up.

This little publication deserves a 5 for fulfilling its purpose of bringing awareness to the history that created these national parks. It can serve as a springboard for other research, as well as create interest in including these sites in one's vacation plans.

Doctor De Soto is a dentist and a mouse. He does very good work and is especially liked by the big animals. Doctor De Soto accepts all animals except those dangerous to mice. He and his wife (who just happens to be his assistant) always check before letting in a patient to make sure the patient is not dangerous.

One day a fox came to the door. Doctor De Soto was reluctant to let him in but did because he couldn't stand to see the pain the poor fox was in because of a rotten tooth. Doctor De Soto gives the fox some gas to put him to sleep while he pulls out the tooth. When the fox wakes up Doctor De Soto tells him to come back the next day so that he can put in a new tooth.

That night both De Soto and his wife are worried that the fox will eat Doctor De Soto when he comes back the next day, so they come up with a plan and outfox the fox.

The illustrations are bright and colorful and the style is bold and straightforward. There are several more books about Doctor De Soto, even if they aren't all sold here.

Loggie-log-log-log

Like taking a trip back in time to the Hawaii we all wish remained. A vacation without the jetlag. Fantastic resource for graphic designers, artists and a wonderful gift for anyone who loves Hawaii. Full color photos throughout are fantastic.

Keep 'em Reading Bulletin Boards: Year-Round Designs For The Library And Classroom is a remarkably easy to use book of bulletin boards to promote reading among children from kindergarten through grade 8. Each bulletin board pattern shows friendly creatures enjoying books, such as a smiling monkey who reads while hanging from his tail. The 20 suggested patterns include boards for everyday use and boards for seasonal occasions, and these patterns can be mixed and matched as needed. With many large and small pieces designed to be easily traced, display recommendations, and suggested activities to help get children thinking, Keep 'em Reading Bulletin Boards is a superb addition to any elementary school library reference shelf.

OUTSTANDING ANALYSIS OFFERED BY TOP THINKERS WITHIN THE FIELD KNOWN AS LAW AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. EDGARDO BUSCAGLIA'S AND H. DE SOTO'S PIECES CAPTURE THE ESSENCE EXPLAINING THE LINKS BETWEEN THE JUDICIARY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. MORE OF BUSCAGLIA'S WORK SHOULD BE PUBLISHED BY THE IDB.

I agree that this book would have been more interesting if read before Mystery, but now the mystery is gone.

This is good stuff just the same.

Lots of good points that are useful in a classroom.

In many ways, I am disappointed that I read this book after reading de Soto's other book, "The Mystery Of Capital". Both this and his other book largely contain the same ideas, but "The Other Path" focuses more intently on de Soto's experiences in Peru rather attempting to answer a very broad question. Because "The Other Path" focuses on squarely on Peru, it can more completely chronicle how his ideas have been used to better the lot of poor Peruvians, and have contributed to the defeat of Sendero Luminoso.

I would have preferred it if the book did not purport to be a general answer to terrorism. While his ideas are very applicable with respect to Maoist revolutionaries attempting to (in theory) uplift the poor, they seem less relevant to "non-economic" terrorists, such as certain rich scions of Saudi families that fly airplanes into buildings, for example. But that is a minor point.

I enjoyed this book but was spoiled because I first read "The Mystery of Capital" and then this. This book's stats are somewhat outdated because so much has happened in the last 15-20 years, which takes away from the crispness of the argument, but the argument is still apparent and sound. Although I agree that eliminating government red tape to let more people become a part of the economic system and therefore become plugged into the benefits of the system (eg, a legal work address for customers to reach you at, legal recognition so to advertise, etc.) and thereby allow government to collect more taxes so to (hopefully) put more money toward fighting social problems; I hope de Soto agrees that the economic answer to terroism is not the only answer. Stregthening the economic infrastructure is a strong part of the answer, but much more is also needed for some people to not desire to kill other people, and that may be something which can never be had. Although I would say "The Mystery of Capital" is a must read, this is nonetheless a great supplement to "The Mystery of Capital".

Following the collapse of the Soviet empire there was great anticipation that capitalism would sweep the planet and transform the lives of the world's poor into something resembling life as we know it in the West. Instead of this rosy view of the future what has actually happened is that capitalism has failed to take hold in all but a few places around the world. This failure of capitalism to take hold has caused great consternation amongst the Western political establishment who fear that this failure may be seen by the Third World's poor as a deficiency of capitalism, or worse, as a purposeful effort by the West to keep them down.

Make no mistake about it though, the economic system that an overwhelming majority of the world's people currently operate under is NOT capitalism. "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" is Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's explanation of why capitalism has failed to take root in most of the world's countries.

What de Soto believes that developing countries lack is an integrated property system that would allow the people of these countries to turn their homes into engines of growth. He starts by stating that he has collected data from all over the world and he concludes that the world's poor 'own' real estate assets in excess of trillions of dollars. He then states that the poor are unable to realize the capital potential of these assets because they do not belong to the formal property sector. Instead the world's poor often hold their assets in an informal, extralegal sector.

They do this not because they seek to avoid taxes or because they are engaged in illicit activities but because their governments have made it too difficult and too expensive to get legal. De Soto says that, in Peru, the city of Lima alone requires any person wishing to formalize their title to property to navigate over 200 steps that take years-worth of time. Given the difficulties and expenses involved with this bureaucratic nightmare, the poor often give up and form their own property associations to protect their rights.

De Soto then goes on to say that this is not much different from how things were in the United States up until about the mid-1800s. Modern Americans don't realize the difficulties our ancestors went through in establishing title to their property because there is no clear history of the effort to legalize American property holdings.

De Soto believes this legalization of property holdings is vitally important to the success of capitalism because most start-up enterprises are begun with money raised from someone's home. Without the access to a wider credit market that legalization provides, the developing world's poor are locked into a system that prevents them from expanding their businesses and from gaining economies of scale that would allow them to generate real wealth and jobs.

While all of this seems intuitive, de Soto falls short of adequately backing up his thesis. I am already a believer in the rights to private property so I don't need convincing. However, a majority of the world's people are not believers in private property rights. I assume that it is to them that de Soto is directing his effort. If it is, he needs to include more support for his argument than just assuming the Western concept of private property rights is accepted everywhere in the world.

These failings aside, "The Mystery of Capital" is an important work in that it gets us focusing on what needs to be done to improve the lot of the world's poor. Capitalism, free trade, and private property are the means to improve those lots. However, these concepts will only triumph if most of a country's people are plugged into the system. If they are left out, no matter how successful those concepts may be for the ones on the inside, they will fail to achieve their ultimate goal, which is the improvement of the quality of life for a majority of the world's people.

The Mystery of Capital attempts to "reopen the exploration of the source of capital and thus explain how to correct the economic failures of poor countries." I believe the author makes an interesting argument within the book concerning the failure of capitalism to catch on in developing and post-communist countries. His argument deals with institutions we here in the West take for granted-property rights and other legal institutions. The connection between these legal institutions and economic growth is clear-and de Sota is clear on this point as well.

He states that an individual living outside the West faces an impenetrable wall of rules that bar them from legally established social and economic activities-such as deleterious bureaucracies that retard growth by wielding red-tape. De Sota sent teams to Peru, the Philippines, Egypt, and Haiti and they experienced firsthand how it takes several years to obtain legal verification of assets-years compared to days here in the West. Under these burdens, individuals create new laws-extralegal laws. These social contracts have created a vibrant but undercapitalized sector. This sector is known in economic layman's terms as the underground or informal economy. The author estimates that over half on the inhabitants in developing countries engage in this sector-using Dead Capital. The value of the assets in the informal markets are huge-surpassing the assets of rich countries sometimes. De Sota has brought attention to the core of the problem-he then states that the solution can be found at the heart of the countries.

He supplies the formula to fix the backwardness of the nascent capitalist nations. The first objective is to unify the many social contracts already existing in the extralegal sector into one, all encompassing social contract-by listening to the "barking dogs", or the people. Past attempts with this aim have failed because they have lacked the legitimacy and support from the current extralegal world. De Sota creates a bridge to fix this dilemma-a bridge that integrates old social property customs into a new all encompassing social contract. By working with their people, government leaders can forge a new regulatory framework. The second task is a task of a political nature because the plan outlined above requires the support of the poor, the elite, and the lawyers. The poor will gain the most because they will greatly increase their economic lifestyles with a more unified social property system that will enable them to use their assets as full functioning capital. The elite will harvest gains as well; they will benefit from an expanded market and growing capitalist economy. The lawyers must not use the current law, but instead fine-tune the law and change it to make it work for all.

De Sota's real world studies and solutions make sense in my mind. He identified a problem and supplied the solution. He may fall short though in his solution because a complex capitalist economy requires much more infrastructure than only property rights-of course I mean other forms of capital, such as human capital. By De Sota is on the right tract; a capitalist economy demands strict and discrete property laws that enable individuals to utilize their assets. His premise is right-under capitalism, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. In the third world, the poor don't have access to their assets, and they thus flounder in the extralegal sector.

"The Mystery Of Capital" is a text on development economics and the history of economic thought. It addresses development economics by analyzing roles played by incentives and institutions in shaping the evolution of markets in third world countries. In addition, it addresses the development of economic thought by demonstrating how the notion of capital evolved in the West to encompass incentives for transforming property into productive assets over time. In doing this, de Soto seeks to provide a solution to the dilemma haunting the third world: how to create a system of rules to put the proper economic incentives in place while respecting existing institutions that currently drive economic behavior.

In the book, de Soto argues that it is the inability to produce capital, rather than a lack of respect for private property or the rule of law per se, which inhibits rapid economic growth in the third world. He notes there is a difference between protecting property rights and producing capital. Specifically, he states that over time in the West, mechanisms were developed within systems of property rights to produce capital very quickly. He asserts that many westerners are oblivious to these mechanisms, and that they "...view them as parts of the system that protects property, not as interlocking mechanisms for fixing the economic potential of an asset in such a way that it can be converted into capital."

He defines property as a mediating device that captures and stores the mechanisms necessary to run a market economy. He states that it "...seeds the system by making people accountable and assets fungible, by tracking transactions, and so providing all the mechanisms required for the monetary and banking system to work and for investment to function." He relates the idea of property to capital by pointing out that - rather than a mere representation of assets on paper - it is a process through which a society extracts value from those assets. Therefore, property is not the assets themselves but an expression of how those assets should be used.

From this, de Soto develops his theory of how the West grew rich. He argues that American property systems flourished because they incorporated legal rights to allow people to use their property to create capital. He lists occupancy, preemption, homesteading, miners' laws, and other mechanisms for bringing informal property rights into the legal arena as examples of how Western systems created a new economic order providing the right incentives for massive growth to occur. He believes this evolution occurred under America's legal umbrella rather than Britain's because America's system responded to shifting political attitudes more quickly than Britain's - where the common law had entrenched a static system hostile to extralegal notions of property.

These extralegal notions of property are crucial, de Soto notes, because they dominate most economic transactions in the third world. He points out that with their formal economies so heavily regulated, black markets are the only systems available to most third world residents. As a result, most businesses in the third world incur heavy visible costs in the form of paying bribes, making payments outside legal channels, and operating through dispersed networks without a source of credit. However, the largest costs - which are invisible - are the absence of institutions necessary to create incentives for people to raise investment funds, achieve economies of scale, or protect their innovations in the marketplace.

Thus, de Soto argues, the problem with most proposals to establish property rights and the rule of law is that they ignore existing black market institutions that already guide economic activity in third world countries. He explains that when new legal institutions are created, those institutions must embrace contracts and arrangements that exist under the black market, or they will be rejected over time. He believes the solution is for reformers to codify black market rules so they can be made uniform within individual countries. Thus, leaders can compare these rules to other newly proposed frameworks and create an individual set that best enables them to create a system that is legitimate and self-enforceable over time.

De Soto's book sheds important light on many of the problems inherent in development economics. His insights into the evolution of market institutions to provide incentives for people to both protect their property and use it productively explain many of the frustrations experienced by officials at international aid agencies and third world governments. These leaders would do well to heed his advice.