After a terrific debut novel "North of Montana", I eagerly awaited April Smiths next effort. "Be The One" was not worth the wait. The premise is compelling, but the story never gets off of the ground. The characters are too loosely drawn and the flashbacks are so disjointed you lose track of where you are in the story. This novel is at it's best when April Smith is dishing out the inside baseball stuff. She has a good eye for detail and a good ear for dialogue but she just doesn't get it all put together with this book. I'd like to see her bring back her Ana Grey character from "North of Montana". Maybe she should stick with what works.

Right now I'm a bit mad at April Smith. I started the book a few days ago, then stayed up until 3:30 in the morning to finish it. So this is definitely a page-turner. As a baseball fan, I enjoyed the descriptions of a scouting meeting and of spring training. The author obviously works hard at producing well-crafted prose; once in a while she reaches too far and produces an unintentional oxymoron. Example: when someone is massaging Cassidy's shoulders, they are like granite; she's been working under the kind of pressure that would liquefy stone. As other reviewers have mentioned, there are a couple of loose ends in the narrative (can anyone tell me how Nora knew where to find her father?). Back to Cassidy: if you don't like a heroine with an attitude, who is so driven that she habitually operates way out of bounds, and who has a drinking problem, then you won't like an April Smith book; both Cassidy and Ana, the heroine of North to Montana, April Smith's previous book, fit the description. Plus they are NOT into housekeeping and have pretty bad luck at relationships. Having said that, I'll confess that Cassidy kept coming in and out of focus for me. She seemed to be less sharply drawn than Ana. But even in those patches where Cassidy seems like a shadow, the plot kept me riveted. Do you like baseball? Like thrillers? Read it.

I finished April Smith's Be The One last night and have to rate it a 10 of 10. On my scale that means the author has written a thought provoking book that I will want to read again and that has affected me deeply. This book is a story about a female baseball scout, but so much more. April Smith takes us deep into the world of baseball, the hopes and dreams of young prospects from the Domincan Republic, their struggles to make the majors against the odds, showing the poverty and lifestyle that is so very different. She weaves a tale ripe with suspense and danger and illustrates the political hierarchy and challenges of working in a competitive environment where only the best succeed, and at what cost. Cassidy Sanderson has seen tragedy strike her family and she is an amazing character with a depth not often explored and with choices to make, that, as a reader, you are compelled to watch, to wonder and to hope. April Smith spent some time in the DR researching this book. She mentions in the acknowledgements that it was five years in the making and the many facets of research she undertook. A book of this stature shows what you get when the research is meticulous and careful and in this case we get magnificent results. Some authors have a lot of research and the book has no heart. Some books have heart and the flawed research diminishes the results. Sometimes, rarely, they both come together as with Be The One. The ending, oh the ending. very powerful stuff. Highly recommend.

Beginners won't really benefit from this book. The author's vague description of perspective confuses rather than explains. The book resembles a sketchbook with some notes dropped into it. I would recommend The Art of Drawing and Pencil Drawing Techniques over this thing anyday.

This book is a pleasantly composed item with very beautiful sketches. The author gives very good information and examples on materials and techniques used, and it is clear that this book helped me, but only a little....
I loved the fact that it was not overpowered with text and I would probably be able to copy the sketches in the book fairly well. Unfortunately I don't think this book helped me produce my own sketches from my personal observations. I thnk it is too advanced for the first-time drawer, or the drawer with a minimum of skill and even less confidence...

I found This book very helpful. I needed some help with shading and found the help I needed

I am very sorry to say, that when I got to page 17, I was very bored with the book. It took me forever to read it because my mind kept wondering. I just put it down and started another book. AI couldn't read it any more

This story was one of the best stories I have every read. Even though the story is fiction it seems very realistic. The story was sad at points but I loved the book!

I loved this book it was hard for me to put it down, and it was also sad

The advertising campaign for ABSOLUT Swedish vodka has captured the attention of millions. The promotional program for the product has been highly creative, captivating, and unquestionably successful. Now ranked as the #1 imported vodka in the United States, ABSOLUT is celebrating its 20 year anniversary.

The story behind the bottle, the product, and the marketing campaign is interesting, as might be expected. Most behind-the-scenes looks produce surprises, intrigue, and stories that cause readers to shake their heads in wonderment. ABSOLUT is no exception.

Carl Hamilton is described as one of Sweden's most provocative and original literary voices. He's also host of the critically acclaimed television show, Dilemma, a political commentator, and a columnist for Scandinavia's largest popular newspaper. With this build-up of the author, the reader would expect an intriguing book that would be a joy to read. Even the cover of the book is designed to reflect the advertising image of black and white simplicity.

The book does tell a good story-about the bottle, the name, the development of the product, and the marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I was not as impressed by the book itself as I wanted to be. I was disappointed. While I recognize that the book will sell because of the popularity of the product it chronicles, the writing left me wanting.

Describing this book as a biography suggests a certain amount of genealogical research to illuminate the subject of the work. As family trees are researched, people uncover branches that really don't fit into the mainstream of the family's development. These side stories are typically left out of books that document family histories, or they're archived outside the main text. Not so with this biography: all that information is served to the reader in a number of seemingly unrelated stories that don't seem to fit in the flow. An endorsement on the back cover of ABSOLUT suggests that "the author superbly swings from one scene to another." My description of this experience would be less glowing; I found the side trips distracting, confusing, and sometimes irrelevant. It felt like Hamilton was weaving in every bit of research he had, force-fitting as necessary to fill the book.

I was troubled by the use of profanity in ABSOLUT. One would not expect to find four letter words seasoning a business biography. Perhaps this is the style of Texere, a new publishing company, but the language didn't set well with me. There are ten incidents in the first 50 pages of the book where the author uses words that might get our kids a dose of soap in the mouth or at least a good talking-to. If you don't mind reading the "f" word in a business book, it won't bother you. It annoyed me, particularly as I observed that the point could have been made just fine without the profanity.

ABSOLUT does tell an interesting tale, particularly if you're interested in the reality behind the legend of a popular product. The book is hybrid of a business history, a biography, and expose, if you don't let the bumpy writing get in your way.

Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.

I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.

Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.

Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.

Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.

What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.

But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.

The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.

There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.

After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making your own personal image more appealing and vibrant. Who do you want to appeal to? Who can help you with that?

Have Absolut pleasure from this book! Skoal!

In Absolut: Biography of a Bottle, Mr. Hamilton has written a thorough, fascinating account of how one of the most popular brands in the United States was established in the last 22 years. This book is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed the famous Absolut advertising campaign featuring the bottle shape, and those who want to understand more about the process of successful brand building.

I was an executive at Heublein, makers of market-leading Smirnoff Vodka, from 1974-1977, and found this story fascinating for how overwhelming odds against success were overcome. In this review, I will add some perspective that the author omitted.

Liquor is one of the most difficult areas in which to create a new consumer brand. The hurdles are many. You cannot advertise on television or radio. Most people are not very experimental in the liquor they will try. You cannot go door-to-door dropping off samples like soap powder. Distribution is very expensive and hard to acquire. Establishing profitability with a new brand can take many years, and there are many failures. As a result, the market leader in most categories in 1950 is still the market leading brand today. For imported spirits, the country viewed as the most "legitimate" historical source always dominated the imported category. For vodka, what country do you think of? Certainly, Sweden was probably not first in your mind in 1978.

Absolut was brilliantly developed, but Absolut was also lucky. As the Cold War continued and the Afghanistan War began, Americans had reason to question their ties to Stolychnaya, which had been the leading vodka import. President Reagan's characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire" certainly aided that perceptual shift. Absolut had been established by that time on a brand platform of being different, a classy version of the Marlboro cowboy. The style of the product, the package, and the advertising all "whispered" to you about being subtly different while all the other vodkas shouted in vibrant colors with gaudy labels in similar bottles.

Interestingly, Heublein used a very similar approach to that employed by Absolut with packaging and positioning to build its mustard, Grey Poupon, into the market leader at the same time that the company was ignoring Absolut. The story of Grey Poupon is developed in part in The 2,000 Percent Solution.

What is even more remarkable is that Absolut was developed to be an export brand without a base in Sweden by the national Liquor Monopoly there, which had a strong heritage of keeping drinking under control. At many key points in the brand's development, the Swedes took large financial risks with little prospect of success. Who says that government agencies cannot be entrepreneurial? You will enjoy reading about Lars Lindmark who spear-headed this initiative as head of the Monopoly.

But the heart and beauty of this story is how the brand platform, positioning, and the rest were established. The results were astonishingly good, but the process was inevitably messy. Most consumers have not thought very much about how brands come to be like our friends. This book lays out many of the best practices involved. Get many of the top creative people involved, let them compete for inspiration, test out the results, and keep refining around the core ideas that resonate the most strongly with some people. I was extremely impressed by the role that Gunnar Broman played in the early development of the brand as head of the Swedish agency, Carlsson and Broman. Most brands are mostly developed by internal staff. Quite simply, an advertising agency usually doesn't have the skill to pull off all parts of the task. N.W. Ayer also helped a lot. But what will impress you is how many people contributed in important ways. Much of the advertising we now admire was developed at TBWA, which was the successor agency after a conflict occurred for N.W. Ayer. The task of finding an importer was long and involved. Dichter deserves a lot of credit for establishing the right research methods to find people who were deeply interested in the brand, despite many people being turned off by it. With a brand, you shouldn't try to please everyone.

The bottle stories are priceless. I won't spoil them by telling you about them in detail. But you will find that the developers of Absolut vodka had to overcome a lot of stalled thinking on the part of those they were working with. You will love the many photographs of the bottles and advertising while they were under development, including the famous Andy Warhol ad.

There is another personal reason why I enjoyed this book. Our older daughter (now in her third year in medical school) is very anti-drinking. Despite this, the walls of her room during high school were papered with Absolut ads. For one birthday, I gave her an empty Absolut bottle, which is still in her room at home. This deep impression of an advertising campaign on an anti-alcohol teenager had always impressed me. Reading this book helped me to better understand her attraction to the campaign, and to understand her better.

After you finish this exciting story about developing this fun brand, ask yourself how you can apply the lessons here to making an important task something that everyone wants to do. Who can help you with that? What is the purest form of the concept?

Have Absolut pleasure from this book!

If you want real world knowledge buy this book. This is not a CCNA "how to pass the test" book; this is an "everyday usable" book. It helped me much more with my work than the Lammle CCNA guide. Very helpful for day to day operations.

Mastering Cisco Routers is a great book for understanding many aspects of Cisco routers not typically covered by CCNA books. The author has great information on how to secure your router, usefull information on creating access lists to block standard DoS attacks, and some great information on VPNs. The book also covers TFTP, Syslog, and SNMP setup for both the router, and UNIX and Windows hosts. The last 2 chapters present very useful scenarios for both large and small networks. The only things that were lacking was the chapters on routing (doesn't really go into any detail on setting up routing protocols), and the chapter on LAN protocols which barely touches on IPX, AppleTalk, and NetBEUI. Overall, if you already have a decent understanding of the Cisco IOS, and want to get some knowledge outside of the normal CCNA type information, this is the book for you.

This is a very good book for anyone willing to understand Cisco routing (CCNA/CCNP).Of course some people may find it "the poorest book ever written on Cisco Routing";It all depends on how you read books and what you are expecting from it.This book is an easy to understand way to handle complexity.

Besides being out of date, even for internal software dev groups, the contents of this book are plain out of synch with practices in any SW development environment.

The author wanders through people, process and technology with no clear purpose as far as I can tell, and the technology section is so outdated that it comes across as quaint.

Even the people and process sections are weak. Use the P-CMM to handle people issues, and pick any number of process approaches, from agile methods and extreme programming at one end, to the CMM at the other.

The excellent previous comments by Per Kisler and Linda Zarate sum up this book from a general software engineering perspective. The main value of this book, in my opinion, is that the material addresses internal IT/IS software development more than product-line development or software engineering environments.

If you are seeking guidance on organizing an MIS development group this book is an excellent resource, especially with respect to organization and processes. If your are more interested in development from a product-line or software engineering perspective I recommend "Successful Software Development" by Scott E. Donaldson and Stanley G. Siegel (ISBN 0130868264).

For MIS development this book benefits from the extensive experience of Harris Kern (who is the Enterprise Computing series editor of which this book is a part), and the focus in IT/IS organizational and process factors. In fact, this book is particularly strong in the way it integrates IT/IS operations and management organization and process with software development. I especially like the emphasis on people and process, but like others who have previously commented I feel that the parts of this book that address technology are weak and should be eliminated from any subsequent edition.

The sections on developer recruiting and retention are especially well done, and the issues and factors of integrating processes are discussed in detail, making this an invaluable resource for the right audience.

Slightly outdated overview of nearly all aspects of software development with strong emphasis on Java. The book assumes no previous knowlegde of software engeneering and shows the reader step by step of what elements software development consists. The spectrum of topics spans a range from recruiting the right people to explaining the workings of CORBA. This wide range of topics implies not going very deep into each one. So one needs to read many additional books about each topic covered here. While dealing with Java and Jini the author could not forsee the new moves of Microsoft with it's .NET technology. So it would be interesting how the author would write about it today. Definitely outdated are the listings of software products, e.g. IDE's. Missing are a lot of necessary diagrams for showing how to modell, communicate or visualize the software development process. Overall the book serves as a handy introduction to software development, giving one the feeling, that one has now heard about all the relevant aspects involved in it.

As I struggled to finish this book, my only thought was to tell other people what a horrible book this was. It is very poorly written. The focus changes within a few paragraphs and the author goes back and forth in time in ways that is very confusing. Having read Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers and David McCullough's John Adams in recent years, I was curious about Hamilton and how he antognized these two political opposites. But, as another reviewer pointed out, there is very little written about his last 10 years. There is a few paragraphs about Jefferson and Madison funding a Philadelphia newspaper to rival Hamilton's newspaper -- but there is never any mention of his starting or writing anything for that paper. His starting the New York Post rates only a sentence. I'm afraid I will need to seek out another biography of Hamilton to learn anything (besides his affairs) that occured after the Revolutionary War.

This is a well written book that will interest most people. Randall focuses primarily on Hamilton's childhood and his time in the Continental Army. It sheds very little light on Hamilton's political career. Randall almost forgets what Hamilton accomplished after the war in shaping america( which is remarkable). The book is 70% about Hamilton in the army, which is interesting. So if you are interested in reading a book about Hamilton in the army this will entertain you. If you are interested in Hamilton's political career after the war I would reccomend another book. But overall this is a well written book.

Willard Sterne Randall's biography of Alexander Hamilton joins the recent glut of books covering America's colonial period that have either focused on Hamilton or featured him prominently. Randall's highly readable account of Hamilton's life brings into sharp focus the man who was Thomas Jefferson's ideological counterpoint in the two competeing governing philosopys that emerged from the American Revolution. Ironically, while the aristocratic Jefferson became the champion of the "common man," it was the "commoner" Hamilton who came to favor a strong central government at the expense of individual (and state's) rights.

Hamilton's rise from the illegitimate son of a West Indies merchant to the very heights of power at a time when such avenues were normally reserved for nobility make him America's first great self-made man. Most of the other founding fathers were from either the aristocrat or merchantile classes. Hamilton, whose family's entire modest estate was confiscated at the time of his mother's death when he was a boy, was possessed of the unique ambition of an insecure man who spent his life trying to overcome his humble origins. As Randall demonstrates, Hamilton's close relationship with George Washington, who recognized his junior's incredible organizational and intellectual gifts, was of key importance to the latter's success.

The text of the book is quite sympathetic its subject, perhaps overly so at times. Though Randall does not ignore the less noble aspects of Hamilton's character, he strives whenever possible to show him in the best possible light. Thus Aaron Burr, who actually made his own important contributions to the nation, comes off mostly as a despicable villian. Burr will always be infamous for firing the bullet that ended Hamilton's life, but Hamilton was equally at fault for the feud that ended so tragically.

Oveall, Randall's book is an enjoyable and enlightening work that will most appeal to history buffs.

Sometimes children can be unknowingly mean and brutal. Virginia Hamilton's characters seem real and natural. And how real and natural for children to tease and fear what they do not know. Hamilton's characters move smoothly from at first being fearful of Bluish to knowing her, understanding her illness, and becoming protective. Although not too many unexpected twists and turns, Bluish quickly draws you into a group of very likeable characters. "Girlfren'" Tuli is a hoot. Excellent reading for 5th or 6th grade.

"Bluish" is a novel by Virginia Hamilton, a prolific and multiple award-winning author of books for young readers. "Bluish" tells the story of Dreenie, a young girl who attends a magnet school in New York City with her brainy (but annoying) younger sister, Willie, and their eccentric friend Tuli. When a pale-skinned, apparently ill girl in a wheelchair joins her class, Dreenie is fascinated by her. The girl is nicknamed "Bluish" due to her bluish complexion. Dreenie begins a diary documenting her evolving relationship with Bluish.

"Bluish" is a gentle, moving novel about overcoming fear of someone who is different. The book is a hopeful celebration of childhood friendship. A nice touch is the fact that entries from Dreenie's journal are interspersed between the chapters of the novel. The book also offers an interesting perspective on the multicultural, multifaith world of NYC schoolkids; there's even a little primer on the celebration of Kwanzaa. Overall, an impressive effort from Hamilton.

This book is for middle school youngsters, 5th and 6th grade, although it would be appropriate for a precocious 4th grader and slower 7th grade readers. It is the story of three young girls who become friends after a very unlikely start. The title refers to the skin color of a sick young girl in the protagonist's Dreenie's class; a girl who is pale, weak and restricted to a wheelchair. All of the children, including Dreenie are afraid of the girl and try to avoid her. Later on it becomes clearer that most of them do not dislike her; instead they are afraid of her and the thought of sickness and dying.

Virginia Hamilton who has more than a few titles for young readers under her belt writes Bluish. Unlike some of her fantasy-based work, this is squarely set in contemporary New York with all the attendant urban problems we see on the news. For example, Dreenie almost jumps out of her skin while waiting for her father downstairs in their apartment building. Although she was warned not to go outside, she does just that, looking left and right for her father. Instead he comes in front of her and cautions her yet again that she has to look three ways: left, right and across. It isn't stated, but youngsters have received enough parental warnings and seen enough news shows about abduction to the author's point.

The book is written in a different type of style - it ping pongs back and forth between a journal format (Dreenie's diary) and a regular third person narrative style. While it was a bit unsettling for me as an adult to get used to the format, young people may not have as many preconceived notions of what a novel should look like. Dreenie has a younger sister she has to watch over every afternoon until her parents come home from work, again very realistic of today's world for many youngsters. The younger sister, Willie, of course irritates her big sister to no end, and makes matters worse by being an extremely bright and outspoken child. Every so often her resentment at being so responsible for her sister comes through, as it does in some of her later conversations with Natalie or "Bluish" as Dreenie calls her.

The second key figure in the friendship is Tuli, a bi-racial youngster who lives with her Grandmother and often pretends to be Spanish. Tuli is loud and energetic; highly observant of her surroundings and people and is often very needy. Sometimes so much so that Dreenie feels like she has yet another sibling to watch over. Dreenie feels as if Tuli tries to be too much a part of her family and should spend more time with her Grandmother.

Their teacher who tells them she has leukemia but is on the mend finally explains Natalie's illness. The disease requires that she rests a lot and that she sometimes vomits in class as a result of chemotherapy. Natalie is bi-racial as well with a black father and a Jewish mother who initially takes offense at her daughter's nickname, mistakenly thinking it is a crass put down of being black and Jewish. After she realizes the truth, she warms up to Dreenie and later on Natalie's family attends a Kawaanza celebration at Dreenie's house.

Natalie helps her classmates understand some Jewish traditions such as Hanukkah and brings a dreidel to class and teacher her classmates how to play the game. She also brings knitted caps to all of them saying she has lots of time resting in bed and knitting helps her pass the time. The caps are all bright and colorful and the children love them. The caps also bond them with Bluish who has to wear one all the time due the chemo-induced baldness.

This book will introduce children to a variety of "others." Sick children, the physically challenged, bi-racial youngsters and those from lower socio-economic classes. In one fell swoop, Hamilton poses a number of "isms" for young minds to grabble with, all the while writing about likeable young girls who are engaging but no goody two-shoes. Dreenie can be extremely impatient; Natalie can be aloof and sarcastic; Tuli can be narcissistic and childish. In short, they are real-life children who struggle with real issues facing young people today. Hamilton does not end with happily ever after. It is left open ended as to Natalie health. While she is steadily improving, its made clear she has a five-year window before the doctors will consider her in remission. Tuli remains poor and living with her Grandmother. Dreenie is more comfortable in her new school, but still wonders if she will truly be the intellectual equal of her younger sister. All in all, an enjoyable read that is believable and engaging.

Twenty Years at Hull House is an outstanding example of the humanitarianism movement in America at the turn of the century. Jane Addams, the author and narrator of the book, was born in Illinois. Early in her life she began to see the effects of poverty on people. She recalls one incident early in her life of seeing a homeless man on the street. She asked her father why that was, and he replied that that was just the way things were. Her father was a Quaker and the most prominate role model in Jane's life. As a child she grew up wanting to be just like him. For a while, she aspired to be a mill owner just like him. Her mother is not mentioned in the book at all. Jane went to Rockford College and soon toured London. It was there that she came up with the idea of the Hull House. Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago. It offered day care and college level classes for women. Spawning from her work at the house, Jane joined many causes that she passionately fought for. These causes included working hours for women, child labor laws, and juivenile court. She could be considered an early feminist. Also from her work at Hull House, Jane started studing the causes of poverty and the effects it had on society. She was not satisfied with just the success of her house; she wanted to know why there was a need for it at all. Later in her life she joined the womens sufferage movement. Jane Addams was a wonderful reformist and feminist that sought to better the country. Twenty Years at Hull House offer insight into one of America' most interesting time periods.

Like many of her fellow "Progressives," Jane Addams was born in the midwest and received an exceptional scholastic and religious education. She was strongly devoted to her father and shared with him a reverence for Abraham Lincoln not just as a man, but as a living ideal against which all men should measure their ideas and actions. Typical of many reformers of her era, Addams was not attracted to evangelical duty. Missionary work left her with a sense of futile detachment from the wretched social conditions she witnessed in East London. After visiting Toynbee Hall, Addams decided to establish a similar settlement house in the rapidly-growing city of Chicago, where "the evil and vices of American life seemed to be exaggerated." Her experiences at this settlement house are the subject of this book.

Although, on the one hand, Addams seemed the typical Progressive; on the other hand she did not follow many of the ideas of the more radical reformers. She was very practical and refused to be swayed by the claims of certain social movements and untried panaceas. she did not become a socialist. Although she greatly admired Tolstoy, she found his message "confused and contradictory" and doubted its suitability to the situation in Chicago. She deplored any violent tactics associated with socialist and anarchist groups despite their "noble motives." Addams demostrated an understanding of the ways in which strikes had a detrimental effect on people outside the labor movement (her dying sister was unable to see her family because the transportation system was blocked due to the Pullman strike. Unlike most reformers, she also had respect for the immigrant cultures represented at Hull House. A labor museum put native sewing machines and other instruments and crafts on display for all to enjoy.

One observation made by this reader was the animosity on the part of European reformers toward the work of the settlement residents. Tolstoy offered petty criticisms and one English visitor concluded that reformers in America were indifferent to the plight of the poor because they could not recite the "cubic feet of air required for each occupant of a tenement bedroom." Such remarks smack of a "caring competition." Addams, however, was well aware that the settlement house experiment was far from complete. Jane Addams' honest and humble account--albeit long and sometimes rambling (don't let the skinny paperback fool you)--demonstrated her unwavering commitment to achieving the improvement and unity of humanity.

Although, I did find this book to be hard to read at times, I did find it very interesting. It was an inspiring book, showing what a group of dedicated ladies can do when they set their minds to something. Jane Addams is quite the heroine along with the many other ladies that helped her run Hull-House. A very inspiring story. We should all be as dedicated to doing good in the world.

i was required to read this book for summer reading and i fell asleep 5 times trying to get through the first chapter. it is boring and pointless. i like books and can read about a page a minute or faster. i found myself taking five minutes to get through one page! i strongly dislike this book

Greece and Rome are the foundations of the modern world system and Western culture. We all owe a big debt to the spirit of those two little countries in southern Europe who gave so much to the world. "Roman Ways" should be read with "Greek Ways" if the reader wants to get a better picture of the achievements of these two sister civilizations. A good introduction to anyone who is learning the classics.

No one wrote about ancient history as well as Hamilton; she made these eras come alive, and explained them in a way that made perfect sense to a 20th-century reader. Her book on "The Greek Way" is even better, because I really dig the Greeks!!