J. C. Flanigan did an excellent job when he compiled this book on the churches of Gwinnett County in 1911. He included every church that was in the county at the time. However, the county has changed much since the time this book was written and the number of churches in the county are inumerable. This book needs to be majorly updated in a second edition by another author. I have also, however, caught a few mistakes concerning dates on certain churches that and pastors. This book is still very good and contains some very interesting sketches on the churches. It even includes some pictures of churches and ministers and prominent laymen. It is intersting to see how the First Baptist Church of Lawrenceville and Snellville, etc. looked a hundred years ago and see how they have changed SO much today.

This book is no longer on the list of scarce books on the history of Gwinnett Co GA. Now, reprinted, all the information on the founding of Gwinnett Co GAs early churches, is available once again. And, if you are lucky to have had an ancestor who was a minister, you may find a biography, with information previously unknown to you. One hundred copies sold in first 45 days.

I always wanted to get around to reading Ambrose Bierce. Known as an iconoclast and an excellent satirist, Bierce is best known for his Devil's Dictionary. He's also known for the disappearing act he pulled in Mexico in 1913. I decided to give this short anthology a chance. If I liked his stories, I figured I'd buy some more of his writings. I will be reading more of his writings.

The recent movie _The Blair Witch Project_ has brought scary stories back into vogue. After reading this book, I realized you can make a direct connection from this film to Ambrose Bierce. The connection would pass through Stephen King and H.P.Lovecraft along the way. I've seen things in both of these writers that could have been lifted directly out of one of Bierce's stories. In Bierce's story, "The Damned Thing", with its talk about colors that can and can't be seen, I could have sworn I was reading Lovecraft. Bierce is a master at quick twists and shocking violence, and delivers scares fast and furious. I got chills with several of these short stories, which certainly makes for good horror reading.

The book gives the reader a sample of Bierce's short stories. Most of the stories are tied around American Civil War themes, which is no surprise as Bierce served in the Union army during that conflict. His experiences gave him the necessary frame of reference to write these dark stories. And when I say dark, I mean DARK! Some of these tales will make your jaw drop. The violence in them is extremely unsettling. Chickamauga and Oil of Dog are sickening, describing blown open heads and dead babies in graphic detail.

Did I mention Bierce's prose? Some of the best you'll read. His prose is so amazing that I found myself rereading some of his passages just so I could make sure I was getting the full meaning. It is that rich and textured. It's also extremely funny in places. In the introduction it is written that Bierce lived in England for several years and was embraced by the English, who are masters not only of the language, but also insults. I'm not surprised when I look at how he writes. He can pen an insult that would bring tears of joy to an Englishman's eyes.

Finally, Bierce's stories show incredible depth for the short story format. He ridicules false courage, irony, lawyers, and even unions in the story, "The Revolt of the Gods". I highly recommend that anyone not familiar with Ambrose Bierce give this book a read. It reads fast and you'll laugh and be shocked within the space of one page. Good stuff.

A young northern soldier unknowingly kills his confederate father; a man is about to be hanged for tampering with a bridge during the Civil War but is freed when the rope breaks; a civilian finds a snake under his bed and freezes; and an invisible presence brutally kills a man. These are all plotlines from a few of the stories in Bierce's magnificent collection of short stories Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories. They are guaranteed to keep the reader in suspense and awaiting the always surprising conclusion. For anyone who loves great writing and irony, check out this collection of stories.

I'll admit it, I'm a tech dork. I work for an Internet company and this book is perfect for tag and signature lines for email. Although on a more serious note the definitions found here are not the dictionary definitions but the definitions that modern day society has reflected upon them. While a word, item, or identification for something may mean one thing in the dicitonary we tend to stereotype or re-clasify it in our times as something completly different. Read the exerpts for some good examples. Whil the book was compiled of pieces written back in the turn of the 20th centurey a lot of the sarcastic or sardonic definitions still hold true. Definatly an interseting book.

Ambrose Bierce, in this hilarious book, satirizes all aspects of human behavior. This lexicon that he has created provides often true insight in to the tacit meanings of otherwise benign words. For example, PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. This book is a must-get.

Ambrose Bierce is as famous for the circumstances surrounding the end of his life as for his bitter fatalistic prose. Bierce was a journalist/author and a Civil War veteran. In 1913, after the breakup of his marriage and the death of his sons, he set out for Mexico to meet Pancho Villa and observe the Mexican Revolution at first hand. He wrote to a friend:

Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!

With that, he disappeared into Mexico and was never heard from again, fueling wild speculation about his fate (i.e., Carols Fuentes' novel The Old Gringo). A fitting end for an author whose works combined a bleak view of life with elements of mystery.

Bierce's Civil War stories are bleak little tales of death and destruction. There's one here that nicely captures his cynical world view--most of us saw a film version of it in grade school--An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Peyton Farquhar is a Southern planter captured behind Union lines on a spy mission. As the story opens, he stands upon Owl Creek Bridge with a noose around his neck thinking of the wife and children he will never see again. But when the Union soldiers try to hang him, the noose slips and he swims off downstream. He flees across country until he finally reaches home and as he approaches his open armed wife...the rope snaps tight and we realize that he had imagined the whole episode on his way down. Here in one tidy package is the brutality of war, the futility of life and the bitter wit that characterizes his work.

He's not for all tastes, and I'm not generally big on short stories, but I like him.

GRADE: B

Ambrose Bierce's most famous story is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and many of his stories follow that same kind of pattern: an event is related with some surprising or revelatory twist at the end. The stories of the Civil War are especially interesting as they are not at all typical writings about war. Bierce does not see the battle so much as one of North against South rather he sees the war as the child sees the war in his story Chickamauga, his attitude is one combining fascination at the spectacle and utter disgust. Life is an unresolved jumble of confused forces and mixed emotions for everyone in Bierce's haunting tales that read like dreams but dreams informed by much contact with reality as Bierce was wounded twice(once in the head)in the war he describes. The descriptions of Civil War battles are told with great precision(and alone make this volume worth having) though there is always an additional element to make them more than war reportage, Bierce turns his accounts into stories because he sees through all the cannon smoke to the small detail which encapsulates the essential thing about an event. In one of my favorites, Killed at Resaca, a courageous captain gallops across a field to deliver a crucial message only to find the field is impassable because of a deep gully, instead of turning around however he merely waits for the enemy to shoot him. Going through his personal things a fellow soldier, the narrator of the story, finds a letter which explains this resolve. The letter reads:"...I could bear to hear of my soldier- lover's death, but not of his cowardice." Later, when the narrator has a chance to return the letter to its author he is asked by her how her soldier-lover died. "He was bitten by a snake,"is the narrators reply. Bierce's pen was dipped in wormwood and acid said H.L. Mencken. His stories of soldiers and civilians are told with a bitter and venomous clarity. His humor was always of the sort aquainted with the gallows. He said at age 71,"I am so old I am ashamed to be alive." And so he rode off to Mexico. It's hard to imagine Stephen Crane existing without the example of Ambrose Bierce just as it is hard to imagine Bierce without Poe. What a strange tradition of independents we have.

Ambrose Bierce was the one of the 2 writers of major significance to fight in and survive the Civil War (the other being Sidney Lanier). He was bitter to begin with, but the experience changed him into an even more cynical man. An eloquent writer, his best subject is fear: his ghost stories are dark and spooky - the civil war stories are as well, but with the added horror of a very real war and fear of battle. "Chickamauga" is one of my favorites - Bierce was actually at the battle but the story is fictional, and adds a supernatural angle to an infamous time and place. His writings are ghostly and vivid tales of America in the mid 19th century. The horrific experiences encountered in his tales are both real and imagined. If you are a ghost story fan or an American history/Civil War buff, you'll enjoy Bierce.

let me first say: some of these stories are truly great. the collection clearly shows great imagination, great writing, and a vide variety of original stories. yet, there is something... I don't know. many of the stories seem so unfinished. too abrupt, too short, too lame descriptions. again and again stories seem to lack one quality, destroying it, or simply having just a little bit to little to recommend it. i don't know. just didn't quite get into it i guess. perhaps it's just me.

Bierce ranks with Poe and Lovecraft as one of the greatest American writers of horror stories. This collection presents a selection of his supernatural tales, leaving out the Civil War stories for which he is perhaps better known. The first story, "The Death of Halpin Frayser", is a genuine nightmare, and well worth the price of the volume on its own. But the book also includes Bierce's genre-bending experiments with science fiction, "Moxon's Master" and "The Damned Thing"; the cynical Rashomon precursor "The Moonlit Road"; the apocalyptic "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and "The Eyes of the Panther", a lycanthrope story (maybe) which grows more unsettling the more you think about it, as well as a number of minor works which may be hard to find elsewhere. The only real flaw is E F Bleiler's sanctimonious introduction, which seems to attempt to escape the satiric snap of Bierce's work by repeating unpleasant (and largely unreliable) opinions of the writer. Watch out for this book - even the cover is scary.

This book should be considered a classic for all that it offers (and for such an unbelievably low price!) Better than today's masters of macabre, Bierce goes deep into the mind of macabre. His stories make you contemplate the truth of the existence of what he writes about. If you want truly "deep" horror, I would highly suggest the works of Bierce and this book is a great place to start.

No matter what it is called, be it the Civil War, the War Between the States or the War of Southern Secession, the time period 1861-65 was one of the most bloody, destructive and emotionally and ideologically charged periods in U.S. history. No author had a better grasp of it than Union comabt veteran Ambrose Bierce, whose stories in this short but riveting collection are not dry historical abstractions nor a cold analysis of the decisions of senior leaders, but a graphic record of the everday sweat, endless terror and cruel, surreal absurdity of armed conflict. From the eerie "Incident at the Owl Creek Bridge" to the gripping "Parker Adderson, Philosopher," Bierce honed the unique literary and expressive skills that served him well as a corrosive and controversial San Francisco newspaper columnist and astonishingly effective writer on horror and the occult. War to "Bitter Bierce" was the purest expression of the basic animal survival instinct; hardened and warped by endless fear, by the power of technological advances in weaponry and the stress and repeated brutality that turned ordinary human beings into ruthless killers--to the point where ideology and the color of the uniform no longer mattered. Bierce's experiences and deep cynicism led him to believe that human beings could do nothing but create meaningless tragedies. "War is a byproduct of the arts of peace," he was reported to have said, but these stories, a product of a bygone era, remain curiously contemporary because they tell us about everyday people--not unlike ourselves despite more than a century of difference--who fought a war, that, in light of the issues it raised and the forces it unleashed, has never really ended

This book stands with the Devil's Dictionary and In the Midst of Life as one of Ambrose Bierce's finest achievements. Dozens and dozens of short - sometimes very short - fables, each one a small, sharp needle in the backside of respectable hypocrisy. Some are simply written-out jokes, like the one about the baby ostrich who swallowed a bottle-cap ("Go quickly, my child, and swallow a corkscrew", says its mother); but the best of them to my mind are those featuring metaphors or abstract concepts as characters, like the one about the Moral Principle and the Temporary Expedient which met on a narrow bridge one day with predictably humiliating results. All the usual suspects are here - corrupt politicians, pious hypocrites, daffy judges and members of the Women's Press Association snarl, whimper, wheedle, preach, cheat and sneak alongside various Pairs of Hands making unauthorised incursions into Treauries, Streaks of Lightning failing to match the speed of Politicians Running for Office, and Blotted Escutcheons doing what Blotted Escutcheons do. Readers of the Devil's Dictionary, with its numerous improving anecdotes and rhymes, will know what to expect; anyone else is in for a treat, or possibly a coronary.

This is my first experience with Bierce's works, and I thought this book was pretty good for it's price. I really didn't think that any of these stories were scary or horrifying in any way, but some of them were interesting. I thought that some of the longer tales resembled Poe's with the sometimes unwanted droning of needless descriptive and large words. But, I would reccomend this book if you are a fan of Poe. I thought this book was a good bargain, since it is cheaper than a cup of coffee these days. So, I encourage you to take a look at it. It's a pretty good read, and what else can you buy for this price today?

This small book contains 12 of Ambrose Bierce's short stories (The Eyes of the Panther, The Moonlit Road, The Boarded Window, The Man and the Snake, The Secret of Macarger's Gulch, The Middle Toe of the Right Foot, A Psychological Shipwreck, A Holy Terror, John Bartine's Watch, Beyond the Wall, A Watcher by the Dead, and Moxon's Master). The stories cover ghosts, revenge, and otherworldly messages. This is by no means a definitive collection of Bierce's work, but it is a good, inexpensive introduction.

The stories are short and do not go into intense detail and background. These are compact and complete enough to be told around the campfire or just around the living room with the lights turned out. Bierce knows his reader and will often give the ending an unexpected twist.

This book showcases the fine writing talents of Ambrose Bierce, famous for his "Devil's Dictionary" among other things. These ghost stories are very fine and show a lot of thought and imagination. The title story in particular is extemely powerful in its perspective changes and genuine feeling of sadness experienced by the characters. I recommend this book and edition wholeheartedly.

If there was ever a doubt that Dorsey Stancil was a biggot, this is the proof. While it is a good history, it shows his rascist views and pure malice against the black community. He proudly boasts his love for Fascism and Nazi-like attitudes. If you would like to waste your hard earned money on this example of contemporary Nazism, then be my guest. Those of you who are opposed to this sort of malicious attack on the African American community and the Jewish faith in general please protest this vile man's twisted views of the southern most states.

I'm not sure I read the same book as the previous reviewer, and feel compelled to offer a different view.

Vanishing Gwinnett is a pictorial history of life and times in Gwinnett County, Georgia, which has evolved to be part of the ever-increasing metropolitan Atlanta area. The book is primarily captioned historical photographs provided by state and local historical groups. Early century Gwinnett industry, families and others pictures of interest are shown. It's a typical local history picture book. Perhaps some would find the included photo of an early 1900's lynching offensive. It's not an attractive part of our past, but is historical nonetheless. Fascism and pro-Nazi beliefs? Sure didn't see any references to any of that in the book I saw.

If you have an interest in this areas local history, you will find the book interesting. I don't know the author, but the book is well put together and certainly not slanted in any direction.

To put Bufe between the same covers with Bierce is a joke. His contribution is simply a left liberal attack against America and an outlet for radicalism run amuck..A waste of money and dumped in the garbage bin !

As usual, Ambrose Bierce said it best. In the preface to "The Devil's Dictionary," he describes the country being "flooded by its imitators with a score of 'cynic' books- The Cynic's This, The Cynic's That, and The Cynic's t'Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness."...

(What Bufe lacks in wit or talent, however, he more than makes up for in effrontery. Consider, for example, the pretentious title ("The Devil's Dictionaries..."), in which he places his own inadequate work on an equal footing with Bierce's timeless classic. What's next? "The Hamlets, Revised and Expanded, by William Shakespeare and Chaz Bufe?" Consider also his lame self-justification above: "Progressive-minded people have generally loved it, while fundamentalists and other authoritarians have generally hated it." In other words, if you fail to be amused by Bufe's weak attempts at humor, it must be because you're a fundamentalist authoritarian- it couldn't possibly be because the book just plain stinks. Talk about blaming the victim!

Postscript: In a new statement in the editorial review section above, the publisher blames this book's uniformly bad reviews on "right-wingers, fundamentalists, and prudes" who are trying to suppress sales of this book because it "gores their sacred cows." For the record: I'm not a right-winger, a fundamentalist, or a prude by any possible standards, and the only "sacred cows" of mine that this book "gores" are (a) that great authors whose works happen to be in the public domain should be treated with respect, rather than used for posthumous "endorsements" of inferior works that can't stand on their own merits, and (b) that reading a humor book should be an enjoyable experience.

A caustic exercise in political and social black humor. 300 plus definitions such as - JUSTICE, n. A term of vicious mockery, as in "equal justice under the law."