Breece Pancake killed himself with a shotgun in Charlottesville, Virginia on Palm Sunday in 1979. He was 26 years old at the time and had just completed a graduate writing program at the University of Virginia. Four years later "The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake" was published, a collection of twelve stories that posthumously established his literary reputation as one of the finest short story writers in twentieth century American literature.

Pancake grew up in the hollows of West Virginia and each of the carefully wrought stories in this collection deals with the seemingly desperate lives of the working poor in that part of the country. They are remarkably crafted stories, written with a deep sense for the locale and the people from which they are drawn. They are also models of precision, the kind of stories that deserve to be read over and over, studied for the way in which they use foregrounding and the mundane details of everyday life--albeit everyday life that quietly screams with the desperation of poverty, deadening work, drinking, promiscuity, and brutality-to draw complex portraits of people who endure, even when endurance is no more than a substitute for hope. As he writes in "A Room Forever," the story of a tugboat mate spending New Year's Eve in an eight-dollar-a-night hotel room where he drinks cheap whiskey out of the bottle and eventually ends up with a teen-aged prostitute: "I stop in front of a bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going. But I know they can't run away from it or drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it. It's always there."

The best of these stories are "Trilobites," "The Honored Dead," "Fox Hunters," and "In the Dry." But there really isn't a weak story in the bunch. Every story is captivating, every one an exemplar of what good short story writing should be. At the end, the only thing that disappoints, that leaves the reader discomforted, is the thought that Pancake died so young, that these are the only stories we have by a truly remarkable writer.

In this volume, the writer's surviving voice really hits home and stays there. Like that perfect song that stays in your head and carries you through the day, Breece Pancake's words and wisdom echoe through the reader's mind forever after reading them. In this life, there is always something around to remind of a Breece Pancake story. From the time weathered fossils in the creek beds to the rare West Virginia 120 m.p.h. strait stretches, after reading this volume I see Pancake everywhere, no matter where I am in the world. Like the trilobite preserved beneath the earth that hides it, these stories are a tangible (and for some reason widely unknown), history of a time and generation that, like the tragedy of Pancake's suicide, is destined to be repeated if ignored.

There are times when things come together in such a way that you know it's perfect. It can be a phrase of music, a blending of colors and sounds in film, or, in this case, the words of a story. This book tells stories that fall together in a timeless way, but are still firmly rooted in a specific place and time.

Having grown up in West Virginia, there were parts of these stories that spoke to me from a sort of "native" perspective. But more to it was the emotion that was the core, the skin and the stitching of each of these stories.

It's a good book to own. To read from when you feel like being taken to another place for a while. And to carry a piece of that place with you once you put the book down.

James McPherson is considered by many to be the greatest Civil War historian in the US these days. His one-volume classic about the War, Battle Cry for Freedom, is the one most recommended to those who want the best book about the war. Therefore, it was with great interest that I read Drawn with the Sword.

McPherson does not disappoint with this book which is really a series of essays about various topics from the war. The essays range from Why the South Lost to Who Actually Freed the Slaves. Based mostly on previous articles and lectures, all the essays are excellent, and McPherson pulls no punches during his detailed analysis. For example, McPherson disputes the claim by some recent social historians that argue that the slaves freed themselves, and that Lincoln played a reluctant part in the process. McPherson clearly lays out the argument that Lincoln went to great lengths to ending slavery, and that without him it probably would not have happened.

McPherson also gives his educated opinion about Lee's performance as a general, and whether or not the South actually could have won the war. Two topics which I find fascinating because they are so disputed, even among professional historians. Speaking of historians, I particularly liked McPherson's final essay about the challenge that professional historians face when trying to bring history to the masses. He offers a fresh glimpse into this problem, and spells out the potential danger that historians face by making themselves irrelevant to the general public. To find out more, read the essay.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a student of the American Civil War, like myself. The essays will add to your knowledge, and broaden your perspective of the war. If you are new to this part of history, I recommend that you start instead with McPherson's Pulitzer Winning book about the war, Battle Cry of Freedom.

I've really enjoyed McPherson's Drawn With The Sword. I should start off by saying that this review pertains to the audible/cassette version of this book.

The book is a collection of essays on the Civil War. This makes it a little different than my previous Civil War readings in that the book is not "all about Gettysburg" or "all about Shiloh". The book covers topics such as the differences and similarities between the North and South, period books such as Harriot Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, total war, the characters of Grant and Lincoln, a critique of the movie Glory, analysis of the Gettysburg Address, etc...

The reading on the cassette struck me as a tad monotone. But this may be because I just finished a theatrical reading of a BBC production of Tolkein's Lord Of The RIng. But after a bit you become so absorbed in the content -- and the content is excellent -- that you don't listen how it is being said.

Very enjoyable. Recommended.

James McPhereson has proven himself with "Battle Cry of Freedom" (the best one volume treatment of the Civil War) and "Why the Fought". This book is a collection of his essays and lectures on various Civil War topics. As such, it lacks the central theme of a book. It does, however, allow one of America's most learned CW historians to range over vairous topics and explore them with his insightful thinking and clear, bold prose.

The topics are varied, from a look at the origns of the war, why it turned out the way it did, the continuing impact of the war on American society (with a nice discussion of the movie "Glory") as well as a collection of essays on the Enduring Lincoln. A nice endpiece looks at problems with current day historical scholarship and historians and is a good argument for getting that important field of study back on track and away from the political agenda that has unfortunately subverted the purpose of many historians.

This is a good book for the reader who knows something of the war and enjoys an intellectual treatment of various war topics that go beyond storytelling. An important and telling addition to Civil War scholarship that will appeal to the layman as well as the deep reader.

This book is a great practical introduction to PCR. It truly does cover the full spectrum of PCR topics from background to benchtop (real-world) applications. It is very clearly written and easy to understand. I own about 10 books on basic and advanced PCR methods, and this one is by far the best. If you want a clear, concise, comprehensive introduction to PCR, this book is it.

This book explains really good all the basics of the PCR.
For the beginning PhD student, or even before, all you need to know and even more is inside. Some applications are more complicated, but the book is never too difficult to understand.
A must-have!!

PCR by McPherson and Moeller, is a great great little book that addresses the practical and theoretical aspects of the polymerase chain reaction. The fundamental aspects of PCR, ranging from reagents and instrumentation, to PCR optimization, to the analysis of genomes, are outlined in each of 10 chapters with companion protocols for each application. Each technique is explained with clarity and numerous illustrations greatly aid in the understanding. I tried personally the "SOEing" method to generate a deletion mutants and it worked to perfection. Another great feature of this book is that it explains many of the potential pitfalls associated with PCR technology in a very comprehensive manner, and gives simple solutions to remedy these problems. PCR has been around for some 15 years, and the many applications of this revolutionary technique have often been overlooked due to the sheer number; PCR takes many of these new applications and makes them simple for the reader, and in that it constitutes one of the more comprehensive educational books on the subject. PCR will surely simplify the task of students and veteran molecular biologists alike, and for these reasons I highly recommend it.

This is a massive book. It will soon be "THE REFERENCE" to most all Civil War debates.

If I were to pick just one book to go to, for a search of Civil War information, this one would have to be it.
From Battle, Politics, Leaders, speechs, debates, economics, literature, etc., IT IS ALL IN HERE.

This is one book that everyone would be proud to own. ( As well, as the kind that almost caves your chest in, laying in bed reading--It IS A BIG BOOK.)

There is such a wealth of information, and every thing is solidily backed up with excellent references. It's a fantastic book.

This humongous encyclopedia is easily the best reference I have ever seen on the Civil War. The thing is 2600 pages long, has 1600 entries, and weighs about 7 pounds, and is quite well written and edited. It covers military, political, and social events, and biographies equally. The articles are generally well written but short and introductory rather than exhaustive. Has lots of photos, illustrations and maps (the maps are OK but not spectacular), and a wonderful bibliogaphy section. I can't recommend this book enough. I learn something new every time I open it.

First of all, this thing is MASSIVE! When you're done reading it you can use it for weight in an exercise routine. However, it has over 2200 pages so it will be a long read. That having been said, I believe this will henceforth be THE standard reference guide to the Civil War. It is packed with great photos and maps, some I have never seen before. The capsule summaries are well written and informative. I have glanced through this book and now I am ready to dive in and read it cover to cover. Get this one if you are a Civil War or History buff!

James McPherson is not only the preeminent Historian of the US Civil War, but one of the greatest historians working today. He offers razor sharp analysis of complicated issues, with fair consideration of all points of view. Best of all, McPherson does all that in clear, concise and at times poetic language, that is remarkably easy to read.

'Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution' enjoys all the benefits of McPherson's considerable scholarship. Its problems are almost exclusively editorial.

This thin volume (152 pages of text; 20 more pages for notes, bibliography and an index) contains seven essays about the two themes in the title - The US Civil war seen as the second American Revolution, and Abraham Lincoln's role in it.

The first essay argues convincingly that the Civil War did radically change the Unites States. From a Slaveholding Republic, it became a free one. Politically, the center of gravity moved from the South to the north. Economically, the Industrial revolution, earlier contained in New England, spread out and defeated the plantation economy. In the South, the prevailing order was weakened, although not surmounted, and the situation of Blacks improved considerably, although equality was still very far. The theme McPherson is most interested in, however, is the change from a philosophy of negative liberty - freedom from government oppression - to one of positive liberty - the right for protection - guaranteed by the Federal government.

The second essay discusses Lincoln's role as the leader of the revolution. Lincoln, McPherson argues, was a pragmatic revolutionary. The revolution, which he brought on America, was caused by Lincoln's accurate assessment of necessities, not by a strong ideological tie to the revolution. Lincoln was no Lenin - he held sternly to the one principle of democracy, and the second American Revolution happened as a by-product of defending this principle.

In the third essay, 'Lincoln and Liberty', McPherson discusses how Lincoln's struggle for positive liberty was seen as despotic by those holding the principles of negative liberty. The Republicans wanted to restrict and ultimately destroy the rights of Southerners to hold slaves - and to enforce these restrictions by government action, if that was what it took.

Lincoln's role as supreme military commander is a neglected issue in Civil War historiography, claims McPherson, and he sets out to remedy that in the following essay. Lincoln's most important contribution, he concludes, was his unyielding hold on the doctrine of Unconditional Surrender. This issue also returns in Essay number 6, which compares Lincoln to Northerners who were not nearly as clear about the goal of fighting as he was.

Lincoln's rhetoric and the use of metaphors is the subject of the fifth essay. In an interesting comparison with Jefferson Davis, McPherson concludes that Lincoln's usage of metaphors in writing and speaking made him a superb communicator, which Davis wasn't. Thus, McPherson agrees with David Potter that had Lincoln been the leader of the South in the war, the confederacy might have maintained its independence.

One weakness of the collection is the lack of coherence in topics. The illuminating comparison between Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln in this essay, for example, is sadly missing from other chapters. Take War Leadership -Lincoln's grasp of the northern grand strategy made him replace popular generals who nonetheless could not follow his concept of total war. Jeff Davis on the other hand, despite his superior military background (as a war hero and a West-Point graduate), never articulated war aims as Lincoln did, and the Confederate war policy was constructed de facto by the decision of its irregularly brilliant generals. Lincoln would have made much better use of Robert E. Lee than Davis did.

The absence of such themes concurring through the book weakens the narrative, and it remains more an anthology than a focused monograph. Another such problem is the repetition between the essays. The final essay repeats almost all of the discussion about Isaiah Berlin's concepts of positive and negative liberty, before launching into the new theme. That theme, the turning away from positive liberty back to negative liberty during reconstruction, is fascinating. During reconstruction, Republicans had to constantly use the military in order to enforce equality for blacks on the unwilling Southrons. The disillusionment from Reconstruction and the resurrected fear from governmental tyranny left the racist policies of the South for another century, when Martin Luther King finished that job that Abraham Lincoln has began.

Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution is a collection of seven related essays by James M. McPherson. Each essay shows us a perspective from which the Civil War can be seen as a "revolution." They are all provocative and intense -- two things that are rare in history. From the first page to the last you'll be saying to yourself "I never thought of it that way before ..." A must for anyone even remotely interested in the Civil War.

This is an acute uncovering of the concealed revolution in the Civil War era with its great transformation, as the released energy 'under a war footing' accelerated the real evolutionary emergence of the freedom declared but never fulfilled in the age of the Founding Fathers.
One of the ironies is that the reification of concepts of revolution can result in confusion,while, here, change happened without the label. It is also true that the last step foundered, and the counterrevolution began and hardened, in the tragic era of reconstruction, leaving still another revolution with an ambiguously sour note.

Halabi had no doubt raised the bar for the books to come on internet architecture and so far no one has come close with a book like this. Written by the best in the business today.

I picked it up basically for BGP and it covers all the details of BGP with real world applications. Icky topics like Synchronization, IGP-BGP interaction etc are explained with amazing clarity with diagrams and later on in chapter 10-11 you can see the actual IOS config. I learned a lot from Tuning BGP capabilities chapter which also covers route filtering and route-maps.

Apart from BGP, the entire book is full of useful information. If you have a job in which you have to deal with routing protocols, be it design, implementation, testing, administration you ought to read this book, if nothing else, just for the heck of it.

If you are looking for a book describing all the things which need to be taken care of when planning and implementing BGP then you will appreciate this book.
Mr Halabi provides a lot of example set-ups which are, for the people working in the Internet networking industry, very familiar. The examples range from a typical customer who wants BGP connectivity to multi-customer and international backbone configurations.
Aside from the many examples, which serve the text well in getting the material understood, Mr Halabi takes care to describe the fundamentals associated with it as well.
However, this is not a book for the faint at heart. Prior knowledge of IP and routing will be useful in order to appreciate this book.
Of course, this books focuses on the Cisco IOS architecture syntax, but the explanations and details will suit anyone willing to learn in-depth about BGP.
The other bible is [Juniper's] John W. Stewart's book: BGP4 Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet. Also a must-read. Having both books will tell you everything you need.

I am the architect of a leading MPLS VPN service which uses BGPv4 with MPLS extensions. I constantly refer back to this book for standard BGP scenarios (it has no MPLS VPN info). I have recommended this book to all our techincal support people and our customers for designing BGP peering networks.

The book is well written, well organized and easy to follow. It has great breath of BGP applications. It is a tremendous help for those designing AS peering networks.

It gives a brief overview of internet routing then dives into BGP. After the BGP protocol description, the next part of the book has applications geared around scenarios/case studies. The last part is specific Cisco IOS configurations for the scenarios in the previous part. The scenarios cover, to list a few: load balancing, preference routing (primary/backup), route redistribution, default routes, route summarization, route reflectors and confederations (scaling), damping (stability), policy control (filtering/manipulating routes, attributes and community values).

Note that it is not a BGP specification nor a Cisco IOS reference. A better title would be "BGP Applications".

I am a fan of Victoria Taylor Murray's Lambert Series and was very excited to discover her series was purchased by Thomas Peeler and now being offered in Hard Copy Edition. I will order the 4 bks. to the series for myself and a few close friends. Congratulations Victoria!

From the moment I began reading this book I was captivated by this writer's adult fantasy. The characters are exciting and the plot a real attention grabber. I just ordered the remaining three books to this series and look forward to reading them.

WOW, What a great new cover! I loved The Lambert series and am so excited that the series is now available in this new hard copy version. I can hardly wait to order the remaining books in the series. THANK YOU THOMAS T. BEELER!!!

Grant here gives a consistently interesting account of his role in many of the major campaigns of the Civil War. His prose is clear and his accounts of battles and strategies quite readable, even to those without particular expertise in military history. He sticks to the story, making few attempts to even scores with his numerous critics in the Army or the press.

One thing that should be noted is that these 'personal memoirs' are in many ways remarkably impersonal. There is only a quite brief account of Grant's youth, and his wife, to whom he was apparently quite devoted, is barely mentioned. Grant tells the story of his career as an officer with increasing levels of responsibility, but says little about himself. Also, the memoirs end with the assassination of Lincoln, and do not at all discuss his presidency.

The edition I read was lacking in maps, which was a serious drawback, however it was a different edition than the one discussed here. Because so much of the book focuses on the tactics of specific campaigns, a good set of maps is a very valuable addition, and would be advisable to check for in any edition you consider reading or buying.

No less an eminent man of letters than Mark Twain called Ulysses S. Grant's "Personal Memoirs" "the best [memoirs] of any General's than Caesars." Having now read this outstanding work along with those of Julius Caesar, William T. Sherman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Colin Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf, I must agree with Mark Twain's assessment. For sheer honesty, humility, and simple but powerful language, U.S. Grant's memoirs are without peer.

Grant allows the reader to go along with him and live once again his experiences during the Mexican War and American Civil War. He interjects his own judgments and opinions sparingly, yet always honestly. Where he feels he made mistakes, he admits them freely, and his criticisms of his colleagues is always tempered by an obvious attitude of professionalism. The fact that Grant wrote a memoir of such eloquence while dying from cancer makes it all the more powerful a book.

I found this modern library edition especially outstanding. The introductory notes by Caleb Carr and Geoffrey Perret, while brief, are extremely informative. Maps and etchings from the original 1885 Charles Webster & Co. edition are included, as is General Grant's report to Secretary of War Stanton on Civil War operations during 1864-65. This appendix makes fantastic reading by itself!

I highly recommend this outstanding edition to all Civil War and military history enthusiasts. It is simply the best military memoir I've ever read.

I have never been much of a Civil War fan, but after reading "The Killer Angels" by Shaara, a historical fiction about Gettysburg, I was interested in following up with some non-fiction about the most important event in US History. This book kept me turning the pages from end to end. Despite its bulk (some 618 pages) I simply couldn't put the book down, as Grant's matter-of-fact description of the events that surrounded him was completely engrossing.

Grant was not an extraordinary man or brilliant tactician, his soldiers did not have the same obsession with him that the South held for Lee, he simply saw the war for what it was, a campaign against a rebellion. He looked at the entire war in its entirety, from battlefront to battlefront, and he repeatedly used that to his advantage. Many times he makes reference to deploying troops to no clear end other than to occupy an enemies flank, this often as a junior with no authority over the battle as a whole. Grant was a man of action, who realized he had to take a step in order to walk a mile. He took the battle to the enemy, divised clear and necessary steps which were needed to win the war as a whole. He was a general who did not just see the war as independent sets of battles, but saw those battles as a means to ending the Civil War.

One of my favorite parts of the text was watching the scope of Grant's vision widen. Starting with his actions in the Mexican American War his vision is very limited: he sees only the immediate battle, and his descriptions focus on minutiae reflecting his low rank. His vision escalates with his rank, until the end of the book, with the surrender of Lee, he sees and describes the entire army, and battles that would have once taken chapters to described are now dismissed in single sentences.

My one disappointment with the book was that it ended with the surrender of Lee at Appomatox. I would have liked to learn more about his actions after the war, and especially learned more about his presidency. I wish that there were similar autobiographies by other presidents, and certainly feel that this one elevated my expectations of all other autobiographies!

Favote Excerpts:

"It is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may always expect the most efficient service." - Grant (page 368)

"All he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance." - Grant on Lincoln (page 370)

"Wars product many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true." - Grant (page 577)

"To maintain peace in the future it is necessary to be prepared for war." - Grant (page 614)

"The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world." - Grant (page 616)

I first became acquainted with this book twelve years ago when I was a college student taking an American Civil War course and have highly recommended it ever since. The serious history student will find the book to be very comprehensive, covering not only the war itself, but the antebellum years and the period of reconstruction as well. The social, economic, military and political causes and consequences of the war are all covered in great detail. Professor McPherson has also included many visual aids such as maps and charts which the reader will find quite instructive. Needless to say, it was, and has remained, one of my primary resources whenever I need to refresh my memory concerning just about any topic on the war. I wore out my first copy and recently was forced to replace it with a second. However, Ordeal by Fire is really a text book and subsequently not always an easy read. If you prefer your history in narrative form, I highly recommend McPherson's book Battle Cry of Freedom instead.

I would just like to say that a friend of mine gave me a hardback cover of Ordeal by Fire, which he says he found at a town dump. Go figure! I'm only on page 250 but the amount of knowledge that I gained is beyond belief. What a smart man. And I agree with the above review that McPherson writes elegantly as well as historically accurate.

Thanks James,

JoeSlyman@Hotmail.com

I might be a little biased, I read this book for a class McPherson taught. However, I am not a history buff, and took it to fulfill a requirement. I soon found McPherson is as good a writer as he is lecturer. I found the book extremely clear and well written. Sometimes all the battles got a little confusing, I thought the sections on society, before during, and after, were clearer than those on battles. I highly recommend this book as a comprehensive source on the Civil War. Besides being the foremost expert on the Civil War, McPherson is an extremely good writer, he won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1989.

I don't know where the breastfeeding manuals get the information that "97% of women can breastfeed" because my experience and that of many I've talked to is that one can try awfully hard to exclusively breastfeed and still fail. With both of my children, I've had to pump, supplement, use a lactation consultant, and still had to use both bottle and breast. My first child ended up dehydrated at one point and both lost weight until interventions were started. I ended up with neither the convenience of breastfeeding nor the flexibility of bottle feeding. The harder one tries, the more deflating and discouraging it is when breastfeeding never completely clicks.

So this book is a welcome find for those of us that don't fit into the so-called "97%". Its stories are real life successes and failures in breastfeeding, rather than theoretical or idealized examples. The variety of stories is so great that most mothers would find at least one story that resonates with their own experience. They reflect the true intensity of establishing breastfeeding and the hardships of the newborn period. The only mothers who might not care about these stories are those that never had any intention of breastfeeding.

I met the authors at a book signing and they are neat ladies. One has decided not to have another child given her first experience. Her example is an illustration of how overwhelming the experience of breastfeeding can be when it goes wrong.

I thought this book was absolutely fantastic. Even though it is not a "how-to" book, every situation and problem you could have breastfeeding is covered by one or more of the contributors. This book really helped me to continue with breastfeeding, even during the painful periods. I would highly recommend it. The only critique I have is that there are an awful lot of contributors from Decatur, Georgia (wherever that is!) - also the area where the authors are from. I would have liked to have at least seen more authors from different parts of the US.

This is a great book to educate parents-to-be, reassure nursing parents, and allow parents of older children to wax nostalgic. Some are funny, some are intensly emotional, and others are quite practical and prosaic. Although many of the essays tell of the joys of successful breastfeeding, others describe the pain that often accompanies nursing and even the satisfaction of giving up for the bottle. The essay format is perfect for new mothers, you can actually finish something during naptime!