I was trying to find the right girlfriend and I was always uptight. A friend gave me this book. It didn't seem relevant at first, but I read it anyhow. I started focusing more on the people around me, cultivating my friendships like it said in the book.

Now I don't feel lonely and uptight any more. This is not a book about dating, but guess what? I've been meeting and dating some very nice women. I'm not sure if I'm ready to settle down just yet . . .

Thank you, Dr. Schlecter

When I first bought this book, I was expecting a few good laughs... what I got was amazing. I cracked open the book and cracked a grin, a few pages later I was chuckling, a couple misprints later, howling... after about five minutes with this, I was reduced to nearly to tears with sides so sore and so out of breath, I was worried I had to stop before I got a hernia or a heart attack, but I couldn't. You cannot set this book down willingly, and it would take a major nuclear war to get me to part with it in the middle. Still, I don't recommend taking this out in public-- you'll be laughing and twitching like you were insane. I loaned it to a friend of mine one day... he got kicked out of study hall for laughing too hard.

With headlines like "Dead man found in cemetary", "Mimes banned for abusive language" and "USPS begins program to help 'stamp out literacy'" you can see what I mean here. And that's just the tip of the iceberg-- these aren't even the best ones in the book. Sure, you can't give Leno all the credit (that goes to the many, many editors across the world who screwed up) but his observations on many of these articles were hilarious. Once you have this book, you just begin to wonder how you ever survived without it.

This is probably the funniest book I ever read--even over Dave Barry's. Somehow, a 10 doesn't seem adequate to describe it.

One last note to parents, though: don't let your young kids see this book... some of the misprints are ones that get a little blue.

Knowledge Management is about the "brainware' or "human capital" that exists in a corporation. Today a corporation must invest in their human capital through certification programs, training and education courses, forums and knowledge sharing sessions to maintain and keep their competitive edge. Some believe that 70 to 80% of what's learned is through informal means versus formal methods like reading books, brochures and documents. None the less, all knowledge must be captured and managed effectively and efficiently.

But for 35 years, the USS Liberty has been a festering wound. More than 100 books were written about the incident, which still routinely figures in news and magazine articles.

In 1986, a professor suggested to A. Jay Cristol that his U.S. Navy, international law and judicial backgrounds uniquely qualified him to examine the facts of the case. He then began an investigation that spanned 14 years.

A retired U.S. Navy Captain A. Jay Cristol, accessed every living and written source he could locate, including more than 500 witnesses he interviewed in four nations. He reviewed five television productions, more than 100 books, hundreds of articles, and more than 3,087 documents--including all those from at least ten official U.S. investigations and three official Israeli ones.

Throughout, Cristol focused on the one (right) question--whether the attacking Israelis knew that their target was an U.S. ship. In 1986, Cristol did not know the answer. Nor did he, like many discredited conspiracy theorists, assume that Israel maliciously premeditated the attack against a vessel they knew to be American.

Every official investigation had concluded that while intentional, the attack was also clearly a case of mistaken identity. After conducting the most extensive research ever on this topic--Cristol agreed. Several Israeli and American mistakes caused Israeli forces to mistake the USS Liberty for an Egyptian vessel.

Cristol admirably establishes the peak Cold War context in which the incident occurred. Only five years earlier, the U.S. had humiliated the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis, forcing it with the threat of superior nuclear and naval power to back down. Nikita Khrushchev, who was deposed in 1964, consequently had accelerated warship construction to try to gain Soviet command of the high seas.

Superpower naval confrontations naturally followed. Soviet vessels would follow U.S. warships and intentionally interfere with their operations, particularly in the Mediterranean. Often, Soviet or U.S. destroyers would steer on a collision course for their adversaries in high-stakes naval games of "chicken." Ships bumped in many instances. The escalation eventually led to the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement, but in 1967, incidents still occurred regularly.

The Vietnam conflict was also in full swing. In fact on June 2, 1967, U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers accidentally attacked the Soviet merchant ship Turkestan in Cam Pha Harbor in North Vietnam--just when Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin's was set to arrive to deliver a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The rapidly deteriorating situation described at length in Michael Oren's new book, Six Days of War , became full-scale war on June 5, 1967 when Israel sent its entire airforce to destroy Egypt's Air Force in less than 80 minutes. Many Arab leaders vocally (and falsely) charged the U.S. and Britain with supplying the attack aircraft to Israel, even when they knew otherwise.

Within the Israeli forces there were frictions as well. When the war broke out, Israel's Air Force had 76 state-of-the-art Mirage fighter jets, plus Super Mystere B-2s, Mystere IV's and a cadre of well-trained pilots. By contrast, the Israeli Navy had only three obsolete destroyers, nine motor torpedo boats (three then deployed in the Red Sea) and some miscellaneous small craft. Israeli inter-service rivalries were palpable.

On May 23, the Liberty, an U.S. National Security Agency intelligence vessel, was ordered to take a position 13 miles off Port Said, Egypt. Such ships often sailed off various coasts to listen, record signal emissions, chart their sources' locations, and gather any data of political or military use in the Cold War. NSA civilian employee Frank Raven protested sending the Liberty into a potential war zone. But his lone voice of dissension was overruled.

On May 24, when the Liberty began steaming 3,000 nautical miles from the Ivory Coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, the Cairo newspapers reported that Egypt had mined the Straits of Tiran.

On May 27, U.S. Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. ordered U.S. Sixth Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Martin not to operate aircraft within 100 nautical miles of Egypt's coast. When the Liberty arrived in Rota, Spain, linguists trained in Arabic and Russian reported aboard. None assigned to the ship spoke Hebrew.

On June 6, Israel destroyed more than 150 Egyptian tanks in the Sinai and captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. Nasser broke diplomatic relations with the U.S. and closed the Suez Canal. The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously for a cease-fire. Among the warring nations of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Israel, Jordan alone accepted it. Six Israeli demolition team divers were captured in Port Alexandria. Syria shelled a number of communities on Israel's northern border.

Into this active war zone sailed the Liberty , not knowing that on June 7, the NSA and Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered the ship to withdraw 100 miles off the Sinai coast. The orders had been cabled--but all five messages were sent via the Philippines and arrived the day after the attack.

Cristol spells out precisely how and why the Liberty was mistaken. The attack was not pre-planned or covered up. None of the seamen aboard the USS Liberty could have known all the facts surrounding the case.

He also shows that, had Israel and the U.S. played up their extensive investigations, they could have long since silenced false charges of a conspiracy and cover-up.

For all reasonable human beings, this superb piece of investigative reportage and scholarship should resolve the myriad mysteries of this sad event once and for all.

--Alyssa A. Lappen