This is a classic text which presents a study of the structural forms and cultural patterns of the Japanese living in rural areas from the late feudal period to the 1960's. Particular emphasis is placed on agriculture, family life, village life, and the governmental forms of hamlet versus village. The chapter on the unchanging mentality of the Japanese farmer is very enlightening, and can be easily compared to similar attitudes of farmers throughout the world. This is a highly recommended and unfortunately out of print book which should be read by any and all students of Japanese culture and history.

I have used the earlier version of this book for a while and liked the fine photographs and concise, well chosen information on each page. The photos are interspersed with line drawings of critical floral features, a nice touch. I had only wished that the authors would produce a version with some of the common grasses and sedges. Voila, the 3rd edition includes a section on these ubiquitous but often overlooked plants that is up to the standard of the rest of the book. A note for novices: the book is organized by plant families, not flower color - this makes the book a bit harder to consult for occaisional use (there are simple keys to help you get to the right place) but getting to know the plant families will pay off in the long run. A very helpful book for the novice, advanced amateur, or botanist getting to know the area for the first time.

When I first saw the title to the book, "Wildlife of the New Millennium," I expected a review of new species. Instead I found a hilarious book dealing with man and wildlife facing the new millennium. The pictures add alot to the book. (I esp. love the cover). In a light-hearted way, Peterson brings to light issues that we face with urban sprawl. A great read for environmentalists, scientists, and outdoorsmen who know what is going on, but have a sense of humor.

This is a well written book about six extraordinary women. (Really, any woman who learned to fly befoer 1980 has got to be extraordinary, considering all the obstacles placed in her path by the male establishment as well as other women!) I was disappointed not to see Jerrie Cobb, but each of the women profiled deserve their place of honor.

Parents - give this book to your kids - both boys and girls! Give them flying lessons! The freedom of the skies is freedom indeed.

I will admit that this is the first book I have read about investing in real estate so I don't have much to compare it to. However, I found it extremely helpful and was able to get a wide range of information from many different areas in real estate. I found the following areas most interesting and helpful; appraisals, boosting value through creative improvements, and information on HUD homes. I did have a problem with how the author down plays the stock market with things like "you mine as well buy lottery tickets." He claims he was once naive when investing in real estate, I believe his naive nature still exists when making such general comments about the stock market. Nonetheless, I would recommend this book, just skip the first chapter and maybe the last two also (pay less tax, income for life).

...this book is at the top of the list for clarity, description of quantitative methods, and sound business sense. The opening chapter, though quite accurate, spent too much time touting real estate investing as superior to paper securities, but this is the only problem I had with the book. The theoretical concepts are outlined and well-illustrated. The practical concepts are surprisingly well-developed for a relatively short treatment of this complex subject matter. While I don't recommend executing a real estate investment strategy using this book alone, it will definitely encourage you to seek further education and experience. I especially appreciated the realistic take on 'creative' financing, the appraisal primer, and the quantitative examples.

Among all of the books on real estate investing, this one gives you the best solid introduction. Once you decide the exact strategy you wish to pursue, you will want more specialized detail (like on renovations). I also liked the authors' approach in that they tell you how to really analyze your local market to develop ideas that will likely yield the best profits. I detest books that lay out step by step the author's suppossed "secrets to success"--when in fact that strategy might not work in a different place or time. ( One book I read told me to only buy 3-BR, 2-BTH, brick houses. We don't even have brick houses here!)

GRACEFULLY INSANE is advertised as a narrative description of life inside McLean Hospital, "America's premier mental hospital". More accurately, perhaps, the volume is a superficial history of psychiatric care in the United States, or at least as practiced in the Boston area, using McLean as a backdrop.

Mental health care has come a long way from less enlightened times when, according to author Alex Beam, terrorizing patients into wellness was considered effective:

"One German asylum lowered patients into a dungeon filled with snakes." (My mother, a psychiatrist, once told me about a patient of hers who saw pink snakes on the ceiling. Hmmm, I wonder where Mom did her residency.)

The narrative is at its best when describing the evolution of 19th and 20th century methods of therapy: cold water dunking, bath treatments (hot air, electric light, vapor, salt, sitz, loofah), insulin coma, electroshock, metrazole shock, lobotomy, Freudian analysis, and psychopharmacology. Unfortunately, the author fleshes out the text by describing the experiences of specifically named individuals undergoing such cures, usually at McLean. It was then that my eyes began to glaze over and GRACEFULLY INSANE becomes almost a work of local interest since most of the inmates came from Boston's social upper crust, which regarded the hospital as a handy dumping ground for mentally challenged and inconvenient family members.

I was briefly re-invigorated when a 1948 sex scandal involving McLean's psychiatrist-in-chief and a nurse got the pair prosecuted on a Morals Charge (Oh, puhleeze!). And later in the 60s and 70s, when the badly behaved teenage children of the local gentry, relegated to the institution by clueless parents for too much drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll, upset the traditionally genteel environment.

While mildly entertaining and reasonably informative, GRACEFULLY INSANE came across as too much of a niche market product, appealing perhaps mostly to mental health professionals, residents of Boston and its environs, and fans of certain famous and terminally dysfunctional (i.e. suicidal) poets of New England heritage. I don't fall into any of these categories, though I'm now sufficiently interested to purchase THE BELL JAR and MOUNT MISERY, the former by Sylvia Plath based on her sojourn at McLean, and the latter by Dr. Stephen Bergman (pen name Samuel Shem) based on his medical residency there.

I'll give GRACEFULLY INSANE to my Mom. She can remember the Good Ol' Days of electroshock fondly.

Alex Beam's book about the McLean Hospital is more than just a history of a well known mental hospital It also manages to give a glimpse into the changes in psychiatric care, the various treatments that have gained and lost favor, the personalities that have shaped the institution and a glimpse of some of the people who have sought refuge and treatment within its walls. From the early 1800's, when an escaping patient was referred to as having "eloped" to the 1960's when many families turned to the hospital to guide them with their rebellious youth, McLean has been the caregiver to a wide range of personalities. Well-known writers were hospitalized there ( at one time causing a need to have been cared for at McLean to be considered a poet). Ray Charles spent his "rehabilitation " following a drug bust at McLean as well as other musicians including the Taylor family. "Gracefully Insane" is not just a psychiatric tale, it is a look at the changes in society, especially the upper crust (a big part of the McLean clentele). Just as the treatments and schools of thought fall in and out of favor, the hospital and those who administer its care seem to change constantly. Just the bare bones telling of what is involved in the day to day of such an institution can make facinatiing reading, and the added human element adds that much more. It gives a brief look into the reasons we need such a place and the people who live and work within its walls.

I really enjoyed reading Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital. It's a book that I found both entertaining and erudite. Alex Beam's exceptional writing talent brings to life a colorful and misunderstood institution, the famous McLean Hospital. He effortlessly interweaves annecdotal stories of the rich, famous, and talented (not necessarily in that order) with an insightful look into the history of mental health in America. I find this book to be both scholarly and a tantalizing read--no mean feat! Beam captures the tragic/comic aspects of his complex subject in a way that leaves me feeling wistful for the days when patients were able to stay long enough in a hospital to receive therapeutic benefits. Ultimately, the author vividly captures a McLean Hospital that, despite its faults and shortcomings, provided a much needed asylum from modern life for many fortunate enough to afford it.

This is such an interesting story. I had high hopes for the book. I got to page 60 or so and lost interest. It was a little slow in telling, and although the book is about the main character being a monster, it seemed to go around in circles. No way would a man like that get away with anything like that today. After reading into it, and as much as I detest bullies, I started to feel less and less compassion for the townspeople. Take a stand! Assulted victims would get threatened or beaten up so they dropped the charges!? That would have made me press charges MORE!

Well, what goes around comes around and I know how the story ends. It's very satisfying.

I read this book about 1 year ago while I was working for the lawyer that defended Ken McElroy. Gene McFadin which is pictured in the book. It was very interesting to hear the story being told from both sides. I recomend this book to anyone who likes page turners. Gene still has an office in Gallatin, MO to this day.

I was appalled to say the least that someone like Ken can run around terrorizing everybody and everything in his path. He stopped at nothing. He may have been a loving husband, and a good father, but he was a terrible uncaring person to live in the same town with. I have read hundreds of true crime books, but this was a definate page turner, not one paragraph did I skip.

Published in 1890, "Hunger" represents a breakthrough from traditional romantic European writing. Influenced by Dostoievsky and Nietszche, and anticipating Kafka, Joyce, and Camus, Hamsun creates a novel with intense personal (partially autobiographical) narration (using first and third person), developing on the theme of alienation and artistic obsession. It represents Hamsun'a masterpiece in his first literary production stage, in which social/political issues are of no concern, only the individual and his stream of consciousness.

It is a plot less novel, the setting is Christiana (now Oslo), and the main character is a starving, homeless young journalist, with a mercurial personality. His reactions have no middle term, he moves from extreme joy to acute depression, from arrogance to humility, on the verge of irrationality. It clearly reflects the author's early poverty, his pathological passion with aesthetical beauty, and an enormous driving force to perfect his concept that "language must resound with all the harmonies of music." "Hunger" anticipates Freud and Jung in their understanding of human nature, and creates a new literally hero, the alienated mind.

Of Norwegian nationality, Knut Hamsun won de the Nobel Price for Literature in 1920. In real life he was ostracized by his countrymen and the literary community as a result of his radical individualism, and political/social views. Yes, Hamsun was a convicted Nazi, friend of Hitler and Goebbels, an advocate of the "pure" race (Jews should be expelled from Europe, Blacks should be returned to Africa), and he applauded German invasion of Norway. Neddless to say, when WWII was over, he dearly paid the price: imprisonment, confiscation, and poverty. When he died at the age of 92 (1952) he showed no remorse and helf firmly to his beliefs.

The question arises: to what extent can we separate art from the artist, creation from the creator? Maybe another Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer, himself a Jew, can answer this question for us when he states: "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun."

exciting, youthful, rebellious - these are the adjectives swimming around in my head when i think of Hunger. If you're a disaffected teenager, read this as a tonic - there is hope, others have been more disaffected before. If you're a disaffected parent, read this as a tonic too - there is hope, others have been more disaffected than your wayward kid.

Underneath the irresistible depression cycle of the hero here is a seriously unnerving compulsion to self-harm and mental instability. It is a novel that demonstrates an incredible ability on the part of the author to invent an original literary device - the loner monologue in this case - and carry it through with utter confidence. Hunger is a very selfish book. It obsesses about its narrator. It is no great piece of literature-as-therapy. It offers no answers to big life questions for the hungry reader, in fact, it is more likely to make you ask questions: about the mind, the "system", capitalism, social boundaries and taboos and, lastly, creativity. This is a debut to be reckoned with.

I could not actually say whether this book is "good" or "bad". Furthermore, I am not able to discuss about the necessity of hunger and degradation to pursue art. What I can tell is that reading Hunger is a shocking experience in which the reader cannot avoid wondering why a person should be reduced to such a terrible stage of body and mind just for the sake of...art? Nevertheless, I find his book absolutely worth reading whether it may be upsetting or not.

It is like getting into a dark and narrow tunnel, which becomes narrower and darker with every farther step. It seems as if there's no way out. But sometimes it is: the main character own mind. It is in his mind where the action takes place. The rest of the characters and circumstances within the book are simple devices to stimulate his senses and sensitivity and keep the ball rolling.

Finally, I reached Hamsun through Miller's works. Now I can reach Miller through this disturbing and unforgettable book. It is clear that Hamsun was many years ahead his time. It struck me how modern his writing looks compared to that of other writers of the XX century.

Leo Tolstoy is brilliant at expressing and delving to the core of human emotions, his insight into both males and females emotions is exceptional. The different stages of love and the beauty of death. Written in the 1800's and still prevalent today.

I found the stories to linger too long on emotions as the pace grew slower and slower, almost to an irritating halt.

An interesting read, although for the reader with a bit of patience.

This story begins with the death of Ivan Ilych, a well-respected member of the Court of Justice in the late 1800s. The story follows this event by going into flashback, and exposing the significant events that lead up to his death. Ivan Ilych's unsatisfying life primarily consisted of drowning himself into his work, putting up with married life, hosting social dinners, and playing bridge with his friends and colleagues. One of the most crucial events pertains to Ivan Ilych being diagnosed with an illness. This forces him to analyze his way lof living. I really appreciated this specific short story, because it expressed how much a society's views and beliefs can effect an individual's way of life. I highly reccommend this book to everyone.

This is my first Tolstoy book. Excellent, breathtaking, and strinkingly similiar to some people. I read this book as a final assignment in my Medical Ethics class-the reading is short but full of mind tickling content. If you brain is hungry, read this. I now look forward to other Tolstoy greats.

This is an enjoyable book that is not quite willing to trust the story. The work is well designed - delightful illustrations - and has a very rudimentary introduction to Buddhism preceding the stories. The traditional stories are well told; the original, modern tales frequently succeed. However, the author often feels obligated to provide a commentary - just a sentence or two - to explain the story. There are traditional stories that need a comment or two for readers with little or no knowledge of Buddhist or religious teaching stories as a whole. But often, such as the tale of two monks and a woman carried over a stream, the commentary limits the story's meaning rather than clarifying it. The author needs to trust the stories.

I love this book. I only wish there were more like it. IT was a very easyand thrilling book to read with life lessons for those who are even not Buddhist. NOt to mention one of the best ways to describe buddhism into an interesting short story. (A boy in a fire)

I was extremely pleased with this book. It is not meant to be a profound work on Buddhism, but is introductory in nature. I would never have purchased or read a book on this subject, but a friend introduced it to me. I read one fable and I was hooked. I couldn't stop reading it. It makes me want to explore Zen at a deeper level. I liked it so much I am ordering 4 now to share with family and friends.