I am a fifth grade teacher and am always on the lookout for new books to challenge students. I picked up this novel and looked at the jacket. It seemed innocent enough for a fifth grader. Upon reading it I felt that the subject matter was far to advanced for my classroom. I believe that the seventh grade might be a better spot for this novel.

The book itself was very engaging. The author uses baseball as a venue for healing. I think that Mr. Johnson has quite a future ahead of him.

This is an elegant and haunting depiction of adolescence. I came across this book while browsing... and was stuck by its cover. I expected a lighthearted book about little league baseball. I discovered something much greater. This story and these characters have strayed with me for weeks. I look forward to reading more of Mr. Johnston's work.

Tex gets something quite different for the summer when instead of spending the time with his father and his new girlfriend, he lands in the lap of his mother and her new family. Tex's friendship with his new stepfather is uncertain, until a common connection in baseball introduces him to a new world and brings new family ties. Just as all seems to be coming together, Tex makes a discovery which will again change his family's life. Realistic, involving fiction.

The deeper I got into this book, the better it got. There were a few moments that is got a little "deep" for me, but it turned out to be a very practical book, with great ideas on communicating to today's culture. I liked the author's views on how the church should not "run" from pop-culture, but rather embrace it and use it as an opporunity to reach people. I think this book would be a great read for any pastor or church leader in the midst of transition towards reaching unchurched people.

Johnston's review of postmodernism is accurate and concise. Announcing that modernism has collapsed is one flaw. We live in a mixture of the two - dare I say - philosophies. The other complaint I have about the book is the reliance on secondary sources. Besides these two problems, this is an excellent book.

Postmodernism has come of age in the new century. It's been growing steadily since the sixties. Anyone who was around for the hippie movement can recognize all the signs. However, postmodernism has become mainstream and even adopted by some in the church. (Whatever happened to being renewed in the spirit of the mind?) Johnston not only shows how the world has infiltrated the church but how to reach those with the gospel without accommodating to this age. His understanding that popular postmodernism is a parasite feeding off of modernism is incisive. In essence, postmodernism is a reaction to modernism as feminism reacts against a male dominated society. Christians ought not imbibe either as a philosphy. We do better with pre-modern philosophy and its attention to reality.

This book is more than helpful. It ought to be read by all those who minister today.

Graham Johnston has put together a wonderful book on preaching to postmoderns. Dr. Johnston first gives a brief overview of postmodern culture. While it's not exhaustive life Carson's The Gagging of God or Dockery's The Challenge of Postmodernism or Grenz's Postmodern Primer, that does not mean it doesn't do the job. He boils a lot of it down and gives the neccesary basics to understanding our current culture.

He then describes some ways to engage the listeners, ways that preachers should truly understand. He encourages the preacher to move from descriptive preaching (expository preaching using multiple points) to narrative preaching (expository preaching that uses the plot of the Biblical text).

The author discusses barriers to communication with postmoderns and then how to make a connection and make inroads to the listeners and finally different sermon style and delivery options.

This pictorial book was to coincide with the release of the epic movie based on the classic memoir of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer. The book contains scripts, location stills of Tibet, and hundreds of photo stills from the making and the movie itself. Knowing that due to the Chinese opposition parts of the scenes from the movie were actually shot in South America, I was somehow disappointed. But the pictorial still adds grciously to my Tibet collection.

The book is very....real.The author described everything in great detail.Brad Pitt's character was also very realistic in how the author projected him.Also has many cool facts on Tibet(customs ang religion),the many characters had very interesting personalities.Brad Pitt's character had alot of character,the way the author projected.Good book.Read it.

I found Richard Graves English translation to be excellent. One can almost feel the cold nights and the pain of Harrer's trek up from India to Lhasa. His appreciation of the customs and desire to learn from them is something much needed today as Americans try to understand Tibet. This is a good book to begin with in gaining background. He is not a theologian or historian but gives a much needed glimpse of Tibet fifty years ago. Knowing the past makes the future brighter.

Whether God exists or not, the saints are facts. In this slim, aphoristic book (his last written in Romanian), Cioran sets out to measure the distance between us and the saints. He finds in them an antipode to ourselves--their sickness, melancholy, insomnia and lust for the absolute all charged positive, where for us they've become SYMPTOMS.

For Cioran, the saints' tears are evidence of a special consciousness--a nostalgia for an Absolute, a dissatisfaction with the world as we find it--that we recapture at the irrational extremes of sex, boredom, illness and, above all, the melacholy rapture of music. Cioran doesn't try to psychoanalyze the saints, or dismiss them as aberrations. Instead, he uses them to explore parts of our own psychology (our souls?) that have new meanings here, on the other side of God. What's left to us since the saints have cried? "We no longer believe in them. WE ONLY ADMIRE THEIR ILLUSIONS. Hence our compassion."

Seriously, three things made me pick up this book when I had no notion of who E.M. Cioran was. First, the beautiful cover with a detail from "The Descent from the Cross"; second, the intriguing title; and third the quote from the Chicago Tribune printed on the back: "makes the postwar French Existentialists look like a 6th-grade meeting of the Future Bores of America". I enjoy the French Existentialists - I had to see what was up with Cioran.

What is up with Cioran? He is absolutely top-notch: searching for the origin of tears in the lives of female saints known for copious tears ... from them he build a case against theology and institution and for intuition and sentiment ... all the while being highly political (Romanian politics).

The book pieces itself together in a series of small clips. An example: "Schopenhaurer maintains that, if we were to invite the dead back to life, they would refuse. I believe, on the contrary, that they would die a second time from too much joy."

An enthralling, thought-provoking book to be savored. And you can still enjoy the French existentialists.

E.M. Cioran, brought to us by the incomparable Richard Howard in French is now finding his way into our hearts from his Romanian youth. Ilinca Zarofopol-Johnston's translation is smooth, losing none of the cutting wit that is so exemplary of Cioran. The questions that Cioran asks here are the ones that Nietzsche required thinkers to ask in the preceding century. Cioran aptly describes our world, one in which the Middle Ages exhausted belief, leaving us with only appearances. His task is to find our "salvation" amongst those appearances. To find our way back to the world which we have lost and tried to regain through extratemporal belief, be it the rudimentary Judeo-Christian belief system or the universe of the Kantian transcendental ego. As Susan Sontag wrote of him, he is truly the last in a line of thinkers that includes Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. To ruminate on his tears and to breath the air of his saints in this book is indeed a heady experience. It is a book not to be taken lightly.

This book was one of my favorites. It came full of surprises, and belly-aching laughs. One of my fave issues in this book was when Liz tries smoking. It was a very realistic issue which I felt many could actually relate to. I definitely recommend this book to whoever wants laughs and a couple of sympathetic tears.

Not only did this book hold the expected humor and comedy, but also one of Johnstons most controversial stories. Lawrence reveals something about himself that no one would have guessed. A powerful series which took my breath away. This characteristically serious-with-tinges-of-humor strip is the best in it's league. It will truly go down as a classic.

This book helped my husband & I find some humor during this rough time in a teenagers (parents?) life.

You may have heard that "Twilight in the Forbidden City" is the book that Bernardo Bertolucci's movie "The Last Emperor" is "based" on. If at all, however, this is true only with regard to the first part of the movie (the book was published in 1934, just as Pu-Yi had ascended the throne of "Manchukuo"), and actually, the book should not be read or understood in this limited sense at all. Primarily, this is the personal account of a British diplomat and scholar of the Chinese history, society and culture who, at some point in his career, was appointed to the (for a westerner: virtually unprecedented) position of tutor to China's last monarch. True, those who have seen Bertolucci's movie will recognize individual events described in this book, such as the emperor's birthday and wedding ceremonies (Bertolucci obviously used Johnston's description of the birthday rituals as a model for the spectacular coronation ceremonies at the beginning of the movie - as Johnston had not yet been made tutor at that point, he could not give an eyewitness account of that event), and Johnston's constant battle with the corrupt and reactionary palace eunuchs, as best exemplified by the fight over the emperor's glasses (without which Pu-Yi arguably would have lost eyesight before long).

But Johnston's book is not merely a biography of the emperor. Rather, it is an account of the last period of the Manchu empire, and of the Chinese society in the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. In addition to the author's personal impressions gained inside and outside the imperial palace, up to and including Pu-Yi's dramatic flight from the Forbidden City in 1924, which ultimately ended in the Japanese legation, the book also renders Johnston's view of the role of the major foreign powers at the time (Japan, Russia, the U.S., Germany and, of course, his native England), and the emperor's predecessors and their politics, such as the powerful empress dowager Tzu-Hsi (named "the Venerable Buddha"), the reform attempts of the unfortunate emperor Kuang-Hsü (which earned him, at the age of 28, lifelong humiliation, imprisonment and ultimately death in a tiny and windowless building within the imperial palaces), the Boxer Movement, and the brief and likewise unlucky interlude of the reign of Pu-Yi's father (Kuang-Hsü's brother), Prince Chun.

Johnston was a monarchist and fiercely loyal to Pu-Yi personally, so don't expect him to treat any of the popular movements which ultimately brought the monarchy to an end with much sympathy or at least, objectivity. He probably also underestimated the dangers to China (and the Manchu dynasty) growing out of the emperor's re-installment as ruler of "Manchukuo" at the behest of the Japanese. In fact, the very title of this book is designed to reflect its author's hope that, like the "Rising Sun" symbolized by the Japanese emperor, the Chinese monarchy would soon rise and shine again. Equating the 12 years between the establishment of the Chinese republic in 1912 and the emperor's expulsion from the Forbidden City in 1924 to a "twilight" period and the 10 years following it to the night, Johnston dedicates the book to Pu-Yi "in the earnest hope that, after the passing of the twilight and the long night, the dawn of a new and happier day for himself, and also for his people on both sides of the Great Wall, is now breaking." In the book's introduction, he again emphasizes that "there is a twilight of the dawn as well as a twilight of the evening" and that the dark period witnessed by China might "be followed in due time by another twilight which will brighten into a new day of radiant sunshine."

This, of course, is not the only prediction where history has proven Reginald F. Johnston wrong. His analysis of the role of some of the key players of the time, for example that of the empress dowager Tzu-Hsi, is likewise not undisputed; and he himself has not remained without criticism, either (even at the time of its publication, a major purpose of the book was to defend his actions and view of the facts). The book must therefore be read with a grain of salt. But few westerners of his time had a knowledge of China equaling his, let alone his opportunities to observe and gain insights within the imperial palace. That, in itself, makes his account a compelling read.

Mr. Johnson's work romanticizes the truth behind the opulence that existed within the Forbidden City. The vislual feast presented in the book differed much from what was provided in the film, but, both touched upon the essence of what the author suggested; there was granduer, there was, glitter, and, there was truth in what the author saw. The traumatic changes in the social order of the day happened over years, not minutes. The book did little to present what was happening outside of the palace walls, and the film did even less. The film did focus on the attrocities being committed upon the Chinese people by the invading Japanese during the war, but, it did not touch upon those committed by the foreign influences, and, the ruling class itself. Maybe it was a good thing that this truth was not presented in the film, because,the film would then have to be called, "The Saga of the Twilight in the Forbidden City." Sometimes its better if you just read and understand the book in, and, of itself, then attempt to understand the historical truth being presented by any ONE the book. Go figure!

Twilight in the Forbidden City is considered by The University of Pittsburgh to be out of date due to the use by R.F.J. of the Yale pronounciation of the Chinese language. However, despite that fact, the author manages to capture some of the most historicaly decisive events in Chinese history due to his close relationship with the Emperor, Pu-Yi. He also manages to reflect on some of the events prior to becoming tutor to the Emperor, including the Boxer Rebellion and the downfall of the Empress Tzu-Hsi, that contributed to the twilight in the Fobidden City. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a student of East Asian studies.

All perfect, but there r too many words I can't understand at first sight(not technically) , such as "gotchas" ¡°weired... etc. ...

I wonder how many people will buy this book since most Unix people are pretty certain they already know everything! I am guilty of that myself, I was modifying kernal code on ATT SYS V r 2 back in 1984, so I confess to being pretty skeptical about Unix Unleashed, but I must applaud the authors, this is a wealth of knowledge. And when I finished reading the book, I was glad I invested the time, it was a humbling reminder that just because I can spell "su", that doesn't mean I know everything about Unix.

The writing is very clear, think of the book as the polar opposite of a man page. They use charts, illustrations and other devices to convey difficult ideas. The book has been laid out well and that is critically important when you weigh in with over 1,100 pages. There are only a few pages in the entire work that don't have a subsection heading.

This is a good book and quite servicable as it is, I think it could even be used as a text in a semester long college course on Unix. When this goes to 5th edition I would recommend losing about 100 pages and not try to cover things like Snort, it is better to do one thing well and the Unix coverage is excellent. I would also like to see a bit more effort in meeting the promise of the title in the Towards Better Sysadmin section of the book, this is such an important topic and Andy and Robin clearly have the knowledge, experience and writing ability to help us in our journey to be better system administrators.

This specifically covers all the necessary but not easily found tips which are useful to SysAdmins (and personal users) of these two most popular versions of Unix. This book has now become my #1 choice of the ONE unix book to buy! Look at the TOC: it's very complete topic coverage! I'd even say it replaces the classic "Running Linux" Ora book for content breadth.

Skorzeny lays down the way proffesional soldiers felt after the defeat of their country in WW II. This book follows his rise from artillery officer to top leader of the Commando service, and tells many of the secrets to their success. He talks about the intelligence war and the failures of German strategic intelligence, as well as many of the successes of the allied effort. While the translation is less than perfect, it gives the feel of sitting down and talking with Skorzeny as he reviews the dark years of the war and the atrocities commited by both sides. A story of undaunted courage and limitless valor, a must read for any serious student of WW II or military intelligence.

Otto Skorzeny's memoir is full of realities. It brings a new view at the WWII German soldier. Some of them were not killer Nazis at all. Skorzeny was a professional soldier, dedicated to his country and people. The book is quite estonishing and so real. Every one can get a lesson out of it. Lessons from the thin line between death and life by someone who has been in the no mans land and survived with the brains. The book is very good and a must read for young people to get an idea of being real professional.

Skorzeny lay's it out the way it happened with no excuses. He examines in detail how his personality and character shaped the conception and formation of German special forces. Furthermore, Skorzeny, again with no apology, discusses the German/Nazi mindset during that period. This book is a valuable asset to any serious-minded military officer's library, and likewise to the more realistic (and less idealistic) student of history.

Madeline's story about finding the perfect pet will help many a young reader understand the problems that may occurr when looking for a pet. Having been the parent of a young child I can identify with her the problem of finding the perfect pet not only for the child but for the parents also. A great story and with excellent illustrations and must read for children and parents who are considering owning a pet. Anxiously waiting for her next book!

I loved this book! Miss Johnston tells the story of pet ownership from a young girl's point of view. The illustrations are full of color and life. The story is humorous and creative. Good for young readers. I highly recommend this book for families thinking about getting a pet.

What a wonderfully talented young lady Madeline is. Her parents must be very very pround of her, my book is always on my coffee table, and I have it there for my grandchildren to read when they come to my house. All of my grand children who have read it so far, love it and are hoping that she has a new one out soon.