I am a BIG fan of Ludwig von Mises. I am aware of what his great contributions are to the science of Economics. All free-market believers are indebted to him for his work. That is precisely why I bought a copy of his Theory of Money and Credit.

I found it VERY DIFFICULT to read, even with a dictionary in hand. So much so that I never finished it. And this even though I have read Rothbard's classic "America's Great Depression" twice.

Admittedly, von Mises wrote the original in German (I think), and translating technical material from another language may be quite difficult.

I give von Mises 5 stars for his Theory, (which really isn't a theory, but FACT). But I must subtract one star for it's lack of readability.

--George Stancliffe

The late great Murray Rothbard described Ludwig von Mises's _The Theory of Money and Credit_ as the best book on money ever written. And so it is.

It is probably best known as the volume which first set out the distinctive Austrian theory of the trade cycle. For that alone, it deserves a place on the bookshelf of everyone who cares about such things (and more people should).

But there's much more to it than that. This volume sets out a complete and groundbreaking theory of money itself: what it is, where it comes from, what it means to speak of its "value," the differences between commodity money and fiat money, the demand for money and what it has to do with banking, and -- crucially -- the jiggery-pokery that becomes possible when the State starts messing around with unsound monetary policy.

This edition also includes a section on "Monetary Reconstruction" written in 1952 (and first included in the 1953 Yale University Press edition).

Plus there's a foreword by Murray Rothbard. And, finally, it's another beautifully crafted volume from the Liberty Fund, practically a steal at the price posted above. You'd have a hard time buying most such books _used_ at this price.

So what are you waiting for? Throw your Samuelson and Keynes in the trash and pick up a book of _real_ economics.

This is the first of the modern works to identify the cause of the business cycle: artificial credit expansion sending miscues to capital goods industries. Though written in 1912, it retains its persuasive power, especially in light of the current financial meltdown. Mises also covers the origin and nature of money and banking. As always LibertyFund puts out a beautiful book.

This book, With Christ in the School of Prayer, by the Reformed Dutch pastor Andrew Murray, is a collection of Biblical instructions on intercessory prayer. Although the book was copyrighted in 1981, the foreword (by Dick Eastman) says it was "first written more than a century ago." Since Murray wrote the book so long ago it is understandable that he would use the King James Version of the Bible for his scriptural quotes. I found the archaic language of the KJV made it difficult for me to follow much of the discussion. Words such as; importunity (chapter 8), howbeit (chapter 13), availeth (chapter 23) are no longer a part of our conventional vocabulary. I found it was equally distracting when the same language was carried in the text by Murray, most frequently in the prayers at the close of each chapter, which seemed like an effort to make them sound more pious. In some places I felt that the texts Murray selected were used out of their proper context, and his "proof texting" came close to typology. Throughout the book Murray argues our need to learn to pray, and our teacher is Jesus, and we must continually ask for Jesus' help in our education, in the school of prayer. Murray's writing is very inspiring, and I found his advice very practical. I liked Murray's point that believers are called to a lifetime of intercessionary prayer. We are to draw down God's grace to others. We, as God's servants on earth, need to go to God in prayer and ask to other benefit from his grace. "In conformity to Jesus, the Great High Priest, they are to be the ministers and stewards of the grace of God" (page 225). If our lives are lived in faithful obedience to God's will, we can obtain his promises and use them successfully in our prayers for others. This book is a classic, and I highly recommend it.

I can honestly say that this book was used by the Holy Spirit to powerfuly afect my prayer life. It turned praryer time into a tender and powerful time. I do not think that this book will have the same impact on everyone, but if you like old authors like I do then please read this book. It is written by a man that spent much time in the closet and out of the closet with the Lord.

The contents of this book are the experiences of a Christian, for sure, whose faith in God was tried. The examples are clear, the results of real. Anyone who desires to hear from God and receive "the desires of their heart" should carefully read this book. Of all my books, this one will never be loaned out, for it has many years of practical wisdom pertaining to "touching the hem of His garment". If you need a miracle in your life; If your prayer life needs a boost; If you need to know that God hears all your prayers, and is answering them; If you're a minister; If you're wandering aimlessly through life and need direction, then READ THIS BOOK. Andrew Murray wrote it 165 years ago, but it as relevant today as it was then, for the need to learn more about prayer is a timeless desire from all ages. In the back of this book, there is a section titled "George Mueller, and the Secret of His Power in Prayer." Read this book and your prayer life will never be idle again! Read this book and you'll never lack again to know God's will! Read this book and see God's mighty hand work in your life!

There is no question that Aldous Huxley is one of the most important and influential minds of the twentieth century - a prophet, novelist, poet, dramatist and essayist that expressed some of the most interesting and disturbing commentary about the condition of human beings and their relationship to society. Huxley's concerns are our concerns - overpopulation, ecology, eugenics, fair and oppressive government, drug use and the nature of religion and art. He wrote extensively on all these subjects with eerie insight and awareness. Poet and author, Nicholas Murray, provides a window into Huxley's life and character, which shows us an intellectual continually striving for knowledge: intuitive, scientific and otherwise.

As a personality, Murry points out that Huxley was an abstractionist trying to come to terms with his instinctual nature. But Huxley was probably harder on himself than any critic could be. He described himself as a 'cerebrotonic', and defines the type:

"The cerebrotonic is the over-alert, over-sensitive introvert, who is more concerned with the inner universe of his own thoughts and feelings and imagination than the external world...Their normal manner is inhibited and restrained and when it comes to the expression of feelings they are outwardly so inhibited that viscerotonics suspect them of being heartless." (P.3)

Huxley was anything but 'heartless'. If one reads his novels, early poetry and essays, can see that he was a humanist, presenting us with the follies of the human condition with the intention of making the world a better place.

Murry paints us a portrait of a man who wrote because, '...the wolf was at the door.' He was a seeker of knowledge who wanted to join the artistic sensibility with that of the scientific. In fact, one of his last essays, 'Literature and Science' was an attempt at such a synthesis: 'Man cannot live by contemplative receptivity and artistic creation alone...he needs science and technology.' (P.451)

What emerges from this text is an individual with a ravenous thirst for knowledge, an artist/scientist who wanted to pave new paths towards a more understanding world. This is an excellent biography, brilliantly written, of a complex and fascinating being.

Nicholas Murray's new work is the first full-length biography of Aldous Huxley--author of Point Counter Point (1928), a satiric examination of early 20th-century society, and Brave New World (1932), a sharp indictment of modern technology--since the authorized biography by Sybille Bedford, published in two volumes (1973, 1974).

Seeking to justify a new biography of Huxley, Murray points out that the last thirty years have seen the publication of many collected editions of letters and diaries of those who knew him--D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and many others.

Murray also notes that, in addition to these published works, there is now a wealth of unpublished material, which necessitates a bringing up to date of the Huxley story.

"The intimate life of Aldous Huxley and his remarkable wife, Maria, can now be more fully documented," writes urray. "Maria's bisexuality, the extraordinary menage a trois in the 1920s of Aldous, Maria, and Mary Hutchinson ["this extraordinary triangulation"]--absent for obvious reasons from previous biographical accounts--are described here for the first time."

With the key dramatis personae in Huxley's life now deceased, the fully story of one of the most distinguished writers of the 20th century can now be told.

A member of a distinguished scientific and literary family, the British novelist, essayist, poet, and critic Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) was the grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), a scientist who gained fame as "Darwin's bulldog" (the staunchest supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and notoriety as a tenacious debater against antievolutionists, including scientists as well as clergy).

Aldous Huxley was also the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a literary artist who, incidentally, was the author of this reviewer's favorite poem, "Dover Beach."

Huxley was prevented from studying medicine because of an eye ailment that partially blinded him at the age of 16, causing a lifelong struggle with defective eyesight. Nevertheless, he became a voracious, omnivorous reader, holding his eyes close to the books he read and using a thick magnifying glass. His wife Maria also often read to him.

While still a student at Balliol (Oxford University), Huxley published two volumes of poetry. T. S. Eliot, one of Huxley's friends, observed that Huxley was "better equipped with the vocabulary of a poet than with the inspiration of a oet." "Eliot was almost certainly right," says Murray, "in his view that [Huxley's] talent was for prose."

Murray writes of Huxley's early days at Balliol: "Another inconvenience was having rooms opposite the Chapel, as he confided to his young friend, Jelly D'Aranyi, the concert violinist: 'one is made unhappy on Sundays by the noise of people singing hymns.' Clearly, neither Chapel nor the 'awful noise' of the hymn-singers which 'rather gets on my nerves' would appeal to the grandson of the man who invented the word 'agnostic.' "

Huxley often commented that his forte was not in writing poetry, novels, or plays (to which he devoted much time and energy during his years in Hollywood), but to the writing of essays--the didactic exposition of aesthetic, social, political, and religious ideas.

Indeed, Huxley became of the great essayists of the 20th century (a fact underscored by the completion of an ambitious project by Ivan R. Dee Publishers: a six-volume edition titled Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, completed last year).

Huxley's most celebrated work, Brave New World, is a bitterly sarcastic account of an inhumane dystopia controlled by technology, in which art and religion have been abolished and human beings reproduce by artificial fertilization. The inhabitants of such a "perfect world" suffer from terminal boredom and ennui.

The title of Huxley's famous novel is taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act V, Scene 1, lines 184-186), in which Miranda says, "O, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world, / That has such people in 't"

Increasingly convinced that "modern man" suffered from spiritual bankruptcy, Huxley recommended two time-tested antidotes to nihilism: psychedelic drugs (he experimented with mescaline and LSD) and mysticism.

For example, in his novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) he portrays the central character's conversion from selfish isolation to transcendental mysticism, and in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) he describes the use of mescaline to induce visionary states of mind and an expanded consciousness.

"I am not a religious man," wrote Huxley, "in the sense that I am not a believer in metaphysical propositions, not a worshipper or performer of rituals, and not a joiner of churches." And yet, regretting that the modern world lacked potent symbols, "cosmic symbols"--only nationalist flags and swastikas--he said, "One can be agnostic and a mystic at the same time."

In his later years Huxley turned toward an "undogmatic" mysticism found, he believed, in the "wisdom of the East": Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. He was convinced that the truths of mysticism were profounder than those of science. But he also said, "Man cannot live by contemplative receptivity and artistic creation alone . . . he needs science and technology."

Science and spirituality: these were the twin foci of Huxley's oeuvre. Indeed, his entire life may be viewed as an attempt to synthesize, by literary means, the scientific and the spiritual--to arrive, as it were, at a rapprochement between the "two cultures."

Murray's biography reads like a Who's Who of the rich and famous. In its pages we meet, along with many others, Lady Ottoline Morrell, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, H. L. Mencken, Anita Loos, Christopher Isherwood, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the astronomer Edwin Hubble.

Intelligent and sympathetic, rich and rewarding, Aldous Huxley: A Biography is an engrossing read. Highly recommended!

Scott deftly presents the vagabond Scottish Beat, exposing both his extraordinary gifts and appalling idiosyncrasies. Trocchi's lifestyle likely killed his creativity well before his wife, career, friendships and existence succumbed to his often monstrous excesses.

Andrew Murray Scott digs up a lot of great history on Alexander Trocchi's family history and his young formative years. Scott deftly captures the bizzare brilliance that was Alexander Trocchi's literary ability and also paints a sharp picture of Trocchi's personal shortcomings and strange lifestyle. I'd recommend this book for someone who wants to get to known a talented, yet little-known author.

This book covers all aspects of the alpaca from its history to husbandry. It is easy to understand for beginners and is detailed enough to be a great reference for established breeders. It should be one of the first investments for any one who wants to know more about alpacas.

This book is comprehensive and covers all aspects of care that you need to be aware of if you are considering purhasing alpacas or you already have them. There is no other source for all this information. The investment in knowledge pays off many times over.

This well-illustrated, tightly-crafted paperback is a pleasure to read. By well-illustrated I don't mean fancy. You won't find big color photographs, but you will see what the author is talking about. Murray is not only an expert on the subject; he's a good writer, and I know of no other book that so effortlessly leads the reader through the story of how the wonderful Renaissance architecture of Venice, Rome, and particularly Florence came to be. If you want to know WHY those churches and palaces look that way, and why it matters, this is your book. I especially recommend it to Florence-bound travelers.

I am not an academic, so I cannot judge the accuracy or importance of this book from a historical perspective. I bought this book to help prepare for a trip to Tuscany and Umbria, and was pleasantly suprised to find it very readable and even difficult to put down. I am now more excited than ever to visit not only the famous sites such as the Duomo and Palazzi in Florence, but also lesser known sites such as Lucca's Palazzo dello Signoria and its Piazza and fountain, by the Mannerist Amanetti. I wish I had this book before my visit to St. Peter's in Rome, because the knowledge of the succession of architects and their circumstances would have made my visit even more rewarding, if that could be possible.

Whether you're an ardent fan or a bitter foe of world-renowned atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, once widely known as "the most hated woman in America," you've probably read most of what Bryan Le Beau's biography has to tell you already, whether it's in O'Hair's own books, such as "All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists -- With All the Answers," in her elder son William J. Murray's critical autobiography "My Life Without God," or in other third-person accounts of her life's work such as Lawrence Wright's "Saints & Sinners." I credit the author with bringing together a comprehensive compilation of facts, figures, observations, and quotations, but unfortunately not with presenting a unified portrait of a major figure of late 20th-century American free thought.

Le Beau's exposé begins promisingly enough as we're treated to invaluable excerpts from O'Hair's diary entries covering the early days of her adult life, when she was still wrestling with many of the iconoclastic ideas that would later make her famous, and which are more a part of our present worldview than most people probably want to admit. She left her first husband for another man during the conformist McCarthy era, for instance, nearly twenty years before such behavior became socially acceptable, and refused to marry the father of her second son because she considered him her intellectual inferior. The book shows us the genesis of her mission against the influence of organized religion in the lives of unbelievers as well as her family's exodus from persecution and hostility. All too quickly, however, we move into the realm of religious polemics and lose sight of the colorful personality behind the Murray (and later O'Hair) family's struggle to protect what Madalyn regarded as her First Amendment right to freedom not only of but also from religion. She had only begun her fight when she won her 1963 landmark victory in the Supreme Court to have mandatory prayer and Bible reading removed from America's public schools, and wasn't about to stop there. By the book's midpoint, quotes from O'Hair's radio and television broadcasts are presented out of chronological sequence without a unifying theme that might show us more of the real motivation behind the message. In William Murray's autobiography, which for the most part depicts O'Hair as a heartless villainess, she at least emerges as a three-dimensional flesh-and-blood human being who for better or worse held sway over a coterie of non-conformists and freethinkers who, apparently like her son, began to resent and ultimately to rebel against the extent of her influence. He honestly exposes his own flaws as well, at least up to a point, explaining how he virtually abandoned his daughter to his mother's care as he struggled with drugs and alcohol. For him, religion was the cure-all. For Madalyn O'Hair, we learn, it was just another soporific intoxicant best avoided by responsible individuals. Le Beau's analysis presents Madalyn O'Hair more as the often cold, analytical brain behind the operation than its warm, pulsing heart, even though it offers us random detailed glimpses of her emotional vicissitudes -- courage, bitterness, determination, panic -- and while it is more impartial than Murray's book, it never takes us very far beneath the surface. We learn little about O'Hair's second marriage, which lasted more than a decade, or her relationship with her family after her notoriety began to wane in the 1980s, when her son William became a Christian and when she began to alienate many of her former supporters with her increasingly outrageous behavior. Even most of those who stood by her to the end are only mentioned in passing.

For nearly eighty pages (and through more than the usual number of typographical errors), Le Beau's O'Hair remains only a figurehead to us, even as he discusses her mysterious disappearance in 1995 and her eventual murder, which even those who had long hated her found inexplicably brutal. Even though we may admire O'Hair as an indefatigable pioneer of secularism (or hate her as a foul-mouthed exponent of irreligion), we only occasionally feel we really know her as the driven human being she unquestionably was. While the astute reader can discover how O'Hair managed to distill the ideas of other freethinkers from Socrates to Carl Sagan into a refreshing elixir of liberating unbelief, the book remains more journalism than true biography. If you like cold facts, though, presented dispassionately, this is the book for you.

and then there is the truth. Bryan Le Beau gets to the truth beautifully in this informative and interesting book.

Trying to understand Madalyn Murray O'Hair was always difficult. Her message was sometimes lost in the chaos of her showmanship. Le Beau presents quotes and arguments in a cohesive form that help the reader understand her point of view in a way that eliminates all the emotional button pushing that O'Hair needed to do in order to get the attention of the press. Without O'Hair's personality interfering with her message it becomes infinitely easier to understand what the message actually was and how the prevailing mores of the time affected the various media, and even personal, events in O'Hair's life.

I found the examination of O'Hair's controlling personality and it's effects on her life and her cause particularly interesting and it was presented in an unbiased way - something that is rare when reading and trying to understand about O'Hare and her views. The historical overviews of Madalyn Murray O'Hair's lifetime were nicely written and ultimately necessary to fully understand what it was that was propelling O'Hair through her life.

After reading "An Atheist Epic" by Madalyn Murray O'Hair and "My Life Without God" by William J. Murray it was difficult for me to really understand where the truth lies. I was pleased to find it in "The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair".

Werbach and Murray have done an excellent job of presenting research abstracts on various botanical (herbal) medicines so that the reader can easily do follow-up study or simply know how much of a given botanical medicine is an effective amount for a particular illness. I found the book to include categories of chronic disease conditions that are not generally found in other herbals as well as those maladies we all encounter such as fatigue, headache and infection. Definitely a good buy for anyone wishing to substantiate the validity of herbal medicine.

This book changes from old days style around botanicals to a new century scientific point of view. No pink words. Just science. I hope they will grow it into two volumes for the next year edition. ¡Congratulations Mr. Werbach and Mr. Murray!

I thought the book was an easy read. I learned how to choose which process are more conducive to redesign, how to pick redesign project team members, some tips on what to expect from such an effort, how to overcome some of the barriers. I learned which tools work best for a particular project. It answered many of my questions about process design. A great book to get start in process design.

I have read some books on process improvement, reengineering, etc., and this is the most pleasant to read. The concepts are very clear, the steps for improvement are explained in a simple way. If you want to learn how to redesign business processes, this is one of the best to begin with.

This is a very interesting book. Murray is an incredibly erudite scholar on blues and jazz traditions as well as both idioms' place in American culture. This novel is very much in the jazz/blues vein of investigation and exploration of different form; in this case, prose. At first I found his style somewhat disconcerting, but once into the book, I was completely drawn in by the perfect rendering of deep southern speech, the affecting characters and the deeply intriguing Luzana Cholly and other juke joint characters. Murray also writes movingly of the protaganist's (many say this book is semi-autobiographical)sexual awakening and discovery of a profound twist in his life.

I discovered this book in a college course this year (2002). This review is aimed specifically for those who have always cast a skeptical eye at the literary offerings of the last half of the twentieth century. If, like me, you have always scoffed and balked at the notion that there were numerous undiscovered great pieces of American literature, buy this book.
When I think of this century's great writers I think mainly of Eliot, Kafka, Naipal, Wright, Hemingway, Wolfe, Proust, and Orwell. There are others, but I make this list to illustrate that I am a rather conservative reader, a "Canon Man". All of this to say one thing:
I truly believe that this book will only be fully revealed for what it is in a decade or two...and when that day comes, when scholars are tripping over each other in the rush to sift through what is left to us of Murray's life, thoughts and writings, they will all be wondering what kept the current generation of scholars from seizing upon this legend while he still walked the earth.
I've always wondered when someone was going to write an "epic" American poem. "Train Whistle Guitar" is the closest thing to that. This book will introduce you to the freshest and wisest American voice I have read in the last three years. After finishing this book for my course work I picked it up again the following weekend to return to the beginning once more. The language is so skillfully used Murray makes genius look easy. Like watching a beautifully captured film for the first time, or walking up to a panoramic pastoral, I needed to return again to look for all I missed the first time...That first time while I had been challeneged enough just seeing past the sheer beauty of what lay before me.
Murray's book is more than merely linguistic and structural acrobatics. Murray establishes both an exlusive "black" voice speaking directly backwards to Richard Wright and also the Harlem Renaissance while at the same time writing to include the entirety of the American experience. The end result is a book so remarkable in its complexity and so complex in its execution that for it to be so smooth and fluid is an achievement worthy of note in and of itself. "Train Whistle Guitar" exceeds this and goes beyond the sublime.
I have yet to read the other two books that follow in this trilogy, "The Spyglass Tree" and "Seven League Boots", but I believe I will give "Train Whistle Guitar" a third reading because it is just that good.
At the risk of repeating similar sentiments from other reviews, Murray's book goes beyond the boundaries of both verse and prose and achieves the impossible...a book as melodic, complex and resonant as the Blues and Jazz compositions that inspire it.

I'm not sure why Murray had not recieved the attention he deserves in the canon of American authors. His work is among the finest I have ever read. This book, his first, is one of my personal favorites and deserves recognition.

The most striking aspect of this book is Murray's style, which is absoloutely a joy to read. The major accomplishment that Murray makes in Train Whistle Guitar is the incorporation of the improvisational rhythms of Jazz and blues into speech. In other words, Murray's narrator and characters talk in riffs, call-and-response patters, in trading-twelve exchanges. It's awkward to talk about this but pick up this book and you will get an idea of what I am driving at. His prose is rhythmic forceful and eloquent, swift and swift and not too swift. This work was one of the first to incorporate the aesthetics of Jazz into prose and novel; the result is a profound success.

This stylistic power is mated to the story of a boy growing up in blues-filled Gasoline Point alabama. The way jazz music is integrated into both plot and style is impressive; and make no mistake, Murray is quite serious about the role that music plays in his character's upraising and confrontations with life. Brilliant.