This book was rarely accurate and hardly worth the time I took reading it. Preaching from a single-minded point of view, the author professes to understand a culture and institution where she is an outsider. Having experienced The Citadel experience first hand, I can assure you it is one that is not easily explained to the outsider. Perhaps I am being a bit harsh, but quite a few of the points made in this book reflect upon a mind set that I can not comprehend. Read for yourselves, but I also implore you to keep an open mind about a school that has produced some of the finest patriots of the United States.

This book sets out to be many things. It succeeds at none of them. As a result, it's not only disjointed and confusing, but soaked through with bias as well.

One the one hand, author Catherine S. Manegold, a defense reporter for the New York Times, writes of the fight over the admission of Shannon Faulkner to The Citadel as a metaphor of South versus North. At the same time, she presents the chronology of a legal battle. And a biography of Ms Faulkner. And a sociological study of life at a military college. If Ms Manegold had concentrated on any one of these things, the book might have been more successful.

But apparently she couldn't decide which tack to take, and so the book ends up muddled. Long biographical introductions are given to people who end up playing minor parts in the drama. Lines are drawn for a conflict of cultures -- hidebound, traditional, inbred, hypocritical Charleston versus dynamic, hip, multicultural, liberal New York City -- but this allegory is abandoned as soon as it's developed. The central legal battles are disposed of in a series of 'the lawyers said ... the judges said,' and then, presto!, Ms Faulkner is in the door.

Ms Faulkner herself is the central figure in this drama, but at the end of the book, many questions about her remain unanswered. Did she apply to The Citadel purely on a whim, as it seems at first? Did she want the luster that comes with a Citadel ring (The Ring is almost Wagnerian in its significance), the 'network' and 'connections,' without understanding that the network depends on the shared experience of surviving the Citadel? Were her energies so focused on the legal fight that she was unprepared for what she found when she got in? When she left The Citadel, she complained that she had no friends in the school or the Corps. Was she really so naïve as to expect the school she and her lawyers had spent years attacking to offer her a warm embrace once she battered the doors down? None of these questions are adequately answered. It's not even clear whether the days Ms Faulkner spent in the infirmary were due to heat stroke, a mental or emotional breakdown, physical collapse, or something else entirely.

Instead, we get strange asides, like the bizarre suggestion that harassment of Ms Faulkner was connected to Caribbean voodoo rituals. Or four irrelevant pages rehashing the charges against one of the Left's favorite targets, the School of the Americas.

Interestingly, two of the most evocative sections of the book -- a harrowing account of Hell Week and the strangely moving epilogue 'Fear is like a Tree' -- contain barely a mention of Ms Faulkner at all.

Most Americans probably don't have real strong feelings about The Citadel one way or another. On the extremes, though, are people who really, really love the school, and others who really, really hate it. It's pretty clear whose side Ms Manegold is on.

Unlike Dr Laura Fairchild Brodie, who wrote about 'assimilation' of women at VMI, Ms Manegold is not 'the band director's wife.' Not, that is, someone who knows the story from the inside. She seems not to have even residual sympathy for The Citadel as an institution, for the young men (and women) who attend it, or for the administrators wrestling with how to adapt to a society that has rejected nearly everything they value. Considering the patronizing, even sneering, tone she sometimes takes toward the military and people who serve in it, it's surprising Ms Manegold could have endured a career as a defense reporter.

As Ms Manegold tells it, the original sin of The Citadel was to have been founded for the purpose of training militias in the suppression of slave revolts and the perpetuation of the planter-dominated caste system. The Citadel apparently is tainted by this sin forever, and neither the school nor the author can ever overcome it: she mentions it frequently, often gratuitously. After the War and the end of slavery, The Citadel turned inward, and cadets practiced on one another the social suppression and physical abuse they could no longer impose on slaves. This is what passes for sociological analysis in this book.

That's too bad, because there is clearly an interesting and important story here. Maybe someday, someone will find a more effective, less polemical, way to tell it. In the meantime, read Nancy Mace's book instead.

Catherine Manegold has written a mesmerizing story of the first female applicant to the Citadel, a southern military college located in Charleston, South Carolina. It traces the history and traditions of a formerly exclusive male domain with all the painful insights needed to fully explain the trauma and degradation which go into initiation into such an oppressive
culture. You will be amazed, you will be shocked at the measures
taken in an effort to refuse to enter the 20th century. She exposes us to the cyclical and circular patterns of what it means
to wear the Citadel ring. In this system men are traumatized by life outside the code, estanblished by the process of indoctrination, to the degree that many of them come back to alma mater as teachers and administrators in order to perpetuate the way of life they hold so dear beacuse they can't make it anywhere else. It is frightening, even terrifying, to learn about the code of silence and the extent to which these men will go to protect their patriarchal, domineering society. Manegold makes very real something so foreign to modern culture. Her painstaking analysis of the whys and wherefores of Shannon Faullkner's attempt to break the gender barrier is the best you will find anywhere. It's well worth the read, but be prepared to lose some sleep when you learn this medieval approach to military education still exists in today's USA.

This whole thing and its predecessors are mighty depressing. Sometime in the 1960's short story writing slipped out of the hands of adults who had actually gone out in the world and held jobs and had families and thus had something to write about, and into the hands of graduate students. These workshop set pieces are dreadful and depressing and have little or nothing to do with the South, The exceptions -- Ellen Douglas stands out -- are too few and far between to make these books worthwhile. Stock up on Lewis Grizzard or Jeff Foxworthy instead and buy John Cheever's Collected Stories if you really want to see how it's done.

I've read 3-4 previous editions of "New Stories From the South", and this was probably my least favorite. There were some good moments, and some good writing, but nevertheless, I got to the end of some stories and thought "Huh?". Then again, as another reviewer says, some of that could possibly be attributed to what's 'hip' in short stories these days. A former co-worker said he thought that some stories being published these days were 'the literary equivalent of modern art'.

As with all the books in this series, this collection shows how vibrant, diverse and rich the short story form remains in the United States, and how Southerners are pushing the form. Ravenel, who had a lot to do with the short story renaissance during the 1980s as editor of Best American Short Stories, has a truly fine eye. I highly recommend this one.

This book coves the subject of optical design in detail. The content is good, and comprehensive. However, the material is not well organized. Some of the material is too theoretical, and not related to practical problems.

The book covers a topic badly in need of a comprehensive text. This book seems to be a dump of information by the author with no successful attempt to organize it well. Large blocks of text with no subheadings and inadequate figures make the material confusing to someone who does not understand the material beforehand. References to radiometry are a disaster. In one paragraph on page 95 there are no less than five separate mistakes. The confusion between radiance and irradiance is total. On the other hand, in the absence of any other text, the book is a valuable and complete reference on the use of ray-trace analysis in optical design.

Well there isn't really much I can say except that I hated it and thought it was bad, the absolute pits! A real stinker!

I love Christmas romance books but I was disappointed with this one, it was just another dull romance book filled with misinterpretations and misunderstandings and just another romance book where the arrogant hero treats the heroine very shabbily. I like a hero who is macho but macho doesn't have to mean that he has to be rude and arrogant! I wish I could give this book a lower rating then 1.

If you are looking for a deep / profound love story with a lot of angst,don't read this book. If you want a very pleasent evening read, about basically nice people, this book is for you. The story is about old hurts resolved despite misinterpretations and misunderstandings. It is about need for, and strength of friendship. The story occurs over Christmas (a real plus for me) however, it is not sappy, nor does the holiday theme overwhelm the story.

This was one of the worst books I have read in my life. I suffered through the book hoping that the stories would get better as the years progressed. The majority of the stories had no real plot. The tales just end as abruptly and as strangely as they began. The stories from the early '80's are so bizarre...you have to be on the same drugs that the author was on when he/she wrote it to enjoy or understand the story. I guess these stories are emblematic of the decade. I was disappointed since these stories were supposedly culled from all the other ones of the decade to comprise "the best of". Surely the editor could have done better!

Of all the shortstories I have read, my personal favorite is in this book. It's a story called Griffin and it is fantastic. There are other good stories in the book but that one story alone makes the book well worth it's price.

This book was a good effort but not worth your while to read. It was given to me by a denominational executive to read and I found it lacking in several areas. The authors seem unaware of current trends that are effecting rural churches across Canada and the United States. While this book may provide some insight, if you are pastoring a rural church, you know everything that they have written already.

This book is certainly comprehensive, leaving almost no area of rural church life unexplored. In my experience, most books on rural ministry tend to be either (1) sentimental and romanticized, (2) biased towards a particular model of political activism, (3) lacking any non-theological content, (4) about 25 years out of date, or (5) most or all of the above. This book is different. It assumes no prior knowledge of rural life and ministry; it explores many of the touchier subjects like economics and family structure; and it strives (although ultimately unsuccessfully) to present both sides of the stories it tells.

But it's clear the authors are anything but neutral, being strongly biased towards alternative/sustainable agriculture, and against agribusiness entities and banks.

This becomes clear when the reader encounters the included source material used to illustrate their points; most of it is too heavily edited to include only items which either present alternative agriculture in a good light or agribusiness/agribanking in a bad light. There's nothing wrong, per se, with this point of view, but beginning pastors may quickly find themselves in over their heads if they only take in the anti-corporate, anti-bank point of view. For that reason, I can't recommend this book without some serious reservations.

I purchased this book based on the information it contained. I compared several books on the subject off the rack of a bookstore, mostly looking for a thorough explanation and strategy for the Memory for Addresses section of the exam, as this was the part that was proving to be a major stumper!

As I went through the first excercises, I found there to be several errors in the address checking section. The answer key is unreliable, as you can plainly see whether two addresses are alike or different.

Small errors aside, I proceeded with reading the rest of the book. And then I get to hour 17, the dreaded timed test for the Address Memory section. The section consists of several sessions of memorizing a chunk of information, working with sample questions with and without said chunk (none of these answers count, these sections are just there to assist you with memorization,) and then finally answering the set of 88 questions that actually does matter. In the middle of the different sections belonging to the same chunk of information, the chunk of information magically changes. I memorize the new chunk. And then it goes back to what it was.

Very disappointing.

This book is extremely condensed, and contains all the essential elements of grammar. The problem is that it is not very well laid out. I would instead highly recommend "Write Right!" by J. Venolia

I bought this book to help me as I spent the year studying abroad. The nice part was that there is a small overview of the history and atmosphere of the region, so you could pick and choose your travels carefully. However, with the exception of a substantial vocabular section, there was no information about French culture, customs or travel. Also, there should have been information on the various travel deals in France. The prices will change, but at least the readers would know enough to ask for them. There were only 3 people listed as the authors, and I get the feeling that they did not visit every place mentioned. If they did, they did not spend enough time in each spot to give an accurate portrayal. I assume they asked people who had been there their opinions and used them without fact checking. Many of the places described would be uninteresting to the average traveller. A lot of the cities are typical college towns. Good for being with people your own age, but bad for culture and history. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all. Several of the most spectacular French sites are left out completely (like Carcassonne). Also, they left out places and foods that are very famous regionally (no mention of tarte flambées anywhere in the Alsace chapter, for instance). Like in the 'Hanging Out in Europe' guide, this one is prone to false information and spelling mistakes. Flip through it and decide for yourself if the information is really necessary or if you could do a lot better on your own.

As a corporate executive, I am always seeking material that will provide new insights into ensuring deal success. This book doesn't offer much. Many of the major findings I've either read before in newspapers or come straight from the pages of more detailed books on how to succeed at M&A. There is not a lot of detail on following through with particular strategies and the idealism of the authors suggests that they have never been true players in the process. This book seems like a diluted version of the two pioneering books that have already said it all --"Joining Forces" and "Winning at Mergers & Acquisitions". In my opinion, no integration can truly work without implementing the guidance set forth in these two masterpieces.