Frank Hardy has planned a birthday surprise party for his girlfriend, Callie Shaw - a plane ride. Unfortunately, the plane was sabotage and crash. Both Frank and Joe were unhurt but Callie, who didn't wore her seatbelt suffer severe concussion. Things began to get worse Frank was being accused of carelessness. Now the Hardy brothers have to race to find out why they were being sabotage and as well as to clear Frank's name.

"The First and the Last" contains Isaiah Berlin's earliest surving extended piece of writing ("First"), his final essay ("Last") summarizing his intellectual path and development, and brief tributes by Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Williams, and Aileen Kelly.

The tributes give us a faint glimmer of the man: his humanity and generosity, his passion for music, especially opera, and his extraordinary devotion to friends and students. "You have beautiful black eyes," Greta Garbo once said to Berlin. In Oxford circles Berlin was as renowned for his vivid talk and character as for his ideas. However, these recollections only hint at Berlin's expressiveness and luminous personality. In this regard, Michael Ignatieff's illumnating biography provides a more rounded treatment and measure of the man.

"First" is a prize winning story entered in a children's magazine competition when the Berlin was twelve years of age. The short story concerns a murderous bolshevik commisar named Uritsky, whose motto is "the purpose justifies the ways". Aside from revealing his precocity, the story is meant to illustrate Berlin's lifelong thematic struggle with absolutism in all its forms.

Berlin's last essay "My Intellectual Journey" is the principal and only substantive essay in this volume. It traces the the main themes of Berlin's intellectual journey, from his early interest in verificationism and phenomenalism, his discovery of Vico and Herder, his treatment of Romanticism, his famous formulation of two senses of "Liberty", and his contrast of monism with political pluralism. The writing is lucid and serves as a good synopsis of Berlin's political pluralism, which he summarizes as "a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots of Romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far for human toleration".

Noel Annan once compared Berlin's writings to a Seurat, "a pointilliste who peppers his canvas with a fusillade of adjectives, epithets, phrases, analogies, examples, elucidations and explanations so that at least a particular idea, a principle of action, a vision of life, emerges before our eyes in all its complexity." The force and brilliance of Berlin's writings is found elsewhere. Nevertheless, "The First and the Last" is worth reading. For it is the one and only place where we find Berlin's own summation of his intellectual development alongside a modest tribute by his friends and admirers.

I was more familiar with German philosophy, as an intellectual reaction to the French revolution, than with the French and Italian thinkers who are also discussed in the radio lectures which are included in this book. I also have the book, KARL MARX by Isaiah Berlin, and noticed some of the same themes, though this book is mainly concerned with a half century prior to the writings of Karl Marx. I try to see the humor in history, so when Isaiah Berlin says that Helvetius's principal work, published in 1758, "was found to be so atheistical, so heretical, that it was condemned both by Church and by State, and was burnt by the public hangman," (p. 11) I'm not surprised that this might be "the first clear formulation of the principle of utilitarianism." (p. 13).

Rousseau is the philosopher that Berlin blames most frequently for stating opposition to those who are overly refined. This includes "All those nineteenth century thinkers who are violently anti-intellectual, and in a sense anti-cultural, indeed . . . including Nietzsche himself, are the natural descendants of Rousseau." (p. 41). The Germans were not particularly well off, politically or materially at the time, so some tried to advance themselves by studying Kant. "Therefore, Kant says, the most sacred object in the universe, the only thing which is entirely good, is the good will, that is to say the free, moral, spiritual self within the body." (p. 57). Fichte's biggest contribution to 20th century political thought in Germany has been on leadership as a solution for a crisis, and Berlin considers the hero: "The favored image is that of Luther: there he stands, he cannot move, because he serves his inner ideal." (p. 65) But Fichte went in a philosophical direction. "Fichte gradually adopts the idea that the individual himself is nothing, that man is nothing without society, that man is nothing without the group, that the human being hardly exists at all." (p. 67). The first three pages of notes are mainly citations. The notes on Fichte cover seven pages and include additional phrases from Fichte's work not mentioned in Berlin's lectures but noted on the manuscript. This provides the opportunity to read bits like, "the natural institution of the State ends this independence provisionally and melts the separate parts into one whole, until finally morality recreates the whole species into one." (p. 166).

The notes on Hegel provide a citation for `slaughter-bench.' Hegel gets credit for a new way of looking at the history of everything which is so inspired by greatness that "To see a vast human upheaval and then to condemn it because it is cruel or because it is unjust to the innocent is for Hegel profoundly foolish and contemptible." (p. 92). Also, "Hegel's most original achievement was to invent the very idea of the history of thought." (p. 99). From there, it figures that Saint-Simon would expect the French to produce rationally a society. "For him, history is a story of living men trying to develop their faculties as richly and many-sidedly as possible." (p. 112).

On the other hand, I also have Isaiah Berlin's book, RUSSIAN THINKERS, and Joseph de Maistre, the last lecture topic for this book, was a source for Tolstoy. "Maistre is fascinated by the spectacle of war." (p. 139). "Tolstoy read Maistre because Maistre lived in Petersburg during the period in which he was interested, and he echoes his description of what a real battle is like, describing the experience of people present at the battle rather than giving the orderly, tidied-up account constructed later by eye-witnesses or historians." (p. 140). After that, the phrase, "says Maistre in a mocking manner," (p. 141) applied to the ideas in the preceding lectures, establishes that "No metaphysical magic eye will detect abstract entities called rights, not derived from either human or divine authority." (pp. 143-4). I think the last lecture is far easier to understand than the others.

A good read from beginning to end. I am fond of geraniums, but had no idea of the scope of the genus. The book helped me straighten out some of my mislabled orphans. Only a couple of problems - I wish it had far more photos of the leaves and flowers to help in identification, and the encyclopedia has no zone information for those of us in the US.

This book was more funny then anything. First of all, Frank and Joe join up with an old firend of there father's in a play about Sherlock Holmes. Someone's out to sabotage the play, and they've got to discover who. It's full of the boys swapping wisecracks and Joe joining the cast as a 'regular irregular.' Though not very suspensful, it is good for a laugh.

This is the first of Michael Underwood's books that I have tried and I found it to be a very enjoyable read. It was exceptionally easy-going - perfect for bedtime reading. There were not too many characters introduced at once, and just enough background information was provided without unduly detracting from the main story. The supposed twist in the tale was predictable from a very early stage, but this did not spoil the form of the story, and an element of suspense did remain. I will certainly be reading other books by this author, and I would recommend him to anyone who enjoys vintage Agatha Christie, but is frustrated by not being given sufficient clues to solve her mysteries.

Good reference book. Includes good discussions on foundations and principles of Colorimetry. Should be updated to include examples of modern colorimetry applications such as Digital Color Management topics, Scanners, etc. If a person is starting a career which requires a knowledge in colorimetry, it a must.

Occasionally there's a "ghost" in Hardy Boys books. They never end up being real ghosts, so why is there another one? Could it possibly be a real ghost?

Giles Lutz, the author, does an excellent job of unraveling the story behind the Fredonia Rebellion. Lutz did such a superb job of research that it is difficult to separate the facts from the fiction. Whether a reader's intent is for pleasure or simple interest in that particular timeperiod of Texas history, the paperback is an excellent choice.

There are at least three fine books on hardy geraniums. Yeo's book is exhaustively technical; Bath & Jones' is whimsical and lush; Hibberd's-though a much smaller book-provides an amazing amount of information, all of it well organized and well written. The photography, so important in a gardening reference work, is outstanding.

I own all three books, and Hibberd's is invariably the one that I use.

Karen Anderson (karenand@halcyon.com), Seattle, WA