I read this book to my 8 and 10 year-olds as a bed time story. We read two chapters per night and they were spell-bound. They had a hard time not reading ahead to see what would happen. A great story with a great message about trusting God to provide.

If you like card games were you get to [upset] people ..., form little groups to [upset] people ... even MORE, and just have a plan old good time...this is the game for you. In this card game (Battle Cattle) you are cows and other players try to defeat you. The last player or "COW" standing wins. If you buy this I assure you your money was well spent. If you do buy this I advise you to play with three or more players just because it's longer and a lot more fun. And another great Steve Jackson card game to check out is Car Wars:The Card Game. It's just like Battle Cattle, but your cars instead. You can also combine Car Wars and Battle Cattle to have cows trampling over cars. There are so many Steve Jackson card games that are great. You should check out Munchkin, Star Munchkin and Munchkin 2: Unnatural Axe. They are RPG card games where you kill monsters, level up, steal the treasure and [upset] everybody so much they will never play it with you again, let alone talk with you. All three of those kinda make fun of D&D because they cards are just so funny. Well this is a review on Battle Cattle so I'll shut up now. FINAL NOTE: Battle Cattle kicks ... and also buy Car Wars and combine them.

The Battle of McDowell is the first of it's kind in the respect that it is devoted to the history of this important battle in Highland County, Virginia. Anyone interested in further details of the battle may e-mail me at 7thcav@va.tds.net and I will do my best to answer their questions. I thank you, Richard L. Armstrong. P. S. - Yes, I am that Richard L. Armstrong.

Very easy reading, short book.

Wes Jackson describes a growing perspective that we need to interact symbiotically with the earth rather than considering the earth a "resource" at our disposal. He mixes philosophy with actual personal experiences to further illustrate the story.

The fact that he began the Land Use Institute in Kansas and is still and active participant lends credibility to his dialog.

During the past year, I've had occasion to read several books on theological education. This book is by far the most interesting and suggestive of the lot. Repeated visits by the four co-authors to two campuses and careful observation of how students are shaped by the all the dimensions of campus life (included but most certainly not limited to classes)yields a compelling picture both of what actually happens at a theological school and of the role of such schools in religious communities. For anyone with even a passing interest in theological education.

Fuller's "The Best of Jackson Payne" is an ambitious novel. Were it concerned with a man's life and especially a jazz life, it would be interesting. The fact that Fuller tackles some harder questions of philosophy in a fluent literary wrapper, makes the book remarkable, and a remarkable achievement. Some of these questions include: How can we know another person? Is "truth" a composite? What explains great art?, and the great question of aesthetics -- is the life of an artist relevant to an understanding of his art?

Slowing down to wrap the reader in the reality of these issues, never so bluntly posed, Fuller brings to life Jackson Payne, a composite rendering of a saxophonist, and full-featured, full-blooded man in the world. We find in Payne a Faustian character at once difficult and sublime, no matter where or when we find him. He is a hero in Korea, later deep in heroin addiction, in prison, performing at the top of the jazz world, betraying some, loyal to others, complex, conflicted, modern, an enigma to himself. A Bronze Star, "that should have been Silver," seems a small reward for the wounds that Payne takes from Korea. If jazz is the symbol of Payne's existence, so is Korea. The hard side of Payne -- Korea, junk, prison, his murder or assisted suicide, always stand in balance to his achievement in art -- some great records, some good relationships, some great performances, a cult around him as a supremely gifted experimentalist.

Jazz fans will puzzle more over who served as the model for Payne than the manner of his death, which Fuller builds to full-blown mystery status by the final pages. Certainly Payne is drawn from several jazzmen's biographies, and to have made him anything other would have denied Fuller the opportunity to explore generally the jazz life, especially that of the 1945-75 era of which he writes. It is hard to escape the belief that nonetheless the author had someone in mind, just as love songs are said to be about a particular person. Clues are scattered throughout the text, for example, Payne has a low point where he opens for some sixties rock groups - music "so bad that it shouldn't even be heard through a wall." Sounds like Archie Shepp, or Pharoah Sanders, just as earlier passages suggest Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, or Sonny Rollins. But there are just too many other clues --- an R & B background, mastery of every playable scale, rhythm, syncopation, extended solos (some lovely, some excruciating) the reach to the sublime spiritual level, and a wife a lot like Alice -- to make it that hard to hazard a guess. If Jackson Payne isn't mostly John Coltrane, his music has got to be the closest suspect. For jazz followers this is satisfying to a great degree. Fuller allows Payne to live another 10 years beyond the life of Coltrane, and projects what direction his music might have taken. In Payne he hints, toward the sweeter, certain of its roots, self-referential but not arcane, with a profound human touch. We have always wondered where Coltrane would have taken jazz, in Jackson Payne, Fuller gives us a sophisticated, informed guess. There is a lot of jazz criticism laced in the book. Fuller dismisses Miles' late experimentation with rap beats, which provides another clue that jazz development suffered the end of its most interesting evolutionary line with Coltrane's death.

But this is all conjecture. The recreation of Payne's life is all conjecture. After Joyce, and Gide, and William S. Burroughs, time-splicing, multiple points of view, and the unreliable narrator are no longer pioneering literary novelties. In the post-modern narrative these techniques are no longer employed for effect, but for thematic purpose. Fuller uses all of these approaches to build his largest theme, a theory of knowledge, within several sub-texts, not the least interesting of which is the nature of jazz, its origins, and its "meaning." Jazz is, and is not, a metaphor in this book. The time-splicing, syncopation, lyricism, painful and blissful reality of the tale are difficult to mistake as an extended literary solo that literally builds on the basis of Payne's life in the first 200 pages, to the free form explosion of the final third of the book.

If "The Best of Jackson Payne" sounds like a compilation CD, so in fact it is, --- a distillation of a complicated, pained, sad, but ultimately triumphant life. Fuller reaches across race, age, class, gender, and truthfulness in the narratives of the informants he quotes in the book. The remarks of his alter ego, Quinlan, a musicologist who is stiving to re-create the life and death of his hero Payne, are italicized in the latter part of the novel. Un-italicized replies and commentary comes from informants who for the most part have been introduced earlier in the text. Some informants are not introduced, but their identities are intuited. The reader begins to understand the reference and the shifting points of view. Now you are playing jazz with the master.

One ought to forgive the author his day job. He writes convincingly of shooting galleries, jazz charts and clubs, and has an ear for the profane end of the world where pain and suffering turn to art. We forgave Charles Ives and Raymond Chandler their careers in insurance. Fuller runs the risk of being mistaken for a Pulitzer-winning editor and publisher of a major newspaper and not the very great novelist he has become.

If you know someone who watched Ken Burns' "Jazz" and now wants to know what jazz is REALLY about, or if you want a companion to Ashley Khan's "Kind of Blue," if you don't have a CD player but want to hear jazz, are interested in philosophy as literature, or literature as literature, this is the place to start.

the book has a lot of pictures and photographs of Michael from child to thriller (1984). But if you have books such as the Magic and the madness the pictures are of the same thing. Probably from a different angle or such. Great book though for any Michael Jackson fan.

During a recent game of bridge on Yahoo, my partner stammered that he had a Yarborough (p 56). Ah, I thought: he has no card higher than a nine and he is well-read! He has read Kilpatrick's Bestiary of Bridge. I scurried to dig through my summer stash of reading material to find this wonderful and amusing commentary on the nature of beasts and the best of bridge. I find bridge players to be introspective and certainly those of us who love the game will find our personality somewhere within the forty short descriptions of beastie bridgers. I am wavering between the Yakkity Yak (p88, not yet married to the Yakkity Yak, as suggested by Kilpatrick) and the Little Old Lady (p39) who's aura of vulnerability is fleeting and whose game is kin to a deadly lion kill. Readers of this short and amusing essay will leave the games early to find themselves and their favorite conventions addressed. Bridgers..welcome to Kilpatrick's "animal kingdom" analogy of your games and of those with whom you partner!

Karin shows how Jesse influences people in other countries with his handsome looks, suave smile, and woman-winning charm. It's easy to see why Karin succombed to Jesse's "negotiations"

The book is fascinating reading even for non Masons. I throughly recommend it for members of the craft and also for non members. It gives a better insight into what freemasonry is all about.