Agencies

Death Is Not Always The Winner by publisher, radio broadcaster, and foreign policy expert David Landau is an original novel about Cuba and the United States during the implacable reign of Fidel Castro's. Based on true historical events, and deftly written with a keen eye toward Cuban hearts and minds, Death Is Not Always The Winner accurately and engagingly portrays complex political machinations and the individual lives that are all too often destroyed in the eternal struggle for power and influence. Highly recommended reading!

The Vietnam War was a product of the Cold War, that great conflict between titan powers that was spawned by the nuclear age and that dominated foreign diplomacy for decades. It was capitalism versus communism and democracy versus autocracy. The conflict raged not only in the battlefields of Vietnam, but also in the homeland, where the war took the center stage of a cultural and social revolution. In all of the commotion and of all the debate, the war, at the field level, became a product of the political chaos that characterized America during that period. Washington, who scrambled for a policy that worked, that appeased the nation, that placated the growing upheaval, in the end never found it. Its failure to do so produced the only solution that was politically viable albeit immoral: get out anyway you can, but by golly DO GET OUT! This is what Decent Interval is about.

Decent Interval is Frank Snepp's first hand account of the immoral exit the United States made from Vietnam in 1975. Aside from the issues concerning the righteousness of the war, of lost American lives, of a nation grown weary, and of the social/cultural revolution it became a part of, the fact is, that nevertheless, we were there, and we made commitments. And although making the exit may very well have been the right thing to do, the way we left violated the principles that make up the character of our nation. We failed to live up to the very values that we usually identify as American, or at least those values that we like to believe we possess. We value human life. We value freedom. We value honesty. And most of all we value being recognized as champions of all of that. We love that image of America. In Decent Interval we learn that America's darkest hour in Vietnam did not occur during the war. Instead, our worst folly came in the end. We bungled everything from leaving behind a huge arsenal for the enemy, to turning our backs on thousands of people who were loyal to America, who trusted us, who knew our values, and never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that their service to us would be repaid with deception and abandonment.

Decent Interval is not a partisan view in the traditional Pro-war/Anti-war sense. Rather it's a factual account of events as seen through Snepp's eyes. Snepp was a CIA analyst in Saigon, and some have labeled Decent Interval as a whistle blow, but in actuality, the fact that our involvement in Vietnam was full of bureaucratic incompetence and ineptitude, was no secret. Snepp simply gave us the details. .

Decent Interval is an excellent read. It epitomizes everything that went wrong in Vietnam. It illustrates the limits of our political power in the face of an increasingly anxious electorate, and how political survivability took precedence over what would otherwise have been considered the "right thing to do."

Too bad its out of print! It is difficult to overstate the importance of this book in intelligence scholarship. It is perhaps the only book that gives, essentially from the horse's mouth, James Jesus Angleton's approach to analytical counterintelligence. This approach was driven from CIA when Angleton was fired in 1974 as part of the Church Committee witch hunt. Angleton's seemingly simple insight -- that our enemies, as thinking, breathing human beings, may actually go out of their way to feed us false intelligence, so that we will believe things that aren't true -- has been totally lost to CIA for almost 30 years. Instead, it has been replaced with a naive faith that CIA is simply to smart and professional to be fooled. You simply can't understand intelligence matters without grasping the role of deception.

It's really great to get a closer approach on the who's who in designing the web. This book reaches everyone who's interested in web as a visual medium. The "Design Agencies.Com" gives you an entire view on the process of creating web sites as the agencies exposes their feelings through comments and works. As a Web Designer it feeds me with the inspiration I need to keep on creating stuff for the Web, and I hope you all capture the same feeling I have about it.

I picked up this book out of curiosity because I write crime novels. When I saw from the index that the authors discussed my books, I could not resist reading those pages on the spot. Had I not been impressed by the discussion of my work, I would not have purchased the book. And I'm very glad I did. The authors have put a great deal of research and thought and analysis into this book, interviewing agents, editors, and authors (I was not among them, and do not know the authors myself). They have clearly done their homework, with nearly twenty pages at the end devoted to listing cited works and contacted people, all of them among the most knowledgeable and admired in the business. This is an impressive work, and one that I think will be much cited by students and writers taking a serious look at a type of fiction that reflects problems of modern society perhaps better than any other. My only caveat is that the book definitely reads more like a scholarly treatise than a book on pop culture. It isn't for those interested in a quick fun look at modern crime novel heroines. But anyone wanting a more thorough and thoughtful examination of the subject could hardly find a better resource. This is an excellent addition to the library of anyone with a deep interest in the subject.

Set in the turbulent Vietnam War, Bob Swartzel's Diverting The Buddha is a highly recommended political thriller. Two Vietnamese and two Americans find themselves swept into a deadly conflict that none of them can understand or control. Written by a veteran of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in South Vietnam who witnessed the brief-lived Buddhist democracy movement, Diverting The Buddha is driving, powerful, entertaining novel marking Bob Swartzel as a writer of considerable accomplishments.

The century between Augustine's death in 430 and the so-called Council of Orange in 529 has been treated rather cursorily by historians of doctrine, obscured as it has been by the long shadow of the bishop of Hippo. The tendency in treatments focusing on Dogmengeschichte has been to regard the period as a sort of quiet backwater, highlighted occasionally by evidence of the decays and glimmerings of Augustinianism. Such a viewpoint has never been adequate, and its insufficiency has been underscored in recent decades by the renewed scholarly interest in the profound social and cultural transformations of the fifth and sixth centuries. Rebecca Weaver's monograph makes a substantial step forward by setting the "Semi-Pelagian" controversy in the context of some of these transformations.

Weaver's interests are theological, a fact which--O tempore!--sets her treatment apart from much that is currently being written about early Christianity. Her central thesis is unremarkable, namely, that the controversies over divine grace and human agency that burst forth sporadically from Augustine's last years (c. 426) to Orange were the function of deep differences of theological concern and social setting between the disputants. Such differences have been noted before. Weaver's study, however, is remarkable in its ability to mark out their contours through careful, sensitive reading of the polemical texts.

Weaver distills the differences between, on the one hand, Augustine and his defenders and, on the other, those who questioned his doctrine of divine grace. The former, operating within a congregational setting, sought to safeguard the sovereignty of grace, while the latter, from within a monastic milieu, aimed to preserve the connection between human actions and human destiny. While Augustine's opponents could be regarded as traditionalists, following a path tracing back through Evagrius Ponticus and Origen, Augustine's own account of divine grace was novel and "almost entirely self-constructed." The "Semi-Pelagian" controversy, then, is essentially a clash between two different ways of conceiving the relations between God and humanity, "the Augustinian and the monastic." At first blush, this distinction may seem overdone; Augustine was, after all, a cenobite of a sort and a guide to the monastic life. In truth, the distinction between the two perspectives might be expressed with greater nuance. But the reality to which it points is clear enough. As Weaver patiently demonstrates, the differences between Augustine and, for example, John Cassian, were so deep that they could not be overcome by the convergences of vocabulary that marked the century-long evolution of the controversy.

Beginning with Augustine's troubles with the monks of Hadrumetum, Weaver traces this evolution through a clear and informative survey of the writings of the combatants: Cassian, Prosper of Aquitaine, Vincent of Lérins, Faustus of Riez, Fulgentius of Ruspe, and Caesarius of Arles. This survey is unobtrusively informed by the most recent scholarship, and Weaver proves herself a careful reader of texts. The result is the clearest and most theologically astute account of the "Semi-Pelagian" controversy now available. It also suggests the need for detailed and comprehensive accounts of Gallic and North African monasticism. This book should certainly be in every theological library. It is a sure guide to an important period in the history of doctrine, for the Augustine who emerged from this period, his rough predestinarian edges worn somewhat smoother by the course of this controversy, was the doctor of grace for the Middle Ages.

Thomas A. Smith

A superb and well-researched book on the complex relations between congressional committees and federal agencies, a subject that is as poorly understood as it is important.

This book is an "must have". It contains complete formulars that help the average person consider the design requirements.

at first i thought the $1050 pricetag on this item was a litte steep, especially since i was unemployed at the time, but after mulling it over for about three months, i decided to dig deep into my couch and scraped together enough nickels and dimes to purchase this fine piece of literature. the effects were astounding!!! i couldn't walk down the street without getting offered a high paid executive office position. now, i can buy my kids all the pharmaceutical grade narcotics they want (what, do you expect me to let them get it off the street?), i've been employee of the month for the past six years, and my wife's levels of bedroom satisfaction are sky high! and just this past month, i found out i'm next in line for the position of god! i never thought i'd make it that high up the career ladder. anyway, now i'm so well off, i buy this ebook over and over again . . . just for the f*ck of it!