Agent Books

This is a FANTASTIC children's book (easily the most creative ABC book I've ever run across)! The rhymes are funny and well thought out, and the illustrations have an amazing retro spy feel. This book is dark and funny at the same time, and the illustrations are worth a long second look. I can't wait to read this book to a storytime group!!

I am *not* Andy Rash's cousin or any relation at all, but I *still* think his latest book is an absolute delight! I have a professional review posted at www.planetesme.com/dontmiss.html, but I wanted to say from a personal perspective, when I read this book aloud in the classroom, every turned page was met with laughter, groans of "cooool!" and plenty of "Wow!" The artwork is so hip and the rhymes are really creative. Even though the theme is action-packed, the level of violence stays PG. The spy dance party at the end complete with fedora-wearing record-scratching DJ was a HOOT! When I was done sharing the book with classes, boys dove after my copy like tigers on a t-bone. This book taps into what kids want to read here and now, with a finger on the pulse of the reluctant reader. It is my own son's new favorite book. If your family enjoys The Spy Kids movies, Rocky and Bullwinkle or any of the Pink Panther stuff, you've got to add this title to your shelves! I also love Andy Rash's collection of subversive verse _The Robots are Coming_, which has become one of our standard gifts for boys turning eight. Can't to see what this offbeat talent will offer up next!

Okay, I'll 'fess up -- I might be slightly biased because Andy's my cousin. Nepotism aside, this is just a great book. It's funny in the same way Andy is and engages the reader in the story. The illustrations are amazing and perfectly suited to the text. Although now he's all grown up, as they say, Andy still has the ability to see life through the eyes of a child, and his work always connects with children and adults alike. Great job, "cuz".

The images are fantastic and the agent rhymes are the perfect mix of humor and wit so both kids and adults will love this book. I loved turning each page to see what the next agent was up to! I'm buying this book for all my little cousins.

The other reviewers have done a great job of describing this book so I'll keep my review short. I was not prepared for this book. I'm not sure anyone can be prepared. Halfway through I started crying and had to put it away for awhile. Our country is capable of doing some wonderful things. We (and yes I mean we, because the actions of our leaders and military represent all of us) are also capable of doing some truly horrible things. This book shines a light on one of the horrible things we did in Vietnam.

In September, 1976, just back from eight years helping homeless streetchildren in Viet Nam, I wrote an Op/Ed piece for the New York Times ( "Learning From the Vietnamese -- And Giving", 12/04/76) that concluded: "And I'm at a loss how to tell my own people that Vietnam's needs are our remedy - to say that what the Vietnamese people have to offer us - as they did me - is so great that for our own sake we must help them." I was attempting to make a connection between the spiritual strengths the people of Viet Nam had to offer us and the technological assistance we, in turn, could give them. Philip Jones Griffiths, in his book "Agent Orange, 'Collateral Damage' in Viet Nam" has made an even more compelling, if depressing, case for interdependency, i.e., because of the American military's chemical spraying in south VN during the war years there are now thousands of people in both the U.S. and Viet Nam who are dealing with deformities and death because of a ticking "time bomb" planted in Indochina decades ago. Griffiths, author of "VIETNAM, INC.", an award-winning photography book on America's longest war, has included here some unsparing images of humans beings brutally deformed by man's more fiendish dalliance with Weapons of Mass Destruction. Here is a "legacy" that must give all of us pause by a brilliant photographer's tireless effort to bring almost unbearable evidence to us of man's inhumanity to man. Like the Holocaust itself, the full impact of these atrocities took years to come to the fore, but "Agent Orange" makes a compelling case that two countries once at war remain linked in a tragic bond that will not soon go away. This is not an easy book to read or, should I say, to view, but I think we ignore it at our peril. Griffiths knows what of he "speaks", having spent years in Indochina and seen un-speakable carnage firsthand. Here he has placed the evidence before us, as well as a precious opportunity to understand where we have gone wrong and how we may become better human beings in the future. "Agent Orange, 'Collateral Damage'", it almost goes without saying, may be the ultimate brief on America's own WMDs. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------

For those already committed to voting for the so-called 'antiwar' candidate, I recommend putting this book in front of Sen. John Kerry and demanding to know what he will do as president to address American responsibility and pay reparations for the genocidal assault on the people of Vietnam. Such action will constitute a litmus test for this candidate, his "band of brothers" and future warriors about how the USA intends to solve the problem of terrorism. Will they acknowledge international law and prosecute the guilty parties including politicians, bureaucrats, executive military officers and defense contractors? Will they honor, finally, the Paris Accords and repair the ecocide brutally wrought upon the Vietnamese by their chemical weapons? Or will they continue to cover up a deliberate, malefic genocide by honoring war criminals like Kissinger and McNamara who now cries cinematic tears while his Pentagon successors plan the mass destruction of any nation that dares to oppose American hegemony?

Philip Jones Griffiths's AGENT ORANGE, COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN VIETNAM is a complex, dense statement that can be viewed and read several ways. Foremost, it is unquestionably the greatest work of photojournalism ever published. I do not make this statement lightly or without professional judgement. For twenty-five years, I edited the work of distinguished photojournalists -- Capa, Richards, Salgado, Peress, and Nachtwey among many others. Comparable only to W. Eugene Smith's MINIMATA: LIFE -- SACRED AND PROFANE, a passionate chronicle of the devastating effects of post-WW II industrial pollution on a Japanese town, AGENT ORANGE surpasses all previous attempts to synthesize the medium of still photography with historical documentation. Griffiths's masterly images unselfconsciously insert readers into the scene of an historical crime and guide them through the evidence page by excruciating page as a means to elicit direct testimony from the perpetrators and their victims. With the possible exception of Erich Maria Remarque' s ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, no other monograph so successfully confronts citizens with the folly of leaders who commit atrocities in their name. The stares of genetically deformed children struggling to articulate humanity across the threshold of pain and disability give absolute lie to the facile excuses of national security used by politicians to conduct high tech assault-and-battery on unwitting, innocent populations. Then it was Vietnam, today Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beginning with his eloquent book, VIETNAM INC. first published in 1971, Griffiths has pursued an unrelenting inquiry into the truth of violence and war. He reported from the Mekong Delta battlefront and also the brothels of Saigon. Returning years later, he earned the trust of farmers who had rebuilt their devastated villages with the detritus of war. Pushing his inquest further he located and photographed war orphans, now shunned as the miscegenated offspring of foreign invaders (DARK ODYSSEY, 1997). Infrequently supported by the mass media, Griffiths parlayed his skills as a commercial photographer to raise the cash necessary to return periodically to Southeast Asia, as if excavating its pitted landscape for some fragment of reason that might explain the macabre body counts and haunting trans-generational birth defects. Some photographers are celebrated for their commitments in documenting a family coming of age or the rise and fall of a nation. Journalism schools promote the virtues of in-depth or extended coverage (sometime a whole week!) while network and cable news personnel embrace the fame of sticking with a big story only to defer, in the final analysis, to the desire of corporate sponsors. By contrast Griffiths has the determination of a seasoned forensic scientist. Although no maverick, he has paid the price of banishment from the newspapers and magazines "of record" whose editors remain too frightened by management to commission or publish his work. Why would they want to remind subscribers of their own inaccuracies and slavish pandering to the official story?

In this respect, AGENT ORANGE can also be read for its scholarship because it presents new historical research about the manufacture and deployment of chemical weapons during the Vietnam era. It has been almost twenty years since American courts acknowledged the gravity of dioxin poisoning in rulings on lawsuits filed by military veterans. Yet companies who supplied the military with these chemical defoliants continue to falsify experimental data on their products' potential for birth defects. Our government stands mute on the issue of "peace with honor" and refuses to contribute any meaningful economic assistance, nonetheless stipulated in the treaty with Hanoi. The war's apologists and neoliberal ideologues continue to deride Vietnam as a failed socialist experiment. Griffith's photographs and words rip their lies to shreds and dissolve their chauvinism in the cold truth of twisted limbs, hare lips, and hydrocehpalic fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. AGENT ORANGE is the black book of American infamy, its author has given citizens a priceless instrument to test their politicians sincerity and commitment to peace. Buy a copy and ask Kerry for a clear statement of conscience!

Philip Jones Griffiths is among the unsung heroes of our time, photographing the otherwise untold, unsavory aspects of a mean-spirited war completely lacking in human decency. Agent Orange is masterfully conceived, researched, photographed and written in prose that at once is dark, beautiful poetry.

My daughters (2 and 4) love the Backyardigans and this book is a great addition to the set and for any Backyardigan fan!

Pablo's Agent Secret is a very popular character in our house. If you liked Super Secret Super Spy, you'll like this book. It's good for helping younger kids learn to read since they already know and like the story.

Book is fun and there are many different voices you can use...evil Lady in Pink, Agent Secret is more of a James Bond in our house, evil dimwitted henchman, a computer, and Austin has many different voices since he is in disguise most of the time. We have a good time reading it and doing evil laughs. My daughter has now been talking like a robot though, but very cute.

my children just love anything backyardigans and this story we have been reading at night before bedtime and they love it

For those of us, who have (somehow) avoided mental institutions, Ms Firestone is our proxyguide of 'what to avoid'. The amazing thing about her writing, is its clarity within the fog enshrouded material (her one-year confinement in Bellevue). I cannot praise, sufficently, the effort contained within this slim opus. I love Shulamith Firestone!

Firestone doesn't waste words in this plain and haunting look at life in and out of mental institutions. It was a quick read -- one afternoon -- that stayed with me for many days. There is very little analysis here, no deep insight into how people become ill or wind up in the hospital; just stark, honest, sometimes brutal observations on their lives during and after they have been there. I haven't been so frightened, for myself and for others walking the fine line of sanity, since reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (a very different yet similarly evocative book) years ago.

Shulamith Firestone, author of the classic feminist text "Dialectic of Sex" and important early women's liberation activist in the late Sixties has turned her considerable writing skill to fiction. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every story is polished and honed to perfection like a stone rounded and smooth by water.

Shulamith Firestone has long been important to feminists' understanding of social institutions, injustices, and struggles. Airless Spaces adds to our understanding of an institution and experience we too often refuse to examine: hospitals for the mentally ill and mental illness itself. In a series of stark and riveting short stories, Firestone recounts the lives of those who move in and out of hospitals, rely on government, medical, and other social assistance for their survival, and fail or refuse to eke out lives recognizably "normal." As someone whose mother suffers from and has been hospitalized with bipolar disorder, I read this book as a gift. I am grateful to Shulamith Firestone for helping me to understand the lives led by my mother and those with whom she spends her days. I have a better sense now of the sorrow, humor, madness, desperation, and fantastic with which they contend daily. Too often we imagine the mentally ill as having no lives; Shulamith Firestone provides us with a picture of the difficult but nonetheless _lived_ lives of the mentally ill. This is an important and generous book.

Some people, unfortunately, never seem to develop into full-fledged human beings. They remain caricatures but can sometimes be extremely successful. Foster has crafted an interesting and compelling story about how these people interact with their world and provides some insight into their motivations. They can be dangerous, but are also very easy to spot. Sometimes winning isn't worth it, and sometimes accomplishing a goal can jeopardize something more important.

In addition to being a nice read this novel can serve to help a young professional consider their ethical/moral bearing. Foster knows real estate and loves LA and makes both inviting to the reader. I highly recommend this book to anyone starting a career in an aggressive and competitive field or to anyone who likes a good story.

Riveting and compelling. I loved the suspense, drama and romance. A page-turner. Strong characters with strong motives and driving passions.

Opened up an aspect of the Real Estate world until now unknown to me, and which I found intriguing.

A must-buy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from cover to cover. Suspense, romance, twists in plot, ethical dilemmas, intrigue, and downright ruthless tactics by the antagonist all make this a good read.

As a 4th generation realtor, it was nice to finally read a book written by someone in the business - if you are in the business then you will have "names" for each character - people you know just like them.

If you are not in the business, you will understand what draws so many in and why they stay in this cutthroat world.

The author has obviously pored a lot of his heart and soul into the story, providing great realism and fact.

A great read, don't buy it unless you have time to read it cover to cover.

The names are different but every character in Alpha Male will remind you of people and personalitites in you own life.

The pace is fast and the story intriguing. Anyone involved in sales will be able to associate with the moral and ethical challanges presented in this book.

The stirring romance will keep you in your chair; because you won't be able to stand up!

"I need an agent!" A thought that every actor thinks to himself in frustration after a tough audition. Yet we as actors don't really fully understand what an agent does. Even those with an agent don't really grasp what work goes into into their career. Ms. Emory answers the questions that every actor asks themselves...How do I get an agent? What does an agent do? What happens when I get an agent?....She answers those and more.

As I've actually met this wonderful lady, her confidence in her job should be what every actor has as an agent works for them.

After reading this book, I feel extremely confident I can find and maintain an agent. If you want one here's the place to start

I would suggest reading this book from cover to cover. Questons you've always had will be answered and some you didn't know you had, or should have, will too. Tabbing sections of interest for future reference would be a good idea as well.
Step into an agent's office on realistic footing, then deal with your agents through the years professionally and as a team member working toward the same goals.
Margaret Emory has done both actors and agents a service with this book.

If you have about 1,000 questions about the business of acting, then get ready to have 999 of them answered in this book. It's so well-written that it is easy to read, humorous and very informative. You get to find out how agents can get you jobs, what it takes for you to work with an agent, what agents need from you and what you need from agents. Oh, and so much more.

An understanding of the acting business is crucial if you want to be a success. How can you play a game and expect to win if you don't know the rules? This book tells you the rules and it is up to you, the actor to play the game and win!

This is a good book for someone who wants to get into the business and become an agent as well.

Margaret doesn't miss the opportunity to be optimistic and fun, two traits very much needed if you want to be alive and well in this business. :)

If you're an aspiring actor who's looking for an agent, don't go on the hunt until you've absorbed the tips in ASK AN AGENT; EVERYTHING ACTORS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AGENTS. It's tough love in a book: a candid discussion of the world of agents, what they can do, what they can't do, and the pitfalls and successes of dealing with one. Chapters discuss how agents 'sell' actors under their charge, what doors are open to them which are closed to the individual actor - and what happens when things go wrong in the relationship. A 'must' for any aspiring actor.

This book - if you can find a copy - is a witty and entertaining companion to the television series. It covers Cooper's life from childhood [and his first audio recorder] through his FBI career [including the tragedies surrounding his partner Windom Earle], and finally ends where the TV series begins. It offers more insight and exploration into Cooper's character beyond what we already see in the show and film.

This, along with The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (A Twin Peaks Book) and the faux travelguide: Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town, completes a set of official book companions to the series.

One last note: as with "The Secret Diary..." there are a few inconsistencies between the description of some events in the books versus the TV series and the film prequel "Fire Walk With Me", but not enough to detract from the book's value overall.

^o^

This is a wonderful tie-in to the whole "Twin Peaks" mythos. The book is written in the style of a transcript of tapes that Dale Cooper made throughout his life - from childhood, through the initial Windham Earl affair, and ending with the call for Cooper to head to Twin Peaks. (Oddly enough, that's where "Diane..." the audiobook picks up.) Author Scott Frost (brother of Mark Frost, co-creator of "Twin Peaks" with David Lynch) captures the quirky nature of Dale Cooper and the Twin Peaks universe perfectly. From amusing anecdotes in childhood to experiments in college (seeing how long he can go without sleep, without urinating) and beyond, "My Life, My Tapes" helps fill in the unknown quantities of the enigmatic Dale Cooper. If you're a "Twin Peaks" fan who hasn't found a copy of this book yet, I encourage you to do so. It is a wonderful read.

Dale Cooper, How could someone like this write spmething like this? it's beyond me. Dale's life seems to much for anyone but he managed to keep himself together. His closest friends and family all desert him one way or another yet somehow he keeps his head up. I was so amazed by this book and this life thatI am in the process of writing a dramatic script to coinside with it. This book is someone's life this should be shared with everyone. Dale Cooper His Life- His Tapes

I bought this book when I was in eight grade and I connected with it instantly. I'm 24 now and it is still as touching as it was then. I really feel for dale coopers's character. He has so much go wrong and yet he keeps his inocent perspective on the turbulent world around him. This my sound lame, but I think this is a truly great coming of age story.

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RE/MAX Showcase
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The Beyound Sales model makes alot of sense and our office has welcomed it with open arms and open minds. As a very new Re/Max office in a coastal market that has changed much in the last two years, there are many great ideas that this office is going to embrace.

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RE/MAX Coastal
Australia

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Not only does this book do a great job of contextualizing the original Bloody Sunday assassinations of the British secret service but there's an immediacy involved where you feel what it's like to be paranoid in Britain. The author tries to be fair in discussing the roles of the British Black & Tans and the IRA but he's definitely on the side of the IRA. When the British Black and Tans are murdered one by one, there's a lot of confusion but he makes sure to play up the atrocities that the British perpetrated.

Most of the information in the book goes from the Easter Uprising to the Bloody Sunday. He writes about how Michael Collins built up the IRA. HOw he worked in many groups and how he managed to hide in plain sight.

The book is structurally limited to this time period. Not much information about how Ireland became mostly independent from Britain and what happened to the rebels afterwards. But it's limitations serve to strengthen the book throughout. Great story. Great piece of history. Definitely recommended.

The Irish struggle for independence from Great Britain still stirs great passion and controversy. Michael Collins's successful strategy to achieve Irish independence from Great Britain has served as a model for similar insurrections for others across the world, particularly the Jewish struggle for independence in Palestine. James Gleeson's Bloody Sunday puts the struggle for Irish independence in a broad historic context and provides personal accounts that make the historical perspective come alive. By adding lesser-known anecdotes to the larger narrative, Gleeson captures the emotions and mentality of the time to explain the actions and motives of all the key forces: the I.R.A., the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the Black and Tan as well as insights into the motives and mentality of the key players. With this more personal perspective, Bloody Sunday nicely complements more academic histories, such as Michael Collins's Intelligence War by Michael Foy, that examine the same events.

Michael Collins' hit squad was nicknamed the "Twelve Apostles" and Mr. Gleeson unfolds the events that would lead to Bloody Sunday at Croake Park later that day.Unfortunately, Mr. Gleason does not delve into the formation and members of the "Cairo Gang" the English terrorists who were eliminated by the Twelve Apostles. Were they recruited from British intelligence in Cairo, Egypt? An unanswered question worth scholarlly research.

Prior to being sent to Eireann, the "Cairo Gang" had been stationed for a while in Cairo, Egypt (This was at a time when the British thought they owned most of the planet). During the Great War (W.W.I), Egypt, and especially Cairo, was teeming with smugglers, assassins, revolutionaries, telemarketers and other "undesirables" who weren't very respectful to British interests. Egypt was critical to British control of the region and thus the situation called for experienced and capable agents.

The "Cairo Gang" as they became known was the cream of the British intelligence agencies. They had been handpicked for their skill and it was in Cairo that they established a reputation that rivaled the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 'getting their man'.

It seems that Michael Collins and his flying columns were producing feelings of consternation in Dublin Castle (the seat of British power in Eireann) which the local agents had been unable to remedy. The local agents had also developed a tendency of being found dead thus more stringest measures were obviously needed. Enter the "Cairo Gang".

The Cairo Gang was suspicious of everyone in Eireann and kept to themselves but Collins had cultivated a spy network of incredible reach. Michael Collins was a master at what he did and it was only a matter of time before he got the lowdown on the Gang. On 21NOV1920 the Cairo Gang went bye-bye.

I intend to buy this book for the history of Eireann, circa 1916-1923, is simply incredible.

RFB was no angel, but definitely one of my heros- an adventurers of the 1800 when so much of the world was alien, unfamiliar, and exotic. Another reviewer compares him to Indiana Jones, and it's not a bad comparison. While cowboys were taming the wild frontier of the American West, this Brit was playing cowboy in the Old World. He explored the origin of the Nile to Lake Victoria, when it was completely unknown, and widely-regarded as hostile territory. He wandered India and the Middle East, not as a tourist, but so proficient in several of the local languages that he was able to pass himself off as native! Unlike so many British adventurers, RFB respected the indiginous peoples of the lands he was exploring- indeed, was prone to "go native", which often put him at a distance from his countrymen, but made possible the incredibly rich, fascinating life described in this book. I have recommended this to several people, and always received enthusiastic feedback.

A splendid biography, providing additional details from previous books on the subject; a fascinating life. It must be confusing for the non-British reader to be confronted with references to 'England' and 'English'
when the correct nomenclature should be 'Britain' and 'British'. For instance, the author refers to the 'English Government', an entity which ceased to exist with the Treaty of Union in 1707. These lapses are not acceptable from an academic author

This review applies to the A.D. 1990 Volume: "Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made The Pilgrimage To Mecca, Discovered The Kama Sutra, and Brought The Arabian Nights To The West," written by Edward Rice and published by Charles Scribner's Sons, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York City, NY. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-10898.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) is without question one of the most remarkable men of the Nineteenth Century. This text covers the exploits of the man who was the towering intellectual and physical specimen, face scarred by a Somali warrior's spear; Burton the scholar and author; Burton the scientist, soldier, explorer, and British undercover agent to boot.

Burton was one of the very first Europeans to seek the source of the Nile River in Central Africa, as daring then as a trip to the moon now. He was the first European to reach Lake Tanganyika. In disguise he went to the forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina. He was the first European to penetrate the sacred city of Harar in the unexplored East Africa. It was Burton who brought out to the Western World the classic Indian book on sex, the "Kama Sutra." And--perhaps his most celebrated achievement--Burton did the seventeen volume translation of the classic "Arabian Nights."

Burton had mastered some twenty-nine languages and dialects and operated as an undercover agent while employed as an officer for the East India Company in India. On one secret mission, Burton investigated the Mormons of Utah, the subject of his book "The City of the Saints." On another trip to the Western Hemisphere Burton explored the battlefields of Paraguay out of which came a book about the war between Paraguay and Brazil. Fascinated by swords Burton wrote a comprehensive treatise on the subject which is still in print today; "The Book of The Sword."

Burton also served as a diplomat in Trieste, Damascus, and as envoy to Dahome so as to convince the West African King to stop the celebration of the Dahoman custom of human sacrifice and cannibalism and to desist in the slave trade: "It was barbaric and of an unlimited cruelty (the celebration of custom in Dahomey). Burton did not see any executions, but in deference to him--or to his Queen--the victims were slaughtered at night--"the evil nights," said Burton--the King cutting off the first head himself. Nine men perished in the first slaughter, the victims being decapitated and castrated after death, "in respect," wrote Burton, "to the royal wives." In all, Burton counted twenty-three male victims. He was told that eighty perished during the five days of the custom, and some five-hundred during the year. Women criminals were executed by "officers of their own sex, within the palace walls, not in the presence of men," a fact that he could not resist emphasizing later: 'Dahome is there one point more civilized than Great Britain, where they still, wonderous to relate, 'hang away' even women, in public.'" (Chapter 25, p.379).

Burton's translations of "The Perfumed Garden," and of the "Ananga Ranga" were the first in English of these erotic Indian classics. Burton also had the satisfaction of seeing published his own works of "Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah," and "First Footsteps in East Africa; or, and Exploration of Harar."

Although, unfortunately, many of his works and narratives were destroyed posthumously by his wife, no modern day explorer can even hope to achieve or surmount the exploits and travels of Sir Richard Burton who was knighted during the last ten years of his life. Although the 1989 Bob Rafelson movie "Mountains of the Moon" recounts just one chapter in Burton's life (the discovery of Lake Tanganyika and relationship with Speake), it may be a good starting point for the reader.

Simply beyond belief. A remarkable saga! Five stars.

Sir Richard Burton was a true legend -- he spoke more than 25 languages, travelled to all sorts of remote places, and had a fascinating life. If you enjoy armchair travel books, this one if for you. Rice travelled extensively in the 10 years it took him to research Burton's life. Burton has many "firsts" to his name: the first European to look for the source of the Nile, the first to discover Lake Tanganyika, the first to disguise himself and visit Medina and Mecca, and the list goes on. If not for Burton, we would not have the Kama Sutra nor the tales from Arabian Nights. You can just see Burton in his tent in Africa translating and keeping diary notes. This is one of the most interesting biographies I have ever read. A true adventurer.