Endowment Books

Begin looking this book by carefully reading Friedman's Introduction. Like all his books, its theme is 'rich-man as boggy man', great man as mentally sick man. Friedman is a left wing academic, a true red diaper baby. Seriously, His mother and father were active, card carrying members of the American Communist Party during the days when it was a puppet of the Soviet Union. So are all the authors of the mediocre articles in the book. During the more traditionalist 1970s though esrly 1990s, Friedman keep this quiet, coming out only when he observed the tide turning. Just examine his books & their dates. Until he made a name for himself by subtle trashing of Karl Menninger in an official biography (He bragged about being accused by Dr. Menninger's family for causing the death of Karl, with his book), Friedman published rediculous books in which he tried to shrink dead men with an amateurish grasp of psychoanalysis.

The theme of this book is secular progressive, not history. The authors paint the rich man as boogey man, a left liberal stereotype image of America's great Philanthropists. Rich people are easy to stereotype because few Americans know any, including left liberals who are obsessed with them. The authors of this book have academic careers based on reinterpreting great men as cardboard stick figures who merely foul the American terrain, especially Friedman whose career consists of slandering men of action who are long dead, so they cannot defend themselves.

According to the Friedman ganag, The wealthly philanthropist is just out to get you, out to control your life & mind. How do they have time left for their extravagant socializing, boating & out of control consumerism? Whether he claims to give to improve lives, reduce suffering, or simply to give something back to the people, don't you believe it! Friedman & friends want you to know that they really are out to exploit and manipulate us all, after they are old and long gone.

The good news is that the "work" of most American academics is forgotten before they retire. And quick they are to take early retirement offers! Ask Friedman how many he has taken (so far).

Never you mind the Ford family denouncement of the Ford Foundation, taken over by extreme neo-marxists (who take over charities and foundations in order to use them to give people--anarchy?) or the complaints of several of the families discussed in this book, families who object to secular progressive or neo-marxist take overs of their great ancestor's philanthropic foundation. But "scholars" like Friedman and company - who "know" what Americans really want and what is really best for us all. They just want to help us. They want you to know that the rich man really is out to get you.

Ask yourself, Sociology 101 teaches that members of what large group are all alike?
Fictional Groups. Only in fantasy are memebers of any group all the same. The Rich are not even a group. If so where do "they" meet? The left needs to present a copy of at least an official rich guy roster or a single association they belong to. Don't you think? Do you think Soros, Kennedy, Gates, & Opra Winfrey belong to the same global rich guy club? Beware of huge stereotypes like "The Rich Guys" or "the Rednecks" that extremely few people are even aware of as constituting a left liberal stereotype.

Professor Friedman knows best. The late, great historian Professor Robert H. Bremmner dedicated a career to producing balanced histories of Philanthropists but Friedman and his first sargeant, McGarvie know better than Bremmner and his generation of real historians. Professor Bremmner was a gentleman and scholar and he is still remembered by many. He was not the simpleton Prof Friedman and friends depict him.

Read the reviews of Prof Friedman's first two books, especially "Inventors of the Promised Land". More political and psychoanalytical than historical, the books were roundly rejected as trash. Rightly so.

I wonder if they waited until Scholar Prof Bremmner and his scholarly students passed away before they dared to publish this book. Considering its overwelming favorable reviews, does its poor quality prove that there is no professional scholarely history today, just "fiction" disguised as history?

Look for the Friedman & McGarvie students to trash my review--along with the left liberals. They'll assume I am conservative or right wing, living as they do in a false dichotomy bubble. In an age of American scholarship, outstanding students of true historians pounced on Friedman for his many errors and wild interpertations. Now, his few student jump on anyone who criticises him.

I recommend students read this book, after you read the classic work "How to Read a Book", by Mortimer J. Adler... Do that and you will learn a lot.

I am puzzled by the acidity of the review by "J Onyx", who contrasts the supposedly unscholarly and "Marxist" authors of this collection with the scholarly "gentleman" Robert Bremner, who wrote various works on the history of American Philanthropy. J Onyx even speculates that these historians waited until Professor Bremner was gone before they published their writings.

I was one of Professor Bremner's graduate students at Ohio State and assisted him with his revision of his classic work American Philanthropy. Bob Bremner was indeed a gentleman, and he treated other scholars with an irenic spirit even when he disagreed with them. It is impossible for me to imagine Bob Bremner being so uncharitable of other scholars as J Onyx, or engaging in such an acerbic and inaccurate misrepresentation of a work.

This is an important collection of well-researched essays. Anybody interested in the role of philanthropy in American history must begin with this volume.

The brain trust at the Foundation Center has done it again -- unfortunately. Space prevents me from fully documenting the misery, heartache, and downright evil this misbegotten "book" has already wrought.

Witness: My attempts to contact the "Education Research Foundation" in Atkinson, NC (cited on p. 93) resulted in unwarranted phone charges (which appeared on my bill as "Eccentric Passions Inc."), postal threats, and an unsightly rash. No problem, you say, consult the volume and contact a medical foundation. No can do! All my calls to "Cataractus Medical Grants" in Montclair, NJ were ignored -- until I received a huge package at my place of work -- at *my* expense -- which STUNK! (Literally; the stench was both foul and unwelcome.)

Jeffrey Falkenberg, the erstwhile "compiler" of this atrocity, initially refused to take my calls, then began ringing me in the wee hours of the morning moaning about his girlfriend. It was not until we met for dinner and a bottle of wine that we got to the root of his problem -- which doesn't help me one iota.

In short, the sheer girth of this book alone would require Charles Atlas to transport -- with me upon his back and the book carried in a cart. "Foundation Directory?" I say "Foundation Phooey." Save your money and go see "A.I."

I wouldn't ordinarily expect to write a glowing review of such a massive tome, especially one without plot, conflict, or even characters, but this is a book EVERYONE needs to get their hands on. Need money to start a small businees? Find it here. Want a grant to study abroad? They've got 'em! Need to find a foundation to underwrite your organization? David G. Jacobs has combed through what must amount to millions of IRS records to bring to you the best organized, most up-to-date, and just plain gigantic volume of philanthropy- 10,000 entries of philanthropic fury!- to ever bend a bookcase shelf. David G. Jacobs has done a superb job in producing this volume, which is a terriffic upgrade over last year's edition. I can only imagime the supreme effort, long hours, blood and sweat put in by editor DAVID G. JACOBS!

There's no doubt about it. Seeking foundation, corporate and other charitable support for elementary and secondary education is tough. Often grants are sought by teachers, parents and volunteers, who have little or no real background in seeking such contributions. Even professional grant seekers employed by a school can be daunted in matching the needs of the client to the right foundations.     Yet, elementary and secondary schools succeeded in attracting more than $568 million in grants in 1995. If so much money is being given, how can your school get its fair (or unfair!) share?     One important place to begin the search for such grants is the Foundation Center's National Guide to Funding for Elementary & Secondary Education, 4th Edition. This 725-page volume reports on 6,331 grants in support of a variety of programs, including vocational, bilingual, and special education, curriculum development,and programs for gifted or minority students.     Entries include such useful information as foundation type, assets, expenditures, grants paid and number of grants made during the year, and so on. In fact, each entry contains 34 items of information.     So essential is this volume for those seeking grant dollars for elementary and secondary schools that I cannot imagine proceeding without it.

The National Guide to Funding for Women and Girls was written to serve as the starting point for grantseekers looking for foundation, corporate and other charitable support for women or girls. This latest edition, the fourth, contains 978 entries, including 794 grantmaking foundations, 66 direct corporate giving programs, and 188 public charities (including 74 community foundations). Entries were selected on the basis of their stated fields of interest, or though actual grants of $10,000 or more. The volume also reports 4,306 grants, representing nearly $310 million including grants to health care, education, human services, the arts, and more.     This volume will not only be valuable to USA-based charities and causes focusing on women and girls, but to non-USA charities, as well. The fourth edition adds a new section in grantmaker descriptive entries identifying any international giving interests of an organization. The index has been substantially expanded over prior editions, and now describes the countries, continents, and regions in which grantmakers have giving interests. Indeed, the index has expanded from a few dozen such entries to more than 200.

"Savage Century: Back to Barbarism," by Thérèse Delpech, poses the question: What are the worldwide political parallels between 1905 and 2005, and do these similarities suggest that we are, once again, dangerously close to another period of savage world wars? The author makes a convincing argument that the answer is yes.

Thérèse Delpech is director for strategic studies at the Atomic Energy Commission of France and French Commissioner at the UN for the disarmament of Iraq. The original French version of the book, "L'Ensauvagement," won the prestigious 2005 Prix Femina de L'essai. This English translation missed getting a four-star rating from me because I found it frequently very difficult to understand. On just about every page there were sentences that I needed to read over and over again trying to decipher what the author meant, and for many other sentences I was never able to comprehend what the author was trying to convey. I assumed that the problem was the translator, not the author.

I found many of her parallels between 1905 and 2005 eloquent and arresting, but it was toward the end of the book when she was discussing possible political futures for the year 2025 that my interest really piqued. Among many other predictions for 2025, the author suggests these two that I found particularly alarming: 1) the disintegration of Pakistan; 2) a significantly stronger and self-confident India in a military conflict with an economically and socially weakened China--an India that would have no trouble destroying the Chinese fleet in the Strait of Malacca.

Delpech's point of view is decidedly European. As an American, I found it interesting to expose myself to this different perspective on past, present, and future world affairs. When the author makes it clear that she believes that the United States is out of control, I cannot disagree with her, and found it interesting to see that point well argued.

This book is recommended for persons interested in international relations.

The material in the book is very good but...

The book is repetetive and it's overly complicated for no reason.

The book is targeted to nonprofessional investors, but I have an MBA in Finance and I am CFA charter holder, and I had to re-read
many paragraphs to get the meaning. Also the book is repetitive - oh, I said that already.

Kelly's sophomore novel inhabits the well-established realm of the fictional memoir arranged around pop music. Now a prominent Irish music journalist and radio DJ, Kelly grew up in Northern Ireland, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in the mid to late 1970s-just as his protagonist does. In a town far removed from any cultural scene, where nothing ever happens, best pals Declan and his pal Spit discover the liberating power of music. In herky, jerky, short chapters, the twosome lurch from musical phase to musical phase, with little in the way to guide them. Other than chronicle their temporal obsessions with Horslips, then Thin Lizzy, then Van Morrison, then Bob Dylan, then John Coltrane, then country music, nothing much happens. They yearn for girls, they play in garage bands, they yearn for escape to the big city, they get to the big city (Belfast), they grow older and wryly wiser. The only thing one emerges with a slightly better sense of how music can consume teenage boys in remarkable ways, and serves as an important framework for creating an identity for oneself. Ultimately, however, the novel teaches the reader nothing new about all this, and as there's no plot to sustain the reader's interest, it all falls rather flat.

William Gibson recommended this in summer 2003 as a light read, and it lives up to that, filling my commute today. A lecture by the Joycean scholar Cheryl Herr alerted me to this novel, as I am a Horslips fan. The band appears for the narrator when twelve-year old Scout at a jamboree held at to me the unlikely grounds of "Mt Mellary [sic] in County Waterford." Any reader of Joyce's "Grace" will recall the rumor repeated here of the monks who sleep in their coffins, if not that about living high on the fatted calf there and skipping away without paying for your spartan room & board while on the mend from demon rum. The band plays at Jamborama '77 and gains mention elsewhere on occasion, if not as much as Thin Lizzy, whose Phil Lynott proves the icon of Celtic myth and bad-boy pose that Horslips, in what Kelly labels as being a "glam" band, could not sustain as the decade shifted from prog to punk.

This shift, as the perfectly positioned protagonist and stand-in for the author Declan Lydon (symbolically resonant, surprised he does not have Shane as his middle name) shows, gives the power of living as a teen within the North of Ireland who finds his escape from Enniskillen's 365 lakes and market-town stultification. The ennui of being twelve and suspicious of pasta or vegetarianism or wine or sex or jogging as dubious fads expresses well how little had changed since Joyce. Small wonder the boy and his pal Spit Maguire gravitate towards former Portora Old Boy Sam Beckett, if not so much Oscar Wilde, both of whom attended the posh school outside of their hometown decades earlier in the times Joyce described and which echo here, amidst profaner utterances, the blare of TV and disco, and more violent times.

The book, however, is more a series of brief vignettes than a coming of age "bildungsroman." It does not strive to be "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," sure, but the casualness with which Kelly writes, probably honed by long years as one of Ireland's most prominent music journalists and radio personalities (also provider of a fine show on the Aer Lingus in-flight channel), does undermine his thinly disguised fictional "how I grew up in a small town" genial tale's sporadic strengths. Kelly's excellent at summarizing the links between old legends, the ballads like "On Lough Erne's Shore," and his own enlightenment that Horslips, Lizzy, punk, and Dylan all could get along on his turntable. At the end, he grows up and finds that Cohen & Costello prove more fitting gurus for his maturer reflections than metal or rawk.

He shows how the "bubble" lived in during the mid-80s by himself and his student peers at Queen's U. in Belfast provides a sane alternative to the mayhem all around. Van Morrison, Philo, and a showband C&W meets West Ulster phonetically rendered Seamie Sheridan all enter briefly their spotlights. The narrator learns to listen to Coltrane and the Delta blues with sophistication, and while he fails to match as often such suavity in his dealings with young women, the stability that music gives Lydon-Kelly despite his amateurish bands fake (The Children of Prague as the provincial counterpart of The Virgin Prunes) and real offers insight into how a critical respect for music develops for the many who will never find fame on stage.

The difficulty is that the quick pace, the leisurely asides, and the fragmented chapters (despite great quotes taken from Kelly's real-life interviews with musicians) all detract from his overall presentation. Like his real-life autobiography, the intriguingly titled "Cool About the Ankles," (1997) and his sub-Flann O'Brien caper "The Little Hammer," (2003) in which Planxty's piper Liam Og O'Flynn becomes along with Phil L the narrator' obsession. Much of the weaknessses of his other three books repeats here, in the slapdash mix of depth and superficiality. Perhaps unavoidable given the shelf-life of much he writes about, but an author needs greater care in setting out his wares. The misspelling of Mount Melleray provides a telling example of Kelly's lack of care. The glitter's all piled up here, as at a garage sale, and we have to paw through the tawdry and dusty to extract the treasure. More like 2.5 stars, then.

He offers grand craic once in a while -- as in a reverie about the French if they had won in 1798 to turn Hibernia into "Irlande Erotique"-- but you have to endure long detours and enter cul-or his hit-and-miss stories in "Grace Notes & Bad Thoughts" (1994) de-sacs or blind alleys more often than not before finding a way out into the bantering pause that refreshes. But, here's one, contrasting Spit & Declan's learning of Lynott's death by drugs in 1986 with their "only previous exposure" when...

"someone called Billy Chemicals came to the school to warn us of the danger and told us how he had wasted his youth taking every drug he could get his hands on-- impressing upon us the foolishness of throwing away our lives partying.

"Some f[___]n' chance of that! groaned Spit." (101)

As he's but four years younger than me, I confess despite growing up half a globe away, the Catholic school dance, the hours spent spinning vinyl, the utterly fanatical distrust of somebody with the wrong hair style or worse the wrong taste in music, and the slow realization that you grow up along with your record collection all made for moments of "epiphany." While I may not find that moment in Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" as Kelly-Lydon has, I know where it lurks. At least our protagonist, like me and his real-life doppelganger, relate Joyce to our wonderfully silly, delightfully trashy, but ultimately rewarding popular music and our shared love and wish to perpetuate the best of our innovative, fluctuating, determinedly raucous and thoughtfully slagging native culture.

Belarus is next. Most likely not a direct military intervention, but rather a western-capitalist propaganda campaign designed to destabilize and "reform" the country. The Belarus politico-economic system, one of the last of its kind on earth, is structured essentially along the lines of the old Soviet system, and the western powers are dead set on sending it into the dustbin of history. Recently Belarus' Lukashenko government, after receiving criticism from the IMF and World Bank for its slow pace of privatization, actually had the audacity to request that the IMF and World Bank first calculate the social costs of any "structural adjustment programs". (Alexander Lukashenko is the current president of Belarus who the capitalist powers are now starting to demonize as an irrational dictator. Moreover he has been an outspoken statesman against the United States war on Iraq, dubbing it the most cynical war of aggression since World War II.)

Suffice it to say, many Belarusians are refusing to buy the privatization snake-oil, however, and this is the crucial point, a yuppie segment of the country - connected to western elites based primarily in Poland - is intent on joining the exploitation game in which the next step is toppling Lukashenko, a feat that will no doubt happen amidst cheers from CNN. They claim they are advancing democracy when in reality they would support the most autocratic regime if it happened to open up the country to multinational corporate penetration.

For guidance all one has to do is look to Russia and the other former Soviet states where unfettered capitalism is an unmitigated disaster: poverty rates, drug cartels, organized crime rackets, shoddy healthcare, rampant unemployment, human trafficking, corruption and cronyism, petty street crime; all these social indicators have skyrocketed, while a few bandits and shrewd manipulators have become richer than their wildest dreams.

Unfortunately most well educated liberals in the west will go right along with the drumbeat against Belarus socialist society and Lukashenko. Obviously romanticizing Lukashenko is unwarranted, however his administration is generally committed to egalitarian principles and keeping much of the Belarus economy and governing apparatus away from the world's ruling class; which is why he deserves support during this important period in global history.

The United States vilification of President Alexander Lukashenko and Belarus has nothing to do with "democracy" and "human rights." Lukashenko's refusal to surrender Belarus to U.S./E.U. capitalist domination via privatization and criticism of U.S. policies have infuriated Washington. Even more irksome to the White House, IMF, and World Bank is that Lukashenko's economic model is actually working!!!

For accurate and objective information on President Lukashenko and pre and post Soviet Belarus I highly recommend Stewart Parker's new book, "The Last Soviet Republic - Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus." The reader will receive a huge amount of well researched, objective material that contradicts and debunks the stereotypical drivel and propaganda written by Washington's hacks.

The state of progress of egovernment in the US federal and state governments. Federal and State Websites are rated.

Reading E-Government 2003 was a lamentable flashback to reading the first E-Government Book - co-edited by Mark Abramson and Grady Means of the now "absorbed" PwC Consulting. I marvel at how skillfully these people manage to recycle their own compost material with nary a raised eyebrow from the literate and clearly somnambulist public. To add hilarity to this re-hashed litany of E-Government's fits and starts is the exchange of Therese Morin for Grady Means as co-author? of this 2003 version- of a merit less book... In this respect, E-Gov 2003 is where E-Gov 2002 should have been- at the infancy of IBM's capability in E-Government. Someday soon, IBM consulting will realize its mistake in buying the worst of PwC as readers can clearly surmise from reading their worthless products.

This book is likely to be useful for high schoolers applying to college and looking for financial resources. But it is not useful at all for graduates looking for grants and fellowships. Furthermore, its complete lack of indexing makes it very difficult to use in any way other than flipping through entries in alphabetical order, which is very time-consuming.