Governments

Jonathan Dobrer's newest collection of essays showcases his gift for extremely engaging, often humerous and always thought-provoking writing. Who can resist delving into an essay that seems to be a confession of a crime "I just got back from making a drug run to Mexico."? It's not a confession nor a crime--but I leave it to the next lucky reader to discover the truth! His essays explore and address seemingly insurmountable social concern; separation of church and state, Sept. 11, the situation in the middle east, corporate fraud, immigration, racism, and national security. And whether or not you may agree with his observations, these essays will make you think and rethink your own observations. These are essays born to spark lively group discussion. The essays here also show Jonathan Dobrer's strong ability to write deeply moving essays such as the one on the death of Daniel Pearl, delightful whimsical pieces such as "Murder Most Vowel" and local interest pieces such as "Irony-Free in Anaheim" that address the issue of immigration in an intelligent, straight-forward manner done so well it could apply to any community in the U.S. This book is a delight to read, talk about, and read again. I look forward to Jonathan Dobrer's next collection!

Jonathon Dobrer has an irreverent method of cutting to the heart of common and frequent misconceptions and misleading information. His way of playing devil's advocate while imparting knowledge to the reader is unique. He asks questions (most of us would like to ask but are too shy) and provides "dumb" answers--exactly what the average person gets when dealing with companies and their policies. This book is funny and thought provoking at the same time. I couldn't wait to read the next chapter and am looking forward to his next sojourn into the literary forest.

serious; funny; --> seriously funny.
so funny, i couldn't put it down.
seriously.

There are many books that have been written on the subject: from Bill Sammon's book "At Any Cost" on the right to Alan Dershowitz' "Supreme Injustice" on the left. Sabato's is a rare thing, a book that tries to be impartial, and succeeds.

It has chapters by legal advisors to both Gore's and Bush's sides in the legal wrangles that followed the election, as well as journalists and academics. If you want to know what happened, as seen by all sides, this is about the only book that will tell you that.

The only negative point I can make is a printing job that is somewhat careless; missing apostrophes abound, and my copy has two of one page and is missing another. But that does not bear on the book's merit itself.

Not long before the chads stopped swinging in the last presidential election, pundits and pollsters were sharpening their wits and dusting off their finger pointing apparatus. Their goal was to isolate the who, what, where, why, and how of the controverial election results in Florida. That election brought everybody who was anybody, including the Supreme Court, to the edge of their seats for days. The indefatigable Sultan of Soundbites, UVA Professor Larry J. Sabato, had seen enough and done enough in politics to realize this was history, and deserved to be given a thorough investigation. So he collected a group of insiders and commentators to take their best shot at turning over stones and writing about what crawled out. The result was Overtime! The Election 2000 Thriller. No casual or serious student of US history should be without a copy. Congratulations to Dr. Sabato and Joshua Scott, his coauthor and editorial assistant from the UVA Center for Governmental Studies on a job exceptionally well done. Buy this book for yourself, and at the reasonable price, grab a couple copies for friends as well. It's guaranteed to reveal facts that even the media savvy US public has not to this point realized. Alyson L. Taylor-White, Editor, Virginia Review

Will only political junkies or long-ago residents of Florida (I plead partly guilty of the first and fully guilty of the second), appreciate this book? I think not, but it does help to have given up excessive idealism ("Politics is so corrupt!") and excessive cynicism ("People are so corrupt!") in favor of an occasional visit to realism.

With the media giving us mainly--and often only--sensation, and seeing law as a struggle by imperfect human beings to create some justice in the world, I liked best the stories told by the attorneys for both sides.

I worked for Hughes during the time of the event described as his "kidnapping." At the time, the entire Staff on Romaine street was in a major uproar, ostensibly because of a "falling out" between Hughes and Noah Detrich. However, the behavior of some members of the staff subsequent to this event have convinced me that a great degree of truth is contained in Gemstone.

This thick new volume on the famous Gemstone Files is complete with additional research and photos. An extremely valuable book that looks into the roles of Howard Hughes, (Aristotle) Onassis, World War II conspiracies and the Kennedy assassinations in the light of a mysterious document known as the "Gemstone File."

An extraordinary analysis and cross-reference of the Gemstone File, which concludes that many of the bizarre Gemstone events might have really happened: Howard Hughes may have been kidnapped by Aristotle Onassis and replaced by a double, while the real Hughes lived his life out as a zucchini on a Greek island! This book digs up so much dirt your mind will never be clean again. Haven't you wondered why Jackie-K became Jackie-O

This book is amazing. It is written in a clear, simple, succinct manner. Clyde and Ed have really opened my eyes to the way our country is run. I knew that our government was out of the hands of the people, but I had no hope that anything could be done about it. Now I have not only learned the details of the corruptness of our power- and money-driven government, but I know that things can be changed. By adopting the principles of the Libertarian party, we can return our political structure to one that truly is of, by and for the people. We can return our earth and all its people, and our economy, to a state of health and vitality. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand why things are the way they are in this country, to anyone who wishes things could be better, to anyone interested in living a better life. After reading this book, I was delighted to go to the polls on election day and vote for all the Libertarian candidates. I only hope that our citizenry is deserving of what those candidates have to offer.

Cleveland and Noyes make a great case in their book for (as they say) shifting back to "bottom up government" as our founding fathers envisioned.

They both definitely know their subject and have well thought-out all issues they discuss in the book including taxes, prisons and the drug war, energy policy, farming, etc. There is a lot of ground covered here.

After reading each topic, I found my self in agreement with nearly every core belief of the libertarian party - it just makes SENSE as opposed to how we've been doing things here in the U.S. the last hundred years - we've sure strayed from the founding father's principals, including "limited government" - in today's society, you can't do ANYTHING without government involvement and taxation - so much for a "free market" economy. The book reads very well and the is a wealth of information in the Appendixes.

To sum it up: Clyde and Ed have written one of them most inspiring books about the POTENTIAL of government I have ever read - I'm so glad they have shared this vision as I'm sure this book will inspire many other people!

If you are like me, you are completely bored and frustrated with politics in our country. Our candidates flood the TV, airways & press, with personal attacks and negative campaigns. I am continually amazed at how hard they work to say nothing and make it last 30 minutes. Finally, there is a breath of fresh air. Finally, we have candidates that have alot to say. So much, that it took this book to make the information available to the public. This book explains their plans for restructuring the property tax system, eliminating state income tax, generating green energy for the entire state, restoring the power of the individual and much, much more.

Both authors of this book are running for office in Iowa. Clyde Cleveland is running for Governor and Ed Noyes is running for Attorney General. Regardless of the campaign tactics of the other candidates, Mr. Cleveland & Mr. Noyes continue to run their campaign's using the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Their campaigns demonstrate the respect that they have for the individual and that is something that is in short supply in our government today.

Read a single chapter and you will be hooked. You won't want to put it down until you've finished it! Enjoy!

Rarely does a book capture the ways that a family can find purpose and forgiveness in the face of cruelty from others. This detailed account of the imprisonment of the father and eventual banishment of the entire family to a rural village in China puts a face on the experiences of educated persons during Mao's rule. In the same tradition as Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, the author's descriptions and reflections show the resilience and depth of the human spirit. This book is extremely informative about the Maoist regime and inspiring about the strength of persons to survive and thrive in the harshest of circumstances. One of the best books I've ever read.

Wow! I was especially impressed with the clarity with which both the husband and the wife wrote. It is written intellectually, yet with readability. Wu and his wife endured sufferings for actions that they were falsely accused of, yet their love for one another and for their family heightened throughout the entire nightmare. Being sent to prison for 30 years for returning to your own country in order to make it a better place is something that few of us could withstand, yet Wu withstood and became a better person for it. This is one of the best books that I have ever read. It inspires the reader to take a closer look at priorities, and leaves the reader with a deep sense of loss for the authors on one hand, yet a deeper sense of gain in areas of life unseen.

Wu Ningkun's "A Single Tear" is an excellent look at a young Chinese man whose decision to return to China from America after the 1949 Mao Zedong revolution has lasting and potentially tragic implications for both him and his family. Like many Chinese who emigrated to other parts of the world after WWII, Wu believes that China will be able to enter a better, prosperous and independent phase with the new Mao regime. Although quickly disillusioned, Wu and his family remain, subject to imprisonment, deprivation, and humiliation, especially during the infamous "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s. By the time of Mao's death in the 1970s, the Wu family has been moved -- separately and together -- from city to country and back again, persecuted for their religious beliefs (Christian), and distrustful of neighbors and friends with the constant denunciations that have become standard. This book will show you what I have heard firsthand in China: the destruction of the intellectuals and "old" by a new generation with no sense of the past. Very moving and inspirational.

This book brought me to tears. As an activist for the Tibetan cause, I thought I knew how bad things were there, then I read this book. It is fantastically written and includes photographs of China's atrocities in Tibet.

This book is the journey of a man. We watch him go from being a simple tourist and climber to being a doctor and a witness while being present at one of Tibet's largest recorded protests.

Anyone who cares about human rights should read this book

I'm from Brazil, and here we have only few notices about the situation in Tibet. It's not easy to me to read in english, but it's the only way to be aware of the terrible situation on Tibet. Sky Burial is one of these books that bring us some conscience and desire to make something to help those people and that country. Since I read this excellent book , I don't buy chinese goods anymore and I do the possible to talk about the tibetans reality with my family and my friends. We, all the people of the world must help Tibet from the chinese hands, before it's to late.

Add this book to Tears of Blood By Mary Craig and In Exile From the Land of Snows by John Avedon and Whispered Prayers by Steven Harrison. It is important to understand the brutal nature of China and what buying the "Made in China" label supports in both the government and those who control manufacturing and trade. Read, understand and act. This and other books will break your heart that the U.S. wants to become a business partner with the horror that is the government of China.

Prof. Frymer has written a book that many different audiences will find useful. Political scientists will appreciate his skill in demonstrating a counter-intuitive, and yet ultimately convincing, account of race and party politics. Those from other academic fields will be grateful for Frymer's decision to eschew political science jargon, and will find that the book makes contributions to our understanding of history and law. Finally, non-academics will find the book both accessible and informative. I highly recommend "Uneasy Alliances."

This is one of the best books I've read on race in America. It shows why racism persists, and how our political leaders collude in its persistence. It takes on conventional wisdom among intellectuals and political leaders, and it does so in a way that is accessible to an average reader. I can't praise it too highly.

This book is a masterful combination of historical research and party analysis that will reshape the way we think of political parties. Frymer argues convincingly that party institutions have generally sought to marginalize the issue of racial injustice in American politics. A major contribution to the literature from a young scholar and excellent teacher.

Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society. It is quite an education, as another reviewer put it. Marx's revolutionary myth dominated history for the better part of the 20th Century, and if we are serious about not repeating the errors of that period, this book should be a part of our education. The short story Buddha's Smile in Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The First Circle, brilliantly tells the same story, from the point of view of Soviet prisoners. Lewis Feuer's Marx and the Intellectuals compares Marx and Engels themselves with the kind of people Hollander is describing. I also recommend the writings of the Rumanian philosopher, pastor, and former prisoner, Richard Wurmbrand.

Hollander retells George Keenan's story of a Norwegian radical who, when asked what country he most admired, said, "Albania." Keenan noted that the student obviously knew nothing of Albania, but chose that country "simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one's own society."

The same reactionary psychology has, it seems to me, been transferred in our day to an uncritical and naive attraction towards what is (simplistically) called "eastern religion." One could write an even longer book about how Westerners project their fantasies on monist ideologies: people like Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong "explaining" human sacrifice, the Theosophical Society standing up for caste, Arthur C. Clarke (Did he know much more of Asian history than the Albanian radical knew of Albania?) describing Buddhism as "the only faith that never became stained with blood." Even Hollander allowed that, "While the suspension of disbelief has its place in human life, it belongs more to the religious (or asthetic) than the political realm." But his book should be read, in my opinion, as a warning against all forms of ideological naivite. A love of truth, and a determination to tell it no matter how out of fashion it may seem, is essential to integrity in all walks of life. Political Pilgrims vividly illustrates, in the political realm, the evil that can be done when honesty plays second fiddle to fashion.....

Hollander puts the selective moral outrage and selective acceptance of evidence of the Left on parade as he follows these blinkered one's through the various Potemkin Villages of the Totalitarians, from the October revolution forward into most of the 20th century. Smug arrogance knows no political party or religious faith, no gender, race or sexual preference, it seems to be evenly spread among us. In this instance the highly developed capacity for self-deception of the Left is on trial and an amusing trial at that. Their tortured explanations of the intellectually unexplainable are a fictive of mankind's marvelous ability "to transform things to the liking of his desires".

Like all those who are "blowin' in the wind", these intellectual hard heads do not seek truth, but instead to validate their worldview. This book is a study of intellectuals, estrangement and its consequences.

Hollander has written a remarkable work of cultural history, documenting western misperceptions of revolutionary societies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has observed, it is one of the characteristics of a liberal democracy that it is politically unexciting compared with the messianic political creeds. Hollander substantiates this truth with a depressingly predictable, horrifying, but still grimly funny catalogue of intellectual gullibility concerning the supposed virtues of a succession of Communist despotisms, from the early Bolshevik state to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. It is perplexing that this type of support for totalitarianism of the Left has not always - or even often - destroyed the reputation of the 'intellectual' professing it. One has only to think of the deserved obloquy heaped upon supporters of the equivalent monstrous tyrannies of the Right - Ezra Pound's sympathy with Fascist Italy, Heidegger's support for Nazism - to note an unwarranted inconsistency here. The preposterous encomium "Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation" (thus titled in its second edition, without a question mark), defending Stalin and the Moscow trials, has done little to dent the reputation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb as reforming advocates of Fabian socialism, while Noam Chomsky's repulsive polemics denying the extent of Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia are apparently not to be mentioned in polite company. Hollander dredges all this up, with useful annotation on just why these illusions persist. My one main criticism of this seminal book is its loose definition of the term 'intellectual'. Figures such as H.G.Wells or Bernard Shaw are indeed exemplars of the higher stupidity whereby intelligent men may take leave of all critical faculties when it comes to Left-wing tyranny. It is stretching that definition somewhat when Hollander refers also to intellectual lightweights like Jane Fonda.

I read this book right after Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. Together they tell the sad tale of how the original inhabitants of the US were moved from their original lands to make way for the US movement west. I enjoyed this book a little more than Bury My Heart, I felt like I got to know some of the characters a little better in this one. But both are worth reading for anyone interested in this sad chapter of US history.

This book tells the sad story of what happened to Native Americans (a case of genocide) in a very readable format. It is also very educational and should be mandatory for American History classes.

This is an amazing book. Tireless research and the author's gift of vision and words produces a magnificently readable narrative of the American Indian Removals. Very balanced with no point of view overlooked. Many surprising appearances. And plenty of twists which will make you laugh outloud and break your heart. A very human book. An absolute must-read for anyone who wants to learn history as through the eyes and ears (and hearts) of those experiencing it. You won't be able to put it down.

Reprinted in a new Millennium Edition, Michael Minns' The Underground Lawyer is comprehensive, highly detailed introduction to the American legal system, written specifically to be understood by lay people. The next best thing to a law school education, The Underground Lawyer covers everything from criminal law to bankruptcy. A must for anyone with immediate need to quickly learn more about criminal or civil law, the judicial system, the role of the attorney, constitutional rights, bankruptcy, wills, or any other aspect of American jurisprudence.

Twenty years ago, I lost my husband in a crash. I was a widow at 25 and I wish I had had the underground lawyer then. This book is a real lifesaver when there's legal trouble around.

As a litigator myself, I understand the overall complexities of "the law". However, I can't know everything about every aspect of law, so I refer lots of friends and clients to the Underground Lawyer to answer the questions I can't