MAD

What are we doing in this hand basket and where are we going?
That is what comes to mind after reading a book such as this.
We cannot afford to keep our heads in the sand.
Read this book and make the choices that need to be made. An excellent book. The author has integrity and compassion.

Amazon.com is the only place where I could find "Mad Cows and Milk Gate" a year after the trials. At the time that Texas cattlemen, led by billionaire Paul Engler, owner of Cactus Feeders, Inc., filed suit against Lyman, Oprah, Harpo Productions last year, you could find this very informative book "Mad Cows and Milk Gate" written by Dr Hulse in all the major bookstores. Dr. Hulce, a former dairy inspector, reminds us about this inhumane injustice to our planet's herbivores. He informs us of the potential diseases laid out before our human race in our near future. Will an outbreak like Britain's have to open us to the truth--when it maybe too late. According to Dr. Hulce, our pets are also at risk because their food is also being tampered. Remember the movie "Soylent Green" staring Charlton Heston in 1973? New York City and planet Earth in the future is overpopulated. The human feed is Soylent Green, a soybean and lentil mixture with human bodies thrown in. Like the humans in the movie, the cattle don't know what they are eating. The book " Mad Cows and Milk Gate" is about America's cattle eating ground up sheep, (with a history of Scrapie a mad sheep disease for the last 40 years in the United States). Ground up cattle bones, cow's blood, dogs, cats, chicken, pigs, chicken and turkey feathers, and road kill are mixed in with their feed. These ingredients are unknown to farmers who just want their cows to produce more milk and to create "Super Cows." This process creates larger milk yields and super herds of cattle for America's super table. Bovine Leukemia, cancer, Crohn's disease and so many other diseases are the result of this mad feeding. Dr. Hulse took extreme care in the writing of this very informative book because it is his duty to expose how man's feeding practices make God's creatures unclean.

Let me first say that I am not one of Dr. Hulse's peers and I had much difficulty plowing through his heavy medical terms and Latin words usage, however, I was able to grasp the argument that he put forward. Also, I want to be sure that you have the correct picture of Dr. Hulse in mind before going further. He is not an environmental wacko, in fact, I would say that he is fond of meat, milk and eggs. He is against what America's food industries have become and the result it had on our food chain. He tells us why America's meat, milk and eggs are no longer safe for human consumption, when that happened, what needs to be done to correct the problem, and why nothing seems to be getting done. Essentially, the problems are a result of feeding meat protein and manure, which is converted into feed pellets, to cattle, hogs and chickens. The dead animals include cattle, hogs and chickens that died from disease and therefore cannot be fed to humans. The rendering process for turning a cow carcass into food pellets for other cows to eat does not kill all the pathogens and the disease is then passed on to the next herd of cows. Cows with leukemia, cancer and other illnesses are milked until their milk production decreases to far, which then the cow is culled from the herd and rendered into feed for other cows. Pasteurization techniques that used to kill the virus and bacterium in milk have changed and now allow some of the pathogens into the food chain. Farmers are routinely using antibiotics as a preventive measure to get the most from their herds. These are the same antibiotics that people need. Overuse of the antibiotics is creating strains of bacteria that are not affected by the antibiotic. When a person is sick from one of these new strains their doctors will not have an antibiotic solution to cure them. Those antibiotics also make it to the dinner table in milk. Another drug that makes it to your table is the growth hormones given to cattle either to make them produce more milk or to make them leaner. A leaner cow will bring the farmer more money at slaughter than a fat cow. Our chicken industry has its share of problems too. Feeding dead chickens and chicken manure to chickens is causing salmonella to spread throughout the entire flock.

Dr. Hulse goes on to expose the drug industry's efforts to keep hormones and antibiotics in farming, how the American food industries are influencing congress and are trying to force their tainted products on other countries who don't want to eat our stuff. They have laws changed in their favor that block free speech against their product and have definitions of words like "organic" changed so organic food could include their tainted products. They influence the FDA and USDA to reduce food inspection quality at every turn. Dr. Hulse claims that the cost to the consumer through his or her own medical bills and reduced quality of life far exceeds the cost to the food industry if it were to clean up its act. Yet, the American people know little about what they eat and congress will not act until an epidemic sweeps across the nation. This was a hard book to read but well worth the effort. It gets five stars from me because Dr. Hulse's changed the way I think when I make decisions about what food I am about to eat. Also, I like to say that the meat and milk industry are apparently still owned and operated by the same people that Upton Sinclair exposed in his book, "The Jungle."

This book was so bad...I used it to level off a table in my garage that I keep my tools on. Part of the reason is a guy named Scott Maiko. Is there any redeeming quality to this book?

I just barely got into MAD magazine about 2 years ago. I was really behind with issues and the collectibles,but thanks to ebay and online book stores, I reached my goal to find the rare stuff.Now I own over 50 collectibles from busts to toys to t-shirts. And my issues are almost complete(still need the first 24 issues of MAD =P )The MAD Gross book is so funny. I love the articles related to bodily fluids and such. Plus the free poster is too much too handle for me =D. MAD rules!!!!

First off, I would NOT recommend this book for people with weak stomachs or a sophisicated sense of humor. This is Mad at its best(or worst)earning laughs with fart jokes, mucsus jokes, pee jokes (you get the idea). Any moral person will feel slightly guilty at laughing at such crudeness, but laugh you will. My only complaint about the collection is that there are not a lot of classic Mad features. But overall, if you want your humor totally gross, and very funny, this is the book!

Mads Stage also illustrated an edition of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Walter Harding, tittled "In the Woods and Fields of Concord" (Gibbs M Smith, Inc., Salt Lake City : 1982). Which is out of print. I saw his pen-and-ink illustrations and wanted to see more.

The illustrations by the author are worth the effort in finding this book. His style is gentle and leave enough to the imagination to fill in for the child as well as the adult. This artist has been known in the art community for decades, and his childrens' book Greedy Blackbird, and Lonely Squirrel are the two known to me.

This is a weak effort. Interesting and sometimes compelling editorial for each decade (generally essays by agency principals), which has absolutely no relationship to the samples of work shown. The work itself is never glossed, explained, or explored in the larger context of its time frame. The selection of work included is spotty. Reproduction quality is poor, especially on the broadcast material, with many spots featuring only a couple of keyframes and omitting large amounts of dialogue (to the point where the spot makes no sense). Skip this book and look for a used copy of "When Advertising Tried Harder."

...

If advertising is the rock 'n' roll of the business world, then
this wonderfully designed and beautifully written book is about as
close to Woodstock as you're going to get.

For anyone with even the
slightest interest in advertising, Mad Ave is an invaluable guide
covering eight decades (from the 1920s - through to the 1990s) of some
of the best-known ads and campaigns produced by American
agencies.

The book's insightful quotes - from some of the best in
the industry - bring the thrill of an idea you've just scribbled on
the back of an envelope magically to life, as that idea goes on to be
crafted into an effective, well-placed and memorable ad that makes it
through the minefield of critics, account execs and client
uncertainty, to finally do what a good ad should do: highlight the
benefits, position the product, increase sales and enhance the
brand.

From the junior writer or art director, to the
seen-it-all-before creative director, this book has something for
everyone. And as an aspiring copywriter, I came away from this book
determined to do better work and thinking: "Wow, I wish I'd done
that".

There. That's better.

This is my fourth Hammond novel and I didn't find it to be of the same high quality as the other three I have read. This story is about a kennel owner, John Cunningham whose car is stolen from out front of his business with a quarantined dog named Jove in the back. Jove's owner Noel Cochrane was moving to America and his briefcase containing important papers was also in the vehicle along with John's shotgun. The cops aren't too happy with John, Noel disappears and bodies keep appearing while searching for the car and possible rabies filled Jove.

Sounds exciting you say. Well yeah it is in parts but there are a lot of boring needlessly lengthy chapters in between the good stuff. I have also read the Dirty Dollar, The Snatch and A Running Jump which are sensational five star rated thrillers by Hammond. This book however is not in the same league as them.

Poor Cochrane has just retreived his pooch from quarantine only to have the poor doggie stolen along with his briefcase. Not only that, but the kennel owner's missing car and shotgun make the authorities jumpy. When the events lead to a murder case, as a woman's battered body is found near the burnt car, the kennel owner finds himself embroiled with trouble.
Lovely outdoors adventure in Scotland with a clever mystery involving a dog... who could ask for more?

For those of us who went through a phase of tracking down ACE paperback editions of everything Edgar Rice Burroughs ever wrote, it is interesting to see how many of his yarns were originally published in different issues of different pulp fiction magazines of the day. Such is the case with "The Mad King," a tale of confused identities involving European royalty in the tradition of "The Prisoner of Zenda." The first part was published in "All-Story Weekly" as "The Mad King" in March of 1914 with the follow up, "Barney Custer of Beatrice" appearing the following year in "Blue Book Magazine."

The story is set in the fictional land of Lutha where the corrupt regent Peter of Blentz has been keeping Leopold, the late king's mentally unbalanced son, locked up. But after a decade's imprisonment Leopold has escaped and the regent has his minister of War, Coblich, order Captain Maenck to recapture Leopold. Meanwhile, American tourist Barney Custer is visiting his mother's homeland. Seeing a description of the "mad king," he saves a young woman from a runaway horse and on a whim introduces himself as the "mad king."

At this point ERB pours on the contrivances. The young woman believes him, at which point explaining the truth does no good, because she is really the Princess Emma von der Tann, who father supported the old king and would like to see nothing better than Leopold assume the throne. The whole point of the first part of the story is to get the real Leopold on the throne, which does nothing to resolve the romantic tension between Barney and Emma, especially in light of all the political intrigue. The second part finds that the problems of Barney and Lutha are not settled by having Leopold on the throne and Burroughs plays on the various tensions in Europe that were leading the continent towards the First World War.

Your enjoyment of this early ERB potboiler depends almost entirely on your tolerance for confused identities and your knowledge of European politics in the years before WWI. Burroughs would use the idea of look alike characters often, most notably in a couple of Tarzan novels, which is one of the reasons this is an average ERB offering. Burroughs does have a plausible reason for why Barney and Leopold look so much alike, but that really just amounts to another trick from the same deck. You do get strong dosages of adventure and romance that you come to expect from a Burroughs pulp fiction yarn, but the total package is not especially special.

One of my favorites of ERB's stand-alone novels. The resemblance to The Prisoner of Zenda/Rupert of Hentzau is uncanny, even to the two part structure of the story; one could almost say they were twins. This version of the story, set to the backdrop of pre and early World War I, substitutes an American for an English imposter, but for all intents and purposes this is the same story told in Burrough's style.

American, Barney Custer, travelling in Europe visits, Lutha, the homeland of his mother, located near the border of Austria and Serbia. He is instantly caught up in the politics of the two factions within the nation. For those that have not read Prisoner of Zenda, the premise is that the main character bears an almost twin-like resemblance to the nation's king who is being menaced by a rival to the throne, the resulting confusion between the two men and love for the king's betrothed provide the meat of the story plot.

The original Prisoner of Zenda is by far the better adult read, as it incorporates more twists and deeper character development. However, for early teens, or just a fun read without the moral agonizing, this is the better choice. P-)

In the manga collection "Comics Underground Japan" I read a short story by Hideshi Hino. It was well-written and skillfully drawn. I immediately became interested in finding more manga by the author and so purchased Panorama of Hell.

First of all it's nothing like the story I read. While that had some pretty horrific violence at the very end, this has incredibly horrific violence spread throughout the entire book. Disgusting and grotesque imagery, not to mention a fascination with blood (numerous characters are seen licking blood off of knives) are featured on almost every page. I've always thought of myself as desensitized, but this really proved me wrong.

The story is told by a pretty insane painter who uses his own blood to make his paintings. He talks about his grandfather, father, and brother. Goes over his family and what his wife does for a living. He tells his relationship with the atomic bomb. And while pretty much everyone will find themselves recoiling in disgust from the images, these stories he tells are also pretty interesting (my personal favorite was the one about his brother).

I bought this book hoping to see the darker side of manga. I have seen it, and I must say that while I found it sometimes interesting it just wasn't captivating the way some manga is. Some may find this a great book, some may be permanently scarred. I recommend you read collections of manga stories from the underground, like Comics Underground Japan and Secret Comics Japan before taking a step towards a book like this.

I give this work a conditional recommendation.

It's a tragedy that the language barrier has left most English speakers relatively unaware of the unique delights of Japanese literature, but it's heartening that the tide is starting to turn - driven by the popularity of manga, which are obviously great candidates for translation since a good deal of their appeal is visual.

_Panorama of Hell_ is one of the weirdest manga I've seen in English, taking the form of a monologue by a deeply disturbed artist who paints with his own blood. As the story progresses, his revelations (about his family life, his history, his relationship with the Bomb) swing between totally bizarre to tragically plausible; Hino's genius is that with every new revelation, our conception of the character and his insanity turns itself inside out - which, by the end of the story, has shattered all the reader's assumptions, leaving only an unidentifiable, almost primeval dread.

The work hasn't been mirrored - you turn pages and read from right to left. Some might find this a little awkward for the first few pages, but it does allow us to see the layout and artwork as Hino intended - i.e., idiosynchratic (I like it), striking, and often incredibly gory. It's horrible, but it expresses the central obsession of the narrator, the ghastly legacy of the atomic bomb, extremely effectively. Recommended.

For those of us who went through a phase of tracking down ACE paperback editions of everything Edgar Rice Burroughs ever wrote, it is interesting to see how many of his yarns were originally published in different issues of different pulp fiction magazines of the day. Such is the case with "The Mad King," a tale of confused identities involving European royalty in the tradition of "The Prisoner of Zenda." The first part was published in "All-Story Weekly" as "The Mad King" in March of 1914 with the follow up, "Barney Custer of Beatrice" appearing the following year in "Blue Book Magazine."

The story is set in the fictional land of Lutha where the corrupt regent Peter of Blentz has been keeping Leopold, the late king's mentally unbalanced son, locked up. But after a decade's imprisonment Leopold has escaped and the regent has his minister of War, Coblich, order Captain Maenck to recapture Leopold. Meanwhile, American tourist Barney Custer is visiting his mother's homeland. Seeing a description of the "mad king," he saves a young woman from a runaway horse and on a whim introduces himself as the "mad king."

At this point ERB pours on the contrivances. The young woman believes him, at which point explaining the truth does no good, because she is really the Princess Emma von der Tann, who father supported the old king and would like to see nothing better than Leopold assume the throne. The whole point of the first part of the story is to get the real Leopold on the throne, which does nothing to resolve the romantic tension between Barney and Emma, especially in light of all the political intrigue. The second part finds that the problems of Barney and Lutha are not settled by having Leopold on the throne and Burroughs plays on the various tensions in Europe that were leading the continent towards the First World War.

Your enjoyment of this early ERB potboiler depends almost entirely on your tolerance for confused identities and your knowledge of European politics in the years before WWI. Burroughs would use the idea of look alike characters often, most notably in a couple of Tarzan novels, which is one of the reasons this is an average ERB offering. Burroughs does have a plausible reason for why Barney and Leopold look so much alike, but that really just amounts to another trick from the same deck. You do get strong dosages of adventure and romance that you come to expect from a Burroughs pulp fiction yarn, but the total package is not especially special.

This novel, originally published as multiple parts in the All Story Weekly in 1914 and 1915, is an example of a genre popular at the time: The Graustarkian novel. Works of this type typically deal with political intrigue, heavily laced with adventure and romance set in some mythical eastern European kingdom. Anthony Hope's "The Prisoner of Zenda" and George Barr McCutcheson's "Graustark" are the most famous examples.

In this reworking of the theme of a commoner filling in for the missing ruler of the country, we have Barney Custer of Beatrice, Kansas taking the place of the 'Mad' King of Lutha. While far from original, Burrough's use of action and adventure make this an enjoyable tale. If Anthony Hope hadn't written what is essentially the same story 20 years earlier, it would be even better.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is that another of Burrough's novels; The Eternal Lover (aka The Eternal Savage) takes place between parts 1 and 2 of this novel and deals with events that occur to Barney's sister.

One of my favorites of ERB's stand-alone novels. The resemblance to The Prisoner of Zenda/Rupert of Hentzau is uncanny, even to the two part structure of the story; one could almost say they were twins. This version of the story, set to the backdrop of pre and early World War I, substitutes an American for an English imposter, but for all intents and purposes this is the same story told in Burrough's style.

American, Barney Custer, travelling in Europe visits, Lutha, the homeland of his mother, located near the border of Austria and Serbia. He is instantly caught up in the politics of the two factions within the nation. For those that have not read Prisoner of Zenda, the premise is that the main character bears an almost twin-like resemblance to the nation's king who is being menaced by a rival to the throne, the resulting confusion between the two men and love for the king's betrothed provide the meat of the story plot.

The original Prisoner of Zenda is by far the better adult read, as it incorporates more twists and deeper character development. However, for early teens, or just a fun read without the moral agonizing, this is the better choice. P-)

This book was awful. Awful, awful, awful. Mr. Debartolo must have a sticky key on his keyboard for the exclamation mark!!!! Practically every sentence is punctuated with five of them!!! Is life this exciting for this hack writer?!?!?! Besides that, the book wanders from topic to unrelated (and uninteresting) topic endlessly. It mystifies me how this man has actually made a career in the publishing industry. Wonders never cease. This book should be shown to grammer school children to prove to them that you can be ANYTHING you want (even with a total lack of talent). Also, if you want your girlfriend to think you're an idiot and break up with you, give her this book for Christmas. That's what my ex did. Clever maneuvering on his part.

This book is boring, poorly written and disgusting. All Debartolo
does is make Mad look like a has-been long lost and sold-out business. On top of this, there is a rather disturbing homoerotic S&M photograph midway through the book, which I still can't understand why its there, as it has no place in the context of the book, and it's inclusion is not explained at all.
I really get the idea that this book was not even welcomed by the Mad staff, and that Debartolo made a mistake that he knew he had to finish once it was begun. Save your money and buy the other book about Mad called Completely Mad - its much better.

Reading MAD magazine as a youngster in the 1960s and '70s, and checking in with it occasionally as an adult, I always assumed that the "usual gang of idiots" credit line and the other self-deprecating references within the magazine were the sly, tongue-in-cheek creations of a group of witty intellectuals who understood their audience well. After reading this bumpy, poorly written and -edited puff piece, though, I now believe the MAD crew is truly a group of low-life, low-brow yahoos. My opinion of author Dick DeBartolo, the late Bill Gaines and group hit a nadir from which it's not going to recover when I read, with growing incredulity, DeBartolo's account of part of a MAD staff trip to Thailand. He guilelessly tells, in his amateurish "gee-whiz" prose, of the group's nightly patronage of a Thai brothel, and would have us chuckle at the fact that he and Gaines had sex with the same prostitute on consecutive nights. That such a thing would happen is not particularly shocking -- but that DeBartolo would put it in his book, guilelessly and without any seeming awareness of its offensive potential, among cute anecdotes about hijinx with African animals and Roman ruins is a stroke of naivete so stunning as to make one wonder if the book was read by ANYONE other than the author before it went to print. I said this book was for fanatics only, but on second thought, if you want to remain a MAD devotee, perhaps you ought to pass. It's not even funny.

I wasn't sure if I was reading a new novel, or just re-reading one of several of the last Catherine Coulter novels I've waded through. I think that I am truly sick of the big, strong man caring for sick, injured woman bit. The story was dumb; there was no real mystery. I love the "Song" series and most of the Sherbrooke Brides series. This was plain disappointing.

How Does Catherine Coulter continue to get these awful books published? Does ANYONE read this stuff before it goes into print? I've been reading historical romances for 20 years, and this is, without a doubt, the worst reading experience I've ever had! The flat characters and convoluted story line were bad enough, but the ridiculous, dithering, twit headed dialogue that has become Ms. Coulter's hallmark of late, aggravated me so much that I read not even half of this book before I threw it across the room in disgust! Mad Jack is much worse (if you can believe it) than Coulter's recycled regencies that she keeps revisiting on the world, and quite frankly, I feel that this book is not worth the paper it's printed on!

I hate to be a nay-sayer, because I usually like Catherine Coulter's books, but I was very disappointed! There was much too much chatting with characters from previous Coulter books. If you haven't read those books, you may feel lost. I have read those books and I merely felt impatient. Where is the story for this book? The answer is that it is very thin and very contrived. Many other Coulter titles (including The Wild Baron and The Wyndam Legacy) are very good with a lot more character development and the same light tone. Read one of those! Your time and money will be better spent.