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As an intelligence professional, I found this article so worthwhile and compelling that I responded to it, and the Senator in turn provided a gracious and serious counter-response.

I completely endorse Amazon's move toward articles, eventually I hope that Amazon will become the "hub" for all structured knowledge, it is vastly better than Google at pointing toward serious material.

This article is among my top 100 for the year.

I wrote this in 1999 for Door and Hardware magazine. The information is still applicable today. Should anyone require any additional information on this subject, please feel free to contact me.

This very brief article addresses the occupations of upper-class men, such as Mr. Bennet, in their libraries. Yes, he was probably largely hiding from Mrs Benett in particular and the little irritations of daily life in general, but he had to do something! For a very limited audience, but I found it interesting if a bit pricey.

I definetly recomend this book for a boy in 5th or 6th grade. It is about a boy that lives in a remote town in Texas, and how his life changes in one summer. His mother oes off to Nashville to sing in a contest like American Idol, and his bestfriends brother is in war. Things get even crazier when Zachary Beaver (the fattest boy in the world) comes to his town,and changes everything, and the more Cal and Toby get to know Zachary the more they like him. Can Toby balance all these thing with his mother gone and his bestfriends brother in war? Find out when you read "When Zachary Beaver Came To Town"!

The exchange between these two authors is interesting and informative and they argue the traditional Lutheran and a somewhat traditional Wesleyan line. But, one does not need to pay for this correspondence. It is available free online at "First Things."

One of the most interesting topics to the contemporary students, scholars, writers and those who love to read in general is the mystery of witchcraft. The frequently asked questions are: What happened really? Is what we see in books and fairy tales true and which book should we trust?

The book I would put high on my list of reliability is Witchcraft in Scotland, by Brian P. Levack. It is a collage of articles on witchcraft in Scotland written by various authors. Some of them are detailed and deal with particular names and dates but some of them provide a general insight into the happenings during the witch-hunt period. The book supplies the reader with data that creates a vivid picture of the period and background necessary for the understanding of appearance, development and vanishing of the witch believes as well as witch-hunt in Scotland. The articles are arranged so that first major witch-hunts in Scotland are introduced with some particular examples, and then those are also compared to the ones in the neighboring countries. The essays explain the reasons and situations in which people were being accused of witchcraft and also why is it that mostly women were the accused ones and not men. It also tells us why is it so difficult to provide names and numbers of those executed, convicted, accused or of witnesses and accusers. I personally was amazed at the numbers provided and the length of the whole period and the book helped me to change the way I see witches themselves. Before having read the book I knew only about those witches that we can see in cartoons and fairytales, as woman dressed in black, flying on a broom, changing people into frogs etc. What I have in my head now is the picture of real women accused by their neighbors and tortured for confession.

Even though some of the articles are very detailed, that does not decrease the reader's interest in the book because all the articles are independent and if the reader skips reading articles that are not of interest to him/her that won't influence the understanding of other articles too much. The book is very helpful for those doing research on the topic of witchcraft in Scotland because if provides opinions of several authors and one can see how their opinions vary from one to another in reasons for accusation and especially the numbers provided for those involved in the witchcraft.

In his forward to an anthology of humorous short stories, the Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty, sagely commented: "Humorous writing is too hard." His advice? 'The best thing to do is give the whole business a wide berth." In this serious world, humour is becoming increasingly difficult to find. Fortunately, some newspapers and magazines continue to find a place for it and the Pulitzer Prizes have recognised it. One writers magazine has gone so far as to suggest we might see more funny pieces published. So the art form has not been lost altogether. Any aspiring writer of humour (or even those who may think they have made it) would do well to take Ken Pearson's 'Writing Humour" seriously, for it is a practical approach to discovering ideas and writing a range of humorous pieces from letters to the editor to whole articles and even columns (if you're really good and even luckier). A somewhat slender book, it is packed with useful and relevant information and, in the way the author approaches the subject, inspirational. In other words, it makes you want to write and takes you through a process of gathering material, structuring it into a readable piece, determining the form and writing from your own perspective. The book is published as part of the "How To Books" series within the broad category of 'successful writing'. If other books in the series are as helpful as this one, we can expect a new crop of writers in a very short time. And even if publication doesn't always come your way, there's a private satisfaction and, hopefully, enjoyment, in being able to compose a piece of humourous prose. Ken Pearson offers not so much a method as a pathway which, if followed, will always lead somewhere.

I want to learn about being a magazine freelance writer and this book was very clear and succinct. It gave specific advice with examples from magazine articles written by the author. Unfortunately the age of the book has made it outdated and I came to amazon looking for an updated version. It talks about individually typing letters as opposed to photocopying, because it was written prior to the computer age. It discusses using the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for research that can now be handled from home with an internet connectin to the library. This makes me wonder what other information is missing or too outdated to be useful. But the basic advice on the mechanics of writing articles was very clear and easy reading.

Although dated, by education standards, the articles reveal current thinking in how year-round schooling could reinvent the schooling experience. This is a great resource book to begin exploring the possibilities for reform.

This article consists of three letters to the editor of "First Things" about Gary Anderson's article "How to Think About Zionism," and a response from Anderson.

Robert Barnett asks what right a European colonial power and international organizations had to assign an Arab territory to the control of European Jews! That's hilarious. European and non-European Jews were trying for many centuries to move to what is now Israel and buy land there. Finally, some folks decided they would not stop them, and Barnett interprets this as a crime on the part of those who didn't stop them! But the crime actually was on the part of Arabs who insisted on depriving Jews of human rights, and who insisted on killing, robbing, and slandering these Jews. Anderson does manage to reply that Israel's neighbors were indeed guilty of far worse than anything Israel did.

Charles Duvall also sides with Arab aggression over Jewish rights. He boasts that when Jews were finally allowed to move to the Levant in significant numbers, they were only a small part of the population there. No kidding. I think we can all guess why. And he boasts that the partition plan gave 54% of the land to the Jews, even though the Jews only owned 6% of the land. But this is a famous anti-Zionist lie, given that it implies that the Arabs owned the other 94%. Jews did only own about 6% of the land as private property, but most of the land was state land. Arabs owned a roughly similar amount. And even had the Arabs owned 100% of the land and Jews 0%, it would not have been wrong to let Jews buy land and live on it. Israel is land-poor. If everyone were as greedy for land as the Israelis, there would be no conflicts over land, that is for sure. Anderson quite properly mentions that the Levant was not highly populated when the Jews began to return and to improve the land, which is a good point.

Richard Rowling makes a religious point, roughly that Jews have no right to their land. Um, is he kidding? Why does he feel that Jews are special, and must be mistreated? If people in general are to have rights of life, liberty, and property, Jews need these rights as well, because Jews are people too.

Look folks, if you want something, and if it is for sale, and if you have the money to buy it, and if you outbid all others for it, you deserve to get it. Rowling is out of line to suggest that all this is invalid if you are Jewish and want to buy land in your homeland. And Anderson also realizes that it is significant that many Jews persist in wanting to live in their homeland.