An irresponsible book
597849
I am writing from the perspective of a scholar whose field covers several of the issues Mr. Brown touches on in his novel. I wish to say first that where my field intersects with the "information" presented as an integral part of the novel, there is not a single "fact" presented by Mr. Brown that is to my knowledge verifiably true; many of these "facts" are verifiably false. In particular, Mr. Brown's presentation of what he calls the "sacred feminine" or the "goddess" is extraordinarily misleading; his connection of this concept to Mary Magdalene is, from the perspectives of history and scholarly comparative religion, bizarre. I say this book is irresponsible most of all because, as many of the reviews here (including the Amazon.com review!) show, most readers of this novel will believe Mr. Brown when he writes that his book is as accurate as he can make it. I would perhaps not be so unhappy had Mr. Brown not made what I consider his most irresponsible decision, to put the vast majority of these views in the mouth and mind of a character who is a world-renowned "Professor of Symbology," a field the vast majority of readers are unlikely to know does not exist. By using this character as he does, Mr. Brown simultaneously adds a false veneer of academic authority (something he demonstrates himself to be very concerned about, since his character constantly cites authorities who, he does not bother to mention, are rejected by real scholars) and insults the real scholars who devote their lives to helping people like Mr. Brown's readers learn the sometimes unexciting *truth* about these things.
2422609
Never did I think I would find a book that managed to both be so over complicated and simplistic at the same time. While this is ostensibly a book about the Hemmings family of Monticello, anyone reading it without knowing the title could be easily forgiven for thinking otherwise.

  This author uses droning and ceaseless historical commentary to compensate for a near complete dearth of accurate historical evidence and then, when a piece of evidence is finally avaliable, she spends 10 pages or more beating it relentlessly into the ground. For example, in the chapters involving Sally Hemming's stay in France the author spends great stretches explaining a diet and exercise regimen sally MIGHT have had for an illness she MIGHT have had, goes into a never-ending recital of  the French laws concerning slavery and engages in the most mind-numbing guesswork of motives when absolutely none were present.

  There is no information presented in this book that has not been stated elsewhere, in a better fashion. I was literally yelling at the pages at times with sheer frustration. The closest I can compare it to is a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. A historian will spend hours discussing the motives of her sons, father and husband and laboriously attempt to pick through them to discern any possible role she had in them. Now imagine if the historian had equally little knowledge of her sons, father and husband as they have of Eleanor herself and you will roughly approach the problems within this book.

  Moreover, evenas a person of mixed white and black ancestry, I found the constant harping on the evils of slavery entirely excessive. This is a book of a slave family, not of slavery, but you could barely tell.

  The only possible good words I have for this book is that the author tried to expand on a topic not often covered in such detail.
4871313
This is not a very good book. While Rosengren does an adequate job in discussing the eventual reconciliation of Marichal and Roseboro, the rest of the book is an absurd contortion in which the author goes to ridiculous lengths to normalize clubbing a man in the head with a bat in the context of a baseball fight. No, John, the fact that there was a civil war in the Dominican Republic or a riot in Watts that summer does not begin to justify attacking a man with a baseball bat. Neither does the history of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry, or even Roseboro's alleged "buzzing" Marichal's ear on his return throw to Koufax. Baseball has some fundamental rules that have never and will never change: one does NOT, under any circumstances, club another man over he head with a bat. It's not complicated.
3612655
The book wasn't funny and there is nothing good about irresponsible pet ownership. Most religions require morals and values - none of which I read about here. Pet overpopulation is no joke, and lying to your kids is not a good way to parent. Set a good example. Spay/neuter your pets. Admit when you are wrong. Most importantly - do better next time.
This book was a huge disappointment.
4599782
This book is appalling. The authors' stated goal is to provide you with words (specifically verbs) that will engage and call your audience to action. It misses this goal by a wide margin. Almost on every page the authors demonstrate the gaping chasm between their goal and their competence to both follow through on execution and their understanding of the subject of communication. Raise your hand if "abreact" or "absquatulate" stirs the fire of your passion to do anything other than to look-up the definition - bear in mind we are only at words that begin with "ab". The book that has far fewer definitions than a typical dictionary and some verbs, such as "acculturate", warrant appearing twice; because they are so "powerful" in the authors' opinion one presumes. Some word are not even verbs, for example the supposed power verb "oil spot" has an example use as a noun: "Rhonda was a big fan, but to the band, she was just an oil spot they could leave at dinner."

The authors' promise, in the initial pages, is to provide a dictionary of particularly evocative and stirring verbs with example usage in "power" contexts, but the authors quickly tire of this pretext and end up offering definitions that are either very short (sometimes 2 word), for example - "Amerce: punish; fine"; or redundant, for example - "Invocate: speak at an invocation." Aside from this laziness the word choices are dreadful. Who would consider awfulize and attitudinize "power" verbs?

This book is a shameful waste of trees that the FT-Press should have been ashamed to publish and the authors should have realized would damage any professional credibility they had.
4803370
I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. A potentially interesting story is marred by unnecessary graphic depictions of violence and rape against women. It is an upsetting sign of society's values that so many readers are willing to look past or find no problem in this and appreciate the book. I felt disturbed, sickened and disgusted by the author's writing. Yes, I understand that such things happen in the world and it is the author's liberty to write what he pleases in the name of literature and art. I however felt that the author threw in these scenes to keep the book at an exciting r-rated level for the masses. Why would you dumb down your audience with this drivel? Every female character in the book was just a potential sex object or grossly hideous. The language he used to describe his female characters was demeaning and patriarchal. Ultimately I was disturbed the most by the mind of the author in crafting and creating these disturbing, twisted graphic scenes. That is what turned me off from reading the rest of the book, and I stuck it through to page 295. I didn't want to read the rest of a book written by a man who held and was blind to putting down on paper such disgusting attitudes towards women. I felt that this book defiled what literature should aspire towards, and Ken Follett should be ashamed of himself for putting into the world one more book marred with terrible attitudes towards women.
227748
This book is disgusting miserable racist trash of the darkest hue. Its message is pathetic, irresponsible, self pitying, reckless, unformed, angry and delusional. The author lives in a past which he insists is still the present, makes sweeping statements about White People which are as racist and unfounded as the atrocities of the past he claims to lament. His whining victimhood is unreadable and offensive. Apparently he feels that his own racism against all White People is somehow justified by the past. This book reads more like the diary of a spoiled twelve tear old who hasn't received the presents on Christmas morning he was hoping for. Instead of sending a universal  message of personal accountability and self fulfilment, he prefers to wallow in the mud of the past and heave the blame of all the ills of Black Folk, and Black communities onto the shoulders of white people. This book is embarrassing and unreadable. Its only merit is the glimpse it gives into the mind of one very disturbed and hateful black man, and should serve as a warning to others about what to caution against becoming.  If this book had been written by a white man to his son warning against the evils of Black Folk, the author would likely be in prison. How does racist trash like this get printed?
4454463
I love books and own literally a small library. However I rarely take the time to review books.  But this book annoys me so much that I will make an exception.  I was forced to buy an electronic version of this book for a class, for full list price.  No way to re-sell it.  That is the insult.  The injury is that it does not seem to have been revised since 1960 or so.  The chapter examples cover things like 5 tube radios (the "All American 5" radio design was common in the 1930's through the 1960's) and computers that have a mean time to failure of 150 hours (what are they talking about?  The ENIAC?).  I get the impression that the only thing that has been revised in this book is the problems, so the publisher can call it a new edition and make the old copies unusable by students.

Crucial theoretical background is left as exercises which do not even have a hint as to how to approach them, and many of the problems do not not obviously follow from the chapter discussions.  Although many problems have "solutions," the"solution" is a number with no clue in most cases where it came from.  At best, a solution is given in fractional form, which might suggest one way of setting up the problem.  I found an old copy of Hines and Montgomery (1972) to be far more helpful, and wish I could find my old copy of Walpole and Myers - it is the best introduction to statistics I have found.
1585379
This book is a disaster. It is poorly organized; filled with numerous typographical, grammar, and spelling errors; and contains some glaring inaccuracies. Let's start with the organization. The first chapter begins with an outline of Lincoln's life. The rest of the book fills out some of the detail, but it repeats some things and spends way too much space on the different conspiracy theories surrounding Lincoln's assassination (20 percent of the book). He also devotes a chapter to Tecumseh's Curse, which chronicles the deaths of the presidents elected in years ending in zero who died while in office (6 percent of the book). If you are going to write a brief book on Lincoln, you need to focus on Lincoln and his accomplishments. Let the bigger volumes go into the detail of his assassination. The typographical, grammar, and spelling errors are too numerous to list. This book is an example of editing at its worst. Now for the inaccuracies. The author claims that Lincoln is the only president to date that has sported a full beard. He was the first, but four presidents since have had beards: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison. In the chapter on Tecumseh's Curse, the author states that Kennedy was the youngest U.S. president. He was the youngest elected U.S. president, but the youngest president to hold office was Theodore Roosevelt. To sum this review up before it becomes longer than the book, this book reads like a badly written high school term paper. As a former high school English teacher, I have plenty of experience with which to back up that statement.
633182
I regret having bought this book. It's a series of frivolous biased statements. Badly written and misleading. An insult to all authors that have tackled the subject based on reliable sources and research.
The author self definition as having "an uncanny ability to ferret out and weave together important data points that others miss" is just the evidence of an inflated ego and eager desire to sell books based on  superficial knowledge of the subject.
1072146
God, where to begin. In a nutshell, one of the worst books I've read in years. In addition to being simply bad prose, it is also racist, condescending, and full of factual mistakes.

This was published in 1991 by a conservative Brit who traveled to then-Soviet Uzbekistan looking to experience the region where his fellow British gentlemen adventured throughout the 1800's.

As such, he is dismissive of the current culture and politics, does not like to try local foods, passes judgement on local people for being poor and different, and waxes nostalgic for the British Empire.

During one telling moment, the author notices hungry and tired people standing in breadlines (food shortages were common in the early 1990s), and calls them, inexplicably, "crocodiles". I'm not even sure what to make if this, other than that long lines of poorly dressed people waiting to buy food don't look aesthetically pleasing to a European traveler's eye.

Apart from its culturally insensitive tone, the book is also badly edited, with names of places, historical figures, and ethnic groups wildly misspelled. Other times, he condescendingly uses old-style names coined by the British Empire. Occasionally, different spelling variations are interchanged randomly throughout the book (such as Uzbeg versus Uzbek).

In short, absolutely the worst book on the area you will ever read. Uzbekistan has a lot to offer to someone interested in Central Asian history, and sadly there is a dearth of good books on the subject.

This is why this book is especially disappointing: it could have provided real insight and information, but does nothing of the sort. If you want to read poorly written and very badly researched travel notes by someone who is condescending and not really interested in the region apart from the role it played in the formation of the British empire, go ahead and read this.
2177868
The white trash of the book are rural poor, initially in both the northern and southern United States but, by the end of the book, the northerners have disappeared and the focus is purely on southern whites.  It covers the period from colonial times through the first decade of this century. It is academic in tone with a very large number of references and yet it contains very little interpretation, discussion, or factual evidence.  Indeed, most of the content is a string of quotations, scrupulously documented, illustrating the contempt of the literate classes for poor whites; interpretation and discussion are confined to the preface and the epilogue, some 16 rather superficial pages in all.  Professor Isenbergs quotes seem to be highly selective.  In 400 years of history, were no contrary views expressed?  If there were, they are not quoted in this book!  Her quotations are extraordinarily repetitive, a catalog of contemptuous and mean-spirited opinions.  For two-thirds of the book, it is difficult to tell what the authors own view of white trash is.  Does she agree with the critics or does she sympathize with the poor?  But in the final third, her own voice occasionally comes through:  She is just as contemptuous of white trash as those she quotes.

Despite the title, this book is not a history of class or even a history of the rural poor, it is an account of an underclass through the prejudiced eyes of others:  The subjects of the book are not allowed to speak for themselves.  The author does not answer, or even ask, the many questions that arise.  How large was (and is) the group of whom she writes?  Was there any social mobility?  Are those she calls todays white trash the direct descendants of the white trash of colonial days?  Did poor immigrants become white trash?  If not, why not?  (The effect of the waves of 19th and 20th Century immigrants is ignored.)  What was the impact of industrialization?  Amazingly, industrialization is not mentioned in the book.  Industrialization in Europe had a huge effect on rural workers, both for ill and for good, why not in the United States?  How does the history of the poor in similar countries differ from that of the United States?  The author makes no comparisons of any kind to other nations.

There can be few of todays book-readers who believe that the United States is and always was a classless society.  If you are one of them, then perhaps you should read this book.  But for those who do not suffer from that delusion, this book offers nothing to deepen your understanding.

This is an unpleasant and uninformative book.
2020664
This book is very poorly organized. There is far too much reliance on inset boxes which interrupts the flow of reading. The picture captions are poorly placed requiring more effort that should be necessary to associated the caption with the picture. The Font used is VERY difficult to read and hard to imagine that any publisher would allow that in a final product.
There may be good information provided, but the effort to find it is extraordinary. I do a lot of reading and I have never found a book of poor quality like this from the above stated perspectives. I have never rated a book before out of the many hundreds that I have purchased. This one was so bad that I feel obligated to comment
3940017
This book is woefully over-rated.  Having read it in a political science class, this book was full of oversimplifications, sweeping generalizations, liberal indoctrination, and a-historical information.  The breadth was terrible, as was the depth.  The authors left numerous critical points out of the book.  The fact that they didn't include a chapter on Zionism is proof of this.  They also made sweeping generalizations about 9/11 and events which led to the Oklahoma City bombing.  These authors are either completely inept historians, or they're blatantly taking sides.  Either way, there's no excuse for the poor writing here.  It's not necessarily what's written in the book, but what's left out!  History cannot be "politically correct".  If these authors really practiced ethics in their writing they would have presented ALL the information in a straight-forward unbiased manner, allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusion.  Truly dissapointing.  Not recommended at all.
1293911
A general observation I have made over 30 years higher education and dealing with books (I'm a library director and book review editor of a theological journal) is that when an author feels the need to place their academic degree initials next to their name on the cover to title page the book will often have some useful information, but often poorly written.  This book helps give credence to that observation.

The first thing I look for in a book is a set of useful indexes which are entirely missing from this work.  It's simply inexcusable to produce a work of this sort and not even make an attempt at indexing it.  In reading, while there is a great deal of interesting information, the writing style is overly melodramatic and tediously repetitive.  The 600 pages of this book in the hands of a skilled editor could have been reduced by half.  I read the introduction (which in and of itself could have been  shorter) and the first few chapters with some care but noticed too many careless errors (Daniel Morgan was not "Ireland-born" [xvi] The little we know about Morgan's early life is that he was born in New Jersey and his grand parents came from Wales; and Lord Cornwallis had not simply retired to winter quarters, he was in fact planning to return to England to visit his seriously ill wife) to continue.  I forced myself to finish reading and was honestly glad when I was done.  As a book of history there were a few interesting observations (rehabilitating Colonel Rall being one of them) but there's just not enough here to commend it at any level.

If you want to read about this pivotal battle of the Revolutionary War, this book would perhaps serve as a supplemental source, but not a front-line history.  It's too sloppy, too wordy, and too much trouble to read cover to cover.
4850542
I do not recommend this book.  This  book is clearly a hit piece against the inerrancy of Scripture, and the use of a literal hermeneutic.  Two things are  quite clear:  He never gets the definition of an evangelical inerrantist correct, and his use of the term "biblicism" is generally as a pejorative putdown to describe inerrantists.  Mr. Smith tells us that he was a Protestant, but converted to the Roman Catholicism after the book was finished.  Even though he said that he did not convert until he finished this book, this reader could see the conversion early on in his presentation.  He often uses fallacious arguments to support his thesis.  He wanders a bit, but it finally comes across that his basic view is that the Bible has no power of its own, and was not co-authored by God, however, he thinks it does allow people to live better lives because there is a social gospel which was triggered by Christ's good example through his exemplary lifestyle.  Smith does not believe that common pastors can exegete the Scriptures without guidance from a High Church Interpreter who gives a single interpretation that cannot be challenged.  Otherwise there will be more than one interpretation of the passage, and to have more than one interpretation is proof that the bible is not inspired by God.  He just cannot grasp that in this world there will always be many interpretations of every passage because of man's fallenness, not because of God's mistake.  In the end he seems to be arguing for a single person as the interpretative authority for all churches that no one is allowed to challenge.
3520320
I finally got around to reading this book, and was astonished to find that nearly all of Michael Denton's impossibly wrong account of hierarchies in taxonomy was included as chapter six. Denton, in his "Evolution: A theory in crisis" bases the whole of his argument against common descent on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of molecular data. The error is so egregious that, had he submitted it to any organismal biologist for review, it would have been obvious enough to warrant the cutting of the chapter. Denton himself has acknowledged the error, and retracted his attack against common descent.
So what does it say that this "textbook" accepts with an uncritical eye the argument, verbatim, and makes it the foundation of its discussion on molecular systematics? Only that the authors were ill-informed about the field.
It is unfathomable that any student will get anything of scientific substance from this book. The arguments are incoherent, and the data are woefully out of date. The representations of modern biology are laughably simplistic.
As a propoganda tool, Of Pandas and People is of marginal value, as its muddy arguments are not likely to make much of an impression on thoughtful students. As a "science textbook" it is downright shameful.