3 comments about Malachi Martin : God's Messenger.

1. Brian Doran's tribute MALACHI MARTIN: GOD'S MESSENGER, is a worthy ending to the fruitful life of this captivating man, and a splendid beginning to his prodigious legacy. For those who have just discovered the good father, here are the 'footprints' he left behind as he carried his cross along 'the road less traveled,' answering God's call wherever it led him. And what a journey it was:

   As a Vatican spy and man of action during the Cold War, he risked his life to smuggle bibles into forbidden, East Block territory. As a US Air Force Chaplain in Turkey, he brought the solace of Christianity to airmen serving far from home. As an exorcist and spiritual warrior for Christ, he endured the soul-scorching onslaughts of preternatural violence--even suffering a heart attack during one particularly difficult exorcism--to free captive souls from the spiritual death-grip of demonic possession.

   Father Martin's accomplishments are legion: archaeologist, professor at the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute, successor to the Apostles, historian, best-selling author, Jesuit priest, Christian futurist, translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, multi-linguist, Vatican diplomat, confidant and aid to three popes, and exorcist. His depth of understanding on many subjects--geopolitics included--was astonishing, as was his uncanny ability to forecast important, world events at a considerable distance out. I once heard an on-air radio interview he conducted with Southwest Radio Church predicting the death--by bullet--of Israel's Prime Minister, Yitsak Rabin--well over a year before it happened!

   Like the writings of St. Augustine--which kept the light of the Gospels alive through the Dark Ages that ensued after the collapse of Rome--so too, Fr. Martin's works have kindled the remant flickers of Traditional Catholicism--keeping the trinitarian flames of faith, hope, and love burning in the hearts of many, during the New World Order's 'New Age' of paganism, atheism, and the occult.

   'The nightmare of the world-wide collapse of Christianity'--as Fr. Vincent Miceli so aptly described it--is upon us, complete with the spiritual abyss of our very own high-tech 'Dark Age,' moral 'Ice Age,' and mass media 'Tower of Babel.' Fr. Martin believed that we were entering the Great Apostasy, as foretold by the Sacred Scriptures, and it is against this bleak backdrop that he courageously acted--while lesser mortals dared not--towering over the zeitgeist like an Old Testament prophet.




2. When I ordered these tapes, they were backordered and I waited several months to receive them. They were worth the wait, however, and I have enjoyed playing them. It is good to hear about Father Malachi Martin from the people who knew him.

   I was disappointed, however, that this turned out to be 2-1/2 cassettes instead of three. There should have been enough material to fill the second side of the third cassette.




3. Brian Doran's tribute MALACHI MARTIN: GOD'S MESSENGER, is a worthy ending to the fruitful life of this captivating man, and a splendid beginning to his prodigious legacy. For those who have just discovered the good father, here are the "footprints" he left behind as he carried his cross along "the road less traveled," answering God's call wherever it led him.
   
   And what a journey it was: As a Vatican spy and man of action during the Cold War, he risked his life to smuggle Bibles into forbidden, East Block territory. As a US Air Force Chaplain in Turkey, he brought the solace of Christianity to airmen serving far from home. As an exorcist and spiritual warrior for Christ, he endured the soul-scorching onslaughts of preternatural violence--even suffering a heart attack during one particularly difficult exorcism--to free captive souls from the spiritual death-grip of demonic possession.
   
   Father Martin's accomplishments are legion: archaeologist, professor at the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute, successor to the Apostles, historian, best-selling author, Jesuit priest, Christian futurist, translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, multi-linguist, Vatican diplomat, confidant and aid to three popes, and exorcist. His depth of understanding on many subjects--geopolitics included--was astonishing, as was his uncanny ability to forecast important, world events at a considerable distance out. I once heard an on-air radio interview he conducted with Southwest Radio Church predicting the death, by bullet, of Israel's Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin--well over a year before it happened!
   
   Like the writings of St. Augustine--which kept the light of the Gospels alive through the Dark Ages that ensued after the collapse of Rome--so too, Fr. Martin's works have kindled the remant flickers of Traditional Catholicism--keeping the trinitarian flames of faith, hope, and love burning in the hearts of many, during the New World Order's New Age of paganism, atheism, and the occult.
   
   "The nightmare of the world-wide collapse of Christianity"--as Fr. Vincent Miceli so aptly described it--is upon us, complete with the spiritual abyss of our very own high-tech Dark Age, "Moral Ice Age," and mass media Tower of Babel. Fr. Martin believed that we were entering the Great Apostasy, as foretold by the sacred Scriptures, and it is against this bleak backdrop that he courageously acted, while lesser mortals dared not, towering over the zeitgeist like an Old Testament prophet.

No comments about Michelangelo: Library Edition.

5 comments about Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

1. Richard Feynman was one of those individuals that appear on the scene and like the stars, burn bright for a short time before flickering out. In Feynman's case it is the story of a one-of-a-kind, an iconoclast who broke all the rules and relished in his bad boy reputation. He was a rampant womanizer, someone who liked to have fun but mroe than anything he was a man possessed by a brain and work ethic that causes one to gasp.
   
   Reading the book, one discovers that it was not just his thought experiments or math skills or polymath catholicism of knowledge that impressed. All of these (or even one of these) would have have been exceptional but it was the ferocious speed of thought and the range of ideas that spewed forth. Indeed, even he admits he was not always right but like a bubbling cauldron, the conjectures and propositions kept rising to the top.
   
   The writing hit just the right balance between necessary detail and a layman's attempt to grasp his latest scheme. This is not an easy read for someone not aware of scientific advances or cognizant of recent theories in quantum mechanics. Yet - and this is what I find so distinctive - he managed to break down the most frightenting complexity to smaller problems that could be solved. Despite his abhorance of philosophy, art, music - the liberal arts that have dominated over hard science - his finding had deep philosophical conotations - cause and effect, time, predictability, chaos and order. He hated pretense (the "new" math), rote memorization, a single methodology and any kind of fuzzy thinking. His brilliant mind raced ahead of his speech as he thought of newer and better ways to arrive at solutions.
   
   Like Einstien, he engaged in thought experiments. Einstein rode a beam of light; Feynman inhabited an electron or haydron or photon or meson or any of the innumercable sub-level particles. Like Einstein his work ethic was legendary and he was held in awe by those who knew him best. Unlike Einstein, his formulas were too esoteric for appreciation by the general public, no easy e=mc2. But thankfully he differed from Eingstein in another respect - Feynman remained scientifically creative until the end. He reveled in his allure - to women and men - yet he found peace in domesticity at last. In some ways it is almost impossible to approach such genius - all we can do is follow the path of all probabilities (lol).



2. Biography and popular science description of Feynman's work tells the personal story of one of modern physics most unique minds. Feynman won a Nobel Prize in the field of quantum physics in 1965, and was a leading thinker in the Los Alamos project. Gleick does a decent job of making the physics understandable at a popular level.
   
   Never a manager or administrator of the "big science' that 20th century physics created in the war and post-war periods, Feynman stuck to his theoretical roots.
   
   He was a bundle of contradictions:
   
   He seldom read in the literature, reading only enough of books and papers to understand the problem, then resolving it in his own way, often quicker and better than others.
   
   He was a devoted husband to his tubercular first wife, then a womanizing scoundrel afterwards.
   
   He was a professor who disliked teaching, a theorist who thought in concrete analogies, a middle-class Jewish boy from Long Island who was only admitted to anti-semitic Ivy League institutions (with their shameful quotas in the pre-war period) because of the brilliance of his mind at that early stage, who became the highest-paid professor at CalTech during the post-war years.
   
   He was even called by many who knew him and worked with him by the label "Genius". Gleick spends some time talking about what constitutes genius and how to identify it. I believe Feynman defines his genius in this statement: "A theorist who can juggle different theories in his mind has a creative advantage, Feynman argued, when it comes time to change the theories." (p. 368) Feynman's genius consisted of his ability to envision complex physical analogies, and quickly compute complicated formulas from the many in his memory.
   
   An inveterate story teller and shaper of his own legacy, he memorized and crafted stories and anecdotes to mold his image. As Gleick recounts one story about the difference between colleague Murray Gell-Mann and Feynman: "Murray makes sure you know what an extraordinary person he is, they would say, while Dick is not a person at all but a more advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings." That's genius.
   
   This makes a good companion to Richard Rhodes "Making of the Atomic Bomb" which covers the Los Alamos period from a broader perspective.



3. For what is Feynman most famous:
   1) his diagrams
   2) his quantum electrodynamics renormalization
   3) his tacyons
   4) his path integrals
   The only reason I give this book 3 stars is that it is a well researched
   biography that deals with his life, times and personality.
   as far as telling about the physics or any of the equations involved,
   this is inadequate. I couldn't even find a mention of tacyons.
   In this I see a certain contempt for the American
   in the author. Since he is a famous and important
   scientific author that is truly a disappointment.
   There are 500 pages of Feynman's life with more about
   his three wives and his behavior in lectures than
   about why he is really important to the physics of his time?
   There may be still some of my resentment in his Red books
   being over the head of those people taking
   beginning physics in 1964 at UCLA.
   They were closer to upper division physics texts
   than lower division, but because he was the wunderkind
   of California physics, we got them.
   For me they weren't bad as, just very very wordy/long
   and hard to read,
   but for many they were the kiss of death to their
   science hopes. So calling Richard Feynman a genius may be
   O. K. with some, but for me he was just an overrated fellow
   who couldn't express himself very well.
   This book actually made me want to find out more about Julian Schwinger!



4. Genius by James Gleick is a worthwhile read even if you don't have a clue who Richard Feynman was. This is one of those wonderful biographies that leaves you feeling you actually know the man and not just the image concocted by historians and public relations spin doctors.
   Gleick does a really great job of showing Feynman growing up in pre world war II America and the beginning has an almost Tom Sawyer-like feel. Neither geek nor wannabe, not overly impressed by himself or anyone else, Feynman moves though childhood to become not only a brilliant mathematician, but a scientist who liked to play the bongo drums and also helped invent the Atomic bomb.
   The tale becomes tragically beautiful as the almost gothic love story of his first marriage unfolds and twists through his work at Los Alamos and the first atomic bomb. Week after week a young Feynman hitchhikes alone across the country to visit his wife in the sanitarium and week after week the bomb comes closer to becoming a reality.
   The story continues winding through the brilliant maze of Feynman's career with detail and clarity. Gleick's story is more about the man than his work so don't expect to understand Feynman diagrams when you're finished reading it, but you will be entertained.



5. Adopting a definition of the word 'genius' as a 'truly original thinker', Gleick shows throughtout this entertaining book - how Feynman meets this definition. From his work on the Manhattan project to his investigation of the Challenger disaster, Feynman continues to approach problems from 'scratch' so to say. Feynman did not believe in reading his peer's papers - he believed in looking at the abstract and trying to figure out the contents on his own! He believed in solving every KNOWN problem first - before dealing with unknown tough problems. There are several insights into his 'problem-solving' approach - which may have seemed madness to some - but Gleick goes on to show how there was method to his madness - and how his peers were more than aware of his brilliance.
   There are several great anecdotes - from Feynman's time at Princeton, Caltech, Cornell and Los Alamos.

No comments about Magic Johnson (The Smart Reader Book and AudioCassette, Level Two).

5 comments about The Worst Journey in the World: Library Edition.

1. If you watch films like "The yourney of the penguins" you get not the slightest idea how brutally hostile for humans the environment of the South Pole is. If you read "The Worst Yourney In The World", you do. The book is a detailed description of the whole Scott Expedition, complete whith descriptions of packing lists, frostbite, snowblindness, awful food, recalcitrant ponys, and heroic English gentlemen. But the unpoetic language is exactly what makes the book such a worthwile read: The description is written in simple, honest words, that it gets your own imagination going. It reaches its climax with the Winter Yourney, where a small goup of men undertook a journey that was painful and horrific to a downright ridiculous extend, just to get their hands on some penguin eggs. Any romantic exaggeration would have destroyed the impact of this event in the readers mind, it is the simple, honest, sometimes even technial language that transforms this event into a classic tale. The character and the Winter Journey live on in literature, for example in Thomas Pynchons "V". The stuff of legends, on of my alltime favourites.



2. Cherry-Garrard is a literate,educated man, writing his experiences as well as including the memories, and journals of the other expedition members. Interesting how this young man of means who is accustomed to comfortable living,could endure such extreme hardship without complaint. The hardship and adventure begins with the terrible storm experienced on the ship from New Zealand to Antarctica. The description of this ordeal grabs hold and they haven't yet reached the Southern continent. The first year on the ice and the sledge trip during the winter months is gripping.
   
   A compelling aspect is the matter of fact descriptions of the unbelievable [to us] hardship and daily rigors of living, sledging, carrying out scientific experiments, etc., in -20 to -70 degrees. Wind conditions that regularly must have sent wind chill factors [they never recorded such a thing] to -80 to -100 degrees,and the physical exertion. They regularly experience frost bite, hunger, occasional ptomaine from spoiled food, symptoms of Dysentary, and scurvy. Yet, they are able to recover. They never lose their spirit and comeraderie.
   Until discovering the Pole parties' bodies the following year, Cherry-Garrard writes of his contentment and pride in being a member of this expedition.
   In the subsequent years, until he writes the book in 1922, he becomes guilt ridden as to whether he and the other survivors could have reached and saved Scott before they died,[it seems apparent they could not have reached them. [In fact, rescueres would probably have died in an attempt]. It's impossible to imagine living in such conditions for 3 years. Constant cold, diet of seal, penguin, sometimes dog and horse, blubber, biscuit, and tea. Occasionally, chocolate, butter and sugar as a treat.
   I agree with other reviewers that there is redundancy and repetition but I found it interesting to read how different members experienced the same events.
   I thought from reading other books that Scott was somewhat naive and a dreamer when it came to planning and preparing for this expedition. I now feel differently. Scott prepared and planned diligently. He was well liked and respected by his men, in general, he was a strong leader. A terrible mistake was deciding at the last supply depot, to take 5 men on the final push to the Pole rather than the 4 which was the original plan. The 5th man, for which they did not have adequate supplies and the physical collapse of one member after reaching the Pole, probably cost them their lives.
   Reading of a group of men living for years in these conditions, survival aways in doubt, out of touch with the rest of the world, gives perspective and toleration for what we think are trying experiences today. Early explorers are compared to to our astronauts. However,when one considers that communication is constant with space travelers. These men left and were never heard from again until they returned, if they did return, years later.



3. i had been meaning to read this book for ages and when i started it i could not put it down.....what a read. thank you Amazon and keep up the good work.. yours Fintan.



4. The Worst Journey in the World (purchased on 04/05/2008)
   by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
   
   This order has NOT been received. Please advise as what has happened to it.



5. You will NOT be sorry to embark upon this wonderfully written, dramatic, brave and heartbreaking story by a man who survived infinitely more than you and I ever will. With typical English stoicism, but with a beautiful and compassionate effort, he tried to understand Scott and all the others who travelled with him.
   And when you're finished, read "Cherry", an authorized biography by Sara Wheeler for more of his life and times.
   And sit by your warm fireplace...

5 comments about The Chieftains: The Authorized Biography.

1. Irish music is very hot. It is amazing how many successful Irish bands (of all types) have emerged from this tiny Island of 5 million. Yet in no small way can they all point to a single pioneering band that helped put Irish music on the map.

   The Chieftains are more than simply a successful collection of great musicians who have toured the world for over 30 years. When they started, in the mid 1960's, there was little interest in traditional music in Ireland. In Ireland, Irish music wasn't considered to be "hip" and broadcasts were limited to relatively unimaginative ceili music. The most famous Irish musicians of time, the Clancy Brothers, were not even living in Ireland when they began.

   The Chieftains took traditional Irish music and infused it with a new energy and style. They soon developed a cult following, but after doing the sound track for the movie Barry Lyndon (early 70's) their popularity exploded. Even after upwards of 30 albums, they and constant touring, their popularity never falters.

   The Chieftains : The Authorized Biography by John Glatt tells the story of how it all happened. If it weren't all true, it would sound wildly improbable.

   For anyone interested in Irish music, this book is a must.




2. Nanci Griffith does a fabulous job narrating the audio version of the Chieftain's autobiography. Her voice is as sweet and flowing as the melodious tunes she sings.



3. I purchased this CD because of my interest in Nanci Griffith as a songwriter, musician, and performer. Nanci does not disappoint as she breathes life into the narrative of fellow musicians and collaborators, the Chieftains. It is her familiarity with them as friends and musicians which adds to the excitement of the performance. Nanci has already won three grammies, been nominated for seven, and this should have been her fourth.



4. Mr. Glatt appears to have enjoyed carte blanche access to these fabulous musicians but his book reads like he spilled his notes and put them in the book in random. One moment he's praising founder Paddy Moloney for his computer-like brain, the next we're supposed to laugh that Paddy is five hours late for a major recording session.

   There's some fun stuff here, but the weeds are thick!




5. This is a wonderful history book of the Chieftains. The book is very informative about their love of Irish heritage, the traditional music, and all the wonderful groups, singers, musicians that they have shared the stage and recordings. Paddy has a great sense of humor, and he is the glue that holds the group together and make them what they are. I own a lot of the Chieftains recordings, videos, and I look for more products that they have made. We were sadden for the loss of their great harpist, piantist, Derek Bell. We all miss him.RIP

No comments about There'll Never Be Another (Comedy Club).

No comments about Fanny Trollope - A Remarkable Life.

No comments about Tales of Two Cities: Library Edition.

No comments about Letters Of Elizabeth Barrett And Robert Browning (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection) [UNABRIDGED].