No comments about Backwoodsman's Year.

1 comments about Dear Heart (Isis Large Print Nonfiction).

1. A deeply moving, tragic and true love story compiled form lost letters from a young newly-wedded wife to her husband serving in the second World War. Shortly after their courtship and marriage the young couple are separated when he is called up for service, and then suddenly his correspondence ceases. Unsure if he is receiving her letters she carries on writing of her love, hopeful that they are reaching him, but never being able to confirm if this is so, until the story unfolds to its dramatic conclusion. The denouement is both heartbreaking and touching, a genuinely poignant and beautiful tale of one womanÕs refusal to give up hope on the man she loves, sensitively compiled and annotated from fragmentary letters. If this doesn't touch you nothing will. The film rights must surely be sought eagerly soon by some enterprising mogul. A wonderful book. Full of wonders.

2 comments about How I Grew (Transaction Large Print Books).

1. Each time I reread "How I Grew" I enjoy it more. Mary McCarthy paints a picture of herself coming of age intellectually , alongside engaging and often hilarious descriptions of the people she meets in these formative years between age 13 and 21, the town she grows up in (Seattle), and her early experiences at Vassar. What I love most is her chronicle of the most important and influential books and teachers in her life at this time, and how they shaped and sharpened her already apparent keen intelligence. Witty, self-deprecating, acid-tongued, insightful, and admittedly selective in her memories, in this book Mary McCarthy gives us some clues as to how a young girl with a formidable intellect grew into one of America's literary giants.



2. I love most of Mary McCarthy, but in my opinion, this is her weakest book. It covers basically the same territory as Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which she wrote in the 1950s. Here, however, there's little trace of her signature, tightly-wrought style. Instead, the style is baggy, with convoluted sentences, chatty asides, digressions within digressions, and endless lists of books she read, names of friends, etc. As a result, I often lost track of the basic story - which, after all, was the exact same story she had already told in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I'm rather confused as to why McCarthy wrote this book at all. Given that she had already written a detailed memoir of her formative years, why not just skip ahead to the mid-1930s, the subject of her unfinished "Intellectual Memoirs"?

No comments about Indestructible: The Unforgettable Story of a Marine Hero at the Battle of Iwo Jima.

No comments about City Lights and Streets Ahead: His Bestselling Memoirs.

3 comments about Emma & I (Isis (Hardcover Large Print)).

1. Sheila Hocken shares her life with us in this biography which highlights both her experiences using a seeing-eye dog for the blind; then having her vision restored later in life.

   I suppose you would have to have been blind to appreciate the intensity of the moment when her sight is restored. How do you describe light and colors for the first time? Thank you, Sheila, for sharing this experience with us, the readers. Waiting to hear the rest of your life story. (Hardcover has photos).




2. A moving life story of a blind woman and her incredible guide dog Emma. This book is a rollercoaster of deep emotions that Shela feels for Emma and life they lead together, and makes us , readers, feel it too. What can I say...This is the best book I have read in the last ten years.One of those that you just can't put down, one of those that you keep in your home library and read over and over again...However,once you've read this, you'll want to read the sequels too, which are just as good...

   Enjoy !




3. Usually you hear of people's experience loosing their sight. Now I have an idea of what it's like to have sight after a lifetime of blindness. This book gave me a whole new respect for blind people, guide dogs, and sight itself. Thanks Sheila Hocken!

4 comments about Eight Men Out: The Blacksox and the 1919 World Series (Ulverscroft Large Print Series).

1. The year 1919. The city is Chicago. Eight men enter the room of "Sleepy" Bill Burns and conspire to fix the World Series. The money was coming from Arnold Rothstein or "AR" to his friends. Eight men were about to rock the foundations of baseball for greed and the hatred of Charles Comiskey - or was there another story?

   Asinoff recounts the months leading to, the days during and the years after the 1919 World Series with amazing detail and clarity. His story is told and as you listen you'll think you are actually there. This audio book is by far much better than the movie.

   What you get is 8; count them 8, how ironic, tapes that weave a story of deceit, corruption, and conspiracy on both sides of the law. From Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte to Lefty Williams, Chick Ghandl, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch and Swede Risberg the tragedy is unraveled.

   The recording was a true pleasure and the actual use of transcripts, reports and other material adds major credibility to the exposing of baseball worst nightmare. Asinoff is to be commended on this first rate work and baseball needs more men like him. A real standout performance!

   This review refers to the audio book version.




2. The scandal of the 1919 Black Sox is probably the most disilluisioning chapter in the history of baseball. Asinof captured the feeling of America and its reaction to the scandal on and off field. The story is told accurately and with great insight. "Shoeless" Joe was a wonderful player who made bad decisions. He can be both admired and loathed by fans who now know that he wasn't completely innocent as the Sox threw the Worl d Series. It shows how baseball perserviered throught the gambling. Baseball tradition has kept the game alive through many adverse situtations and when gathered together make the history of baseball very rich. A must read for ALL baseball historians and fans.



3. A great book that shows what led to this infamous scandel with the 8 White Sox ballplayers. Not only will baseball fans want to read this book but anyone who likes to read. It also makes you wonder if throwing games is still going on today.



4. Jose Canseco. Barry Bonds. Jason Giambi. Human growth hormone. The cream and the clear. Steroids. The saddest part about baseball today is that these are the words we think of. However, the past is not free from scandal, and I'm not just talking about the introduction and proliferation of "greenies."
   
   When the 1919 World Series was fixed by eight (arguably seven) members of the Chicago White Sox, the face of baseball changed forever. While it remained America's pastime, an inherent skepticism took hold. This was epitomized by the famous "say it ain't so, Joe" confrontation between "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (the arguably innocent of the eight) and not just any fan, but a child.
   
   Eliot Asinof has done a wonderful job of reminding us that baseball is not a sport newly tainted by strikes and drugs. All the major players are documented. The owner, Charles Comiskey, whose tight pocket book can be partially blamed for the scandal and who tried to cover it up. Baseball's first commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis prosecuted the guilty the best way he knew how and set a precedent that baseball followed into the late '80s with the lifetime ban of Pete Rose (eight years after Eight Men Out was published in 1981). "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, to his deathbed, recanted his confession, calling it something contrived, and professed his innocence. And then there were the gamblers: Joe Sullivan, the contact man; Abe Attell, the man who manipulated the whole thing as a middleman without the money; and Arnold Rothstein, the money behind the debacle. Asinof, despite a lack of modern "forensic" evidence, such as phone taps, followed the information back to the guilty parties. As Asinof relays, this is one of the shames, one of the great failures of the American judicial system following the Black Sox scandal.
   
   What Asinof has accomplished with this story, this true epic, is to remind us that todays era is not that only tainted one in baseball's illustrious history. It reminds us that as long as men have been paid to play a childrens' game they have wanted more and owners have wanted to give them less. In the end, Asinof reminds us that we make it possible for players to make $25 million a year. And we also make it possible for someone like Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds or Jason Giambi to become a "hero." While Asinof does not make me feel guilty, he makes me take pause and wonder how much of baseball's dramatic fall has been a product of the absolute corruption of American culture as opposed to the absolute corruption of a select few individuals.

No comments about Boss of Bosses.

5 comments about Rumor of War: With a Twentieth Anniversary Postscript by the Author (Niagara Hardcovers).

1. In keeping with the theme of this Memorial Day weekend, I would like to offer my thoughts on "A Rumor of War," a classic tale of Vietnam. Philip Caputo has crafted one of the most moving and disturbing testaments to the men who fought and died in that far away land. When the book was first published in 1977, the New York Times called it "The troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully, finally." I became aware of this classic memoir when my friend, Capt. Kyle Kalkwarf, West Point Class of 2002, told me that it was one of the best books about war he had ever read. He recommended that I add it to my reading list. He was right in doing so.
   
   Caputo's recollections of his time as a Marine in Vietnam are filled with anger and sorrow at the misbegotten policies promulgated in Washington and carried out with disastrous results by General Westmorland and his subordinates. The author makes it clear in his introductory remarks how he felt and feels about that war and the impact that it had upon him and his comrades in arms:
   
   "Beyond adding a few more corpses to the weekly body count, none of these encounters achieved anything; none will ever appear in military histories or be studied by cadets at West Point. Still, they changed us and taught us, the men who fought in them; in those obscure skirmishes we learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty and comradeship. Most of all, we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once, and in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age. The knowledge of death, of the implacable limits placed on a man's existence, severed us from our youth as irrevocably as a surgeon's scissors had once severed us from the womb. And yet, few of us were past twenty-five. We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads. . .
   
   This book is partly an attempt to capture something of its [the war's] ambivalent realities. Anyone who fought in Vietnam, if he is honest about himself, will have to admit he enjoyed the compelling attractiveness of combat. It was a peculiar enjoyment because it was mixed with a commensurate pain. Under fire, a man's powers of life heightened in proportion to the proximity of death, so that he felt an elation as extreme as his dread. His senses quickened, and he attained an acuity of consciousness at once pleasurable and excruciating. It was something like the elevated state of awareness induced by drugs. And it could be just as addictive, for it made whatever else life offered in the way of delights or torments see pedestrian." (Pages xv-xvii)
   
   Caputo's last comments in the section just quoted seem to be eerily in keeping with the themes of the stunning films, "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now."
   
   In one of the most gripping passages in the book, Caputo recaptures the spectrum of emotions he felt during a helicopter assault - running the gamut from fear to courage:
   
   "A helicopter assault on a hot landing zone creates emotional pressures far more intense than a conventional ground assault. It is the enclosed space, the noise, the speed, and, above all, the sense of total helplessness. There is a certain excitement to it the first time, but after that it is one of the more unpleasant experiences offered by modern war. On the ground, an infantryman has some control over his destiny, or at least the illusion of it. In a helicopter under fire, he hasn't even the illusion. Confronted by the indifferent forces of gravity, ballistics and machinery, he is himself pulled in several directions at once by a range of extreme, conflicting emotions. Claustrophobia plagues him in the small space: the sense of being trapped and powerless in a machine in unbearable, and yet he has to bear it. Bearing it, he begins to feel a blind fury toward the forces that made him powerless, but has to control his fury until he is out of the helicopter and on the ground again. He yearns to be on the ground, but the desire is countered by the danger he knows is there. Yet, he is also attracted by the danger, for he knows he can only overcome his fear by facing it. His blind rage then begins to focus on the men who are the source of the danger - and of his fear. It concentrates inside him, and through some chemistry is transformed into a fierce resolve to fight until the danger ceases to exist. But this resolve, which is sometimes called courage, cannot be separated from the fear that has aroused it. Its very measure is the measure of that fear. It is, in fact, a powerful urge not to be afraid anymore, to rid himself of fear by eliminating the source of it. This inner, emotional war produces tension almost sexual in its intensity. It is too painful to endure for long. All a soldier can think about is the moment when he can escape his impotent confinement and release this tension. All other considerations, the rights and wrongs of what he is doing, the chances for victory or defeat in the battle, the battle's purpose or lack of it, become so absurd as to be less than irrelevant. Nothing matters except the final, critical instant when he leaps out into the violent catharsis he both seeks and dreads." (Pages 277-8)
   
   Caputo's thoughtful and passionate recounting of the growing up that he did in the cauldron of Vietnam added to my understanding of what many of my generation experienced as they fought in Southeast Asia and returned to a country that had grown sick of the fighting. As our nation once again wrestles with combat fatigue and the questions of when to withdraw and how to withdraw from Iraq, I am grateful that this time around - unlike the situation that existed in the late `60's and 70's - even those who oppose the war have not showered those returning from the Gulf with opprobrium. They desire our admiration and our gratitude.
   
   Thanks Kyle, for recommending this book, and for your continuing service to our nation.
   
   Al



2. I assigned this book to my college students for a closer glimpse of the Vietnam Conflict. I had not read it before, but had done research and study on the subject. I found Caputo's book to be insightful, controversial and thought provoking. He doesn't glamorize the war but explains how it effected soldiers and one of the many reasons it was such a mess. Throughout the book, Caputo shows how the conditions changed the average American teenager into a robotic killer and how their experiences stayed with them. In the end, he speaks against the war, but not in the normal Jane Fonda version of bashing the military and labeling them rapists and baby killer. Caputo talks about how the government was at fault and created the situations that lead to PTSD and other issues for returning soldiers.
   
   A must read to understand the war and its effects on our soldiers.



3. Caputo wasn't much of a marine. He started complaining about Vietnam before he arrived. Every page is filled with criticism, cynicism, griping, complaining, and self-serving tripe. He wanted to be a hero, but he didn't have what it took to be anything but a whining wimp. Certainly he writes well. But writing well and living well are entirely different. He doesn't understand honor or duty. Sure the war was politicized, but so is every war. Sure the rules of engagement were stupid, but a soldier serves. Caputo did not serve; rather he whined. Many of us who served in Vietnam believed there were many things that made no sense. But we didn't turn tail and run. We served. For those who want to understand what is was like to be a soldier in Vietnam, read "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young" or "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts". If you want to know what is was like to be useless in Vietnam, read this book.



4. Its a page turner from start to finish. A very unique view of the war.



5. I thought this book was the best book on Vietnam that I have ever read. Its a facinating look into life as a line officer in a front line Marine Infantry batallion during the early part of the war. Caputo holds nothing back when it comes to describing life on the front line and what goes through the minds of these young, too young Marines who fought on the front line. An excellent read and I highly reccomend it.

3 comments about Past Is Myself (Transaction Large Print Books).

1. This is one of the best books I have ever read. I am surprised that nobody has reviewed it and I am also dissapointed to find out that it is not available to buy at the moment. I read it a few years ago and when I get the time, I will definitely read it again. Once you start you can not stop and it is a book you will remember for the rest of your life. Read it!



2. I am so sorry this book is not available. It is a fasinating story of a woman's ability to survive and keep her family in tact in WW II Germany. I met Mrs. Bielenberg a few years ago and she is still as interesting as she was in her book.



3. I read this book a few years ago, when living in the United Kingdom, and wanted to recommend this book to my Book Club in the USA for our next discussion. What a disappointment to find it is out of print, as this is one of the most readable and insightful autobiographies I have read! Dear Amazon team, please campaign for it to be reissued!