ERA Reviews

The significance of the events from 1846-1848 in the history of our country has long been overlooked. Education in many schools jumps from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War; completely disregarding the major influence the Mexican-American War had on our nation. Not only did the war result in the United States increasing it's territory by over a third, but the wealth of mineral resources in California, Arizona, and New Mexico helped to propel the United States to global prominence in the twentieth century. But if the war as a whole is neglected, the unique contributions of a single group to the formation of the U.S. border and to the development of American western migration is almost completely forgotten. The Mormon Battalion, which marched in 1846 from Iowa to California, blazed a trail that would define our nation's borders and history. Published in 2000, ARMY OF ISRAEL: Mormon Battalion narratives gives a fresh look at this regiment's history from their own viewpoint. The editors are both historians with backgrounds in journalism and a special interest in the American Far West. Mr. Bigler is a past president of the Oregon-California Trails Association, founder and first president of the Utah Westerners, and has served on the Utah Board of State History. He has also edited the diary of his great-uncle Azariah Smith, one of the members of the Battalion. Mr. Bagley has edited several books and narratives on the American West and serves as the chief editor of the series KINGDOM IN THE WEST: The Mormons and the American Frontier. The narrative focuses primarily on the events encountered by the battalion during the actual march from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Los Angeles, California in from June 1846 to January 1847. Thought the infantry regiment made the entire journey without firing a single shot, the march was the longest in the history of any American army. It's legacy, however, is much greater than simple trivia. On its way to California, the battalion occupied Santa Fe, Tucson, Yuma, San Diego, and Los Angeles, instituting the first American military presence in each of these cities. They were also to first to construct an east-west wagon road, which intersected the great mountain ranges of the Southwest. Previously, Mexican and Native American merchant traffic traveled north-south along the valleys. The roads were a major factor in the mass migration to California that would soon follow. The roads continued to be used until 1880, when the railroad was built along the same path. Interstate 10 now follows almost the exact same path that the company forged over 150 years ago. The little "Army of the West", made up of five regiments of one hundred men each, made President James Polk's vision of a continental nation into reality. In the Introduction the editors claim, "Only in recent times have historians begun to realize the achievements and the important role the Mormon soldiers performed in California and Western history. The narratives found in these pages reveal ... the significant part these men and women played in that history" (p. 29). Fortunately for us, a great number of the soldiers kept account of their experiences in pocket diaries, which many then transcribed into more detailed journals after the war. These documents not only provide us with detailed information on their day-to-day activities, but also give us eyewitness accounts of the major events of this period - the occupation of Northern Mexico, the opening of major transportation routes, and the discovery of gold in California. The book proceeds chronographically, beginning with the situation surrounding the Mormons and the U.S. government at the time. The Mormons were in need of money to finance their exodus to Utah; President Polk was in need of an army to occupy California. Polk's concern for the West Coast was not over Mexican possession but of the threat of British invasion. Once the deal was brokered, the Battalion set out almost immediately, under the command of Gen. Stephen W. Kearny and Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke. The editors utilize a great number of original documents from James Polk's presidential papers, War Department records, and Congressional archives. Correspondence between the Mormons and the government is also well recorded. The narrative then turns to the march itself, which is presented mostly by means of diaries and journals from the soldiers and their officers. The editors employ a framework that keeps the narrative interesting and ties the various accounts together, giving historical background for each event. This approach enables them to let the documents stand on their own merit but also provides them with the opportunity to accentuate events that demonstrate the importance of the Mormon Battalion campaign. The editors clearly explain the ramifications of events not only during the war but even down to our time. The result is indeed convincing. They make proper use of their source data describing not only the events but also their historical significance. The narrative is interesting and informative. An effort is made to include the journals of women who traveled with the army, as well as to maintain a balance between purely historical documents with entertaining stories. On the other hand, although the stated scope of the book is to present the experiences of the Battalion from their own perspective, there is very little information on Native Americans and even less about the Mexicans. Additionally, though the editors make an attempt to curb their glowing assessment of the Battalion by introducing a few arguments that call the Mormons' intentions into question, the effort is half-hearted and falls short of credibility. What remains is a biased depiction of the campaign that nonetheless does not detract from the authenticity of the source documents. The end result is an extremely readable book about an extraordinary group of people who played a part in our nation's history that often goes unnoticed.

David Bigler and Will Bagley successfully collaborated to bring together a series of previously unpublished documents, as well as some published ones, in an outstanding collection of firsthand accounts and other primary sources on and about the Mormon Battalion's epic 1846 U.S. - Mexican War march and their role in securing the Southwest from Mexican control and claiming the territory that would become the states of Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah -- thereby fulfilling the mandate inherent in the concept of "Manifest Destiny". Several eye-witness sourced perspectives are provided including the journal of teenager William Pace, letters from some of the women associated with the battalion; as well as military and government correspondence. Army Of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives is a superlatively presented and informative contribution to American history in general, and the role of a unique military command in particular.

From time to time, a historian will write a book, as opposed to an author writing history. And when TWO historians write a book, you get what Bigler and Bagley have created here. The entire series, "Forgotten Kingdom" is dynamite, we are fortunate to have these books available to us.

One of the main reasons I picked up The Peculiar Institution was to learn why a nation that was founded on the basis of a popular government would then turn around and aggressively import African slaves. The book tells of the creation of the institution of slavery in the New World as something that evolved, rather than something that European settlers consciously constructed.

It also does a good job of discussing the demographics and economics of slavery. Only a small number of white people in the south owned slaves, and those that did usually owned just one. Yet, because ownership of the vast majority of slaves was concentrated in the hands of a few, most slaves lived on huge plantations. Because slave labor was so cheap, business managers would frequently choose to buy or lease out slaves for work. This forced free labor to compete with the slaves for jobs and wages declined.

These portions of the book are utterly fascinating, and I couldn't put the book down. However, there was a bit more than I really cared to know about the average diet of slaves, and it seemed to belabor the rather obvious fact that free whites were usually able to commit violent crimes against black slaves with impunity. In these sections the book dragged a bit, and I felt that the author would have done the reader a favor by cutting a few of the 400+ pages.

I agree with other reviewers that this book is good. Good, but not to be taken, in my opinion, as the final authority on the subject. Prof. Stampp does not give enough detail concerning his credentials on this subject, and the other thing I object to in general is not that this book exists, but that, like so many others, it concentrates on the institution in the South, and glosses over the role played by our Northern brethren (who btw had much more racist opinions of blacks than southerners at that time as evidenced by their restrictive laws - and why the underground railway ended in Canada and not in a northern state) in buying and transporting these poor souls for profit and fortunes (all of which they and their heirs got to KEEP, not like in the South where all was lost), and the roles played by just about every nation at the time, not to mention the 500 years of slavery the black man suffered under the Islamic rule.

Anyone really interested in the subject should be required to read Rawick's 'The American Slave' based on the Slave Narratives which are interviews taken from actual former slaves during the 1930's. This is hearing it from the horses' mouth, so to speak, for the good and bad aspects.

Personally, my studies have brought me to believe that if handed the situation of slavery (which of course I would never have permitted in the first place), that immediate freedom ultimately was a great injustice to blacks. Given the situation at hand, blacks today would be much better off had slavery first been regulated so that it could have been gradually phased out in an organized and deliberate manner instead of people being 'turned out to pasture like cattle' with no education, no way of livelihood, and at a time when the entire South (even whites) were hard pressed to make a living. I, myself, could write a book on this subject, but suffice it to say that this is why I believe we have suffering today among blacks that are the result of parentless or fatherless homes, lack of education, lack of respect, and lack of culture. It has only been about 4 or 5 generations since the end of slavery, and the first 3 of these not much progress was made because everyone was living poorly. This is not that long of time to right such a terrible wrong, and the correct and best way of righting it might not have necessarily been to seek the fastest and most immediate.

Professor Stampp's book on American Slavery was published in 1956-- two years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education and at the beginning of the American Civil Rights Movement. At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a seminal study of America's "peculiar institution". Time has not changed the value of the book.

The book attacks a picture of the Old South that attained wide currency after Reconstruction and was carried through American culture in works such as, for example, Gone With the Wind-- that plantation slavery was a benign institution, part of an agrarian way of life, that was accepted by both slave and master. Professor Stampp shows that slavery had an economic, commercial basis, that it was resisted by slaves overtly and covertly, and that led to squalor, cruelty and suffering by the slaves. The peculiar institution does not merit sentimintality in any form.

In reading the book a half-century after its publication, and with some benefit of having read subsequent studies, I was struck with the moderate tone of the book. Yes, there were humane masters in an inhumane system and yes,there were variants in time and place. Stampp gives these variants their due, perhaps more than modern students would be inclined to do.

I was stuck with the tone of slavery's defenders, pre Civil War and thereafter, describing the institution as "patriarchal". Not only is that description in error, as Stampp shows, but for readers in a time beyond the mid 1950s, it is hardly a compliment to call a society "patriarchal", even if it deserved this characterization.

There has been a great deal of writing since the publication of this book on matters such as the nature of the slave trade, the presence, or lack of it, of an indigenous culture among the slaves, and the economic viability of slavery. These studies add to the picture that Professor Stampp has drawn.

This is an essential book for the understanding of our Nation's history. Those looking for an introduction to the Ante-Bellum South could not do better than to read this book.

David Healy obviously knows a lot about antidepressants (and about psychopharmacology in general). However, he apparently doesn't know a lot about using clear, straightforward, unpretentious language.

This book badly needs an editor. Healy's writing is far more difficult and opaque than it needs to be.

Nevertheless, I'm giving the book four stars because of the excellent content.

Being a researcher of SSRIs and depression from a psychologiacl standpoint I was impressed by the line took by Healy- my own research is begining to show that even when people take SSRIs their self-esteem (which is formed by childhood and environment) is not affected or changed. I agree with Healy that we should take far more account of the fundamnetal social implications of depression within society and treat this as well as the individual- doing this is a far more efective way of tackling depression. However this may not be the case for the drug companies.

A brilliant historical account that illuminates the degree to which the field of psychiatry has been overrun by pharmaceutical corporate brainwashing. An anti - indoctrination of sorts, to combat the world of neurobabble. An especially important read for psychiatrists, psychologists and all others who are actually involved in treating people with mental health problems. If your intellectual curiosity has not yet dissipated in these biological times, this book is for you.

This book was my first in-depth introduction into the intricacies of the Viet Nam War. I feel like I've only scratched the surface of this monolithic subject.

In the final chapter, Mr. Bui lists the main reasons why the war was so unmanageable and why the US (and coincidentally S. Viet Nam) eventually lost it. The reason listed last (the problems resulting from US intervention) is the focus of his book.

"The South Vietnamese people, and especially the South Vietnamese leaders, myself among them, bear the ultimate responsibility for the fate of their nation, and to be honest, they have much to regret and much to be ashamed of. But it is also true that the war's cast of characters operated within a matrix of larger forces that stood outside the common human inadequacies and failings. And it was these forces that shaped the landscape on which we all moved."

"First...was the obduracy of France, which in the late forties insisted on retaining control of its former colony rather than conceding independence in good time to a people who hungered for it. Second was the ideological obsession of Vietnam's Communists. Not content with fighting to slough off a dying colonialism, they relentlessly sought to impose on the Vietnamese people their dogma of class warfare and proletarian dictatorship. Finally came the massive intervention by the United States, inserting into our struggle for independence and freedom its own overpowering dynamic. These three forces combined to distort the basic nature of Vietnam's emergence from colonialism, ensuring that the struggle would be more complex and bloodier than that of so many other colonies which achieved nationhood during mid-century."

In this book, you definitely will get a S. Vietnamese diplomat's point of view. I was hoping for more on the common man's outlook, the characteristics of the Vietnamese people themselves, and the demographics of the country, but it is not provided at all in this tome. I think this would have done a lot to make the actions of the S. Vietnamese government understandable, if not excusable.

Also, another weakness of the book is that Mr. Bui is always quick to point out American missteps, but rarely expounds on S. Vietnamese imperfections. For example, he writes that one huge problem was corruption. But he never fully elaborates on the nature of this corruption.

The story is easy to read except for when you start to get towards the end. The reason being that no more new insights will be given, and you already know what the disastrous outcome will be.

"In the Jaws of History" is most valuable for Bui Diem's account of his early years in the North, when the "great dilemma in the lives for all nationalists was coming to a head". Nationalists saw collaboration with the French as "repugnant", but then so was "giving the nation ... over to a future ruled by Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and the Indochinese Communist Party" who were then murdering nationalist leaders in Hanoi and along the Red River. Giap's role in the purge of the nationalist Dai Viet and VNQDD needs to be kept in mind by those who tend to accept as fact the popular communist myths woven around its leadership figures. "In the Jaws of History" is perhaps best read along with Bui Tin's memoirs "Following Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel".

This book offers a compelling and fascinating read. The perspective is one we don't see in most of our histories of the Vietnam conflict: the view of a South Vietnam nationalist who tries to save his nation from the Communists. The absence of bitterness, the appraisals of both the weakness and strength of his South Vietnamese compatriots, his views on the American intervention: all are fascinating.

Overall, this is one of the best books I have ever read about the conflict: it's right up there with Stanley Karnow's well-regarded book.

A friend suggested that I take a look at this book. Different than the many books on ecommerce. The last chapter really brings the ideas together.

This book is an encyclopedia of metrics that business process owners care about, and a compendium of advice for measuring them. Don't let the title fool you - this book is as applicable to bricks and mortar businesses as it is to e-commerce sites. I can assure you that reading this book will give you insights into the minds of the business process owners for whom you exist to serve, and will impart a good appreciation of business imperatives.

What I like about this book, aside from what I've said above, is the way the authors analyze the technical and business factors. They start in Chapter 2 with a five-layer e-commerce model, then proceed in subsequent chapters to thoroughly dissect the model and how it applies to business types. This book only addresses technology as it relates to business issues. Chapter 3 illustrates this approach wherein the internet platform is placed into the context of cost/benefit issues. As such you'll get the technical details necessary to understand e-commerce infrastructure, but you'll never lose sight of the business imperatives. This is a refreshing approach, in my opinion, and the rest of the book is consistent with this.

Specific chapters that I particularly like include: (Ch 8) Customer Acquisition models, and (Ch 9) Application of Business models. These two chapters capture the essence of e-commerce. Another valuable part of the book is the appendix, which provides in tabular format real companies, their major and minor categories and revenue models. This is excellent research material that has been pre-compiled and will save you untold hours of research and classification as you benchmark your model against competitors and other business models.

Although I was unfamiliar with the authors and uncertain of the quality of theories/research, I was splendidly suprised and found this book to be a wonderful read. Not only were the theories challenging and stimulating, the author provided fascinating examples of the underlying principles of the book. I think that not only is this book a must read for internet professionals but for the avid business reader as well. The theories can be applied to all disciplines and the concise manner of this book makes it easy for all to understand.

Despite years of detective work by musicologists, Joplin's life remains something of a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. Berlin's work is the most coherent and robust work on Joplin's life to date, and barring some miraculous finding (such as the Sweatman files), it is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The depth of Berlin's reportage and the obvious breadth of his detective work (he's a superb "triangulator") give his assertions and educated guesses on Joplin's life, work and motivations far greater academic vailidity than that of many authors who have chased this musical ghost.

After reading Doctorow's Ragtime and visiting Scott's St. Louis home I was eager to learn more about Scott Joplin and this book satisfied that need.

It is a detective story putting the clues together how his life was lived. This makes it an interesting read.

The only warning I would have is that it is blocky and interrupted with music scores and other interludes which don't lend itself to a reading rhythm.

My review in two words: BUY IT.

This book is probably as thorough of a study into the life of Scott Joplin as is possible. Edward Berlin has obviously exhausted every resource available to him, and throughout, the book is well-noted - that is to say he gives credit to probably 99.9% of the sources of his information in the section for notes. Berlin has went through census records, newspapers, other books on ragtime, interviews with/statements given by numerous people affiliated with Scott Joplin and countless other sources for this book. This book is 99.9% true, solid facts; he seldom states a personal opinion, and when he does, it is made blatantly clear that that is what he is doing. This book also includes a listing of the complete known works of Scott Joplin, and the sheet music for the three songs "Good-bye Old Gal Good-bye", "Snoring Sampson" and "Lovin' Babe". (I would like to say in response to someone else's review that it is very difficult for me to see how the biography of a *musician* can be "interrupted" with music scores.)

I was required to read this book (it reads like a textbook)for an American history class I was taking in my sophomore year, and I love the book. Cooper integrated various facets (political, social, military, and cultural history) into a solid and interesting read. It can be a little dense at times, but it is a very good beginning for those interested in twentieth-century American history.

I had to read this book for my US History,1914-1945 class, and I have to admit, I am quite pleased with it. It was well-organized and gives an in-depth look into the Roosevelt and Wilson presidencies. This book is a must for anyone interested in 20th-century American history.

I liked this book. It details the history of the USA in pretty sensible chronological order from 1900 to 1920, with good description of the events during those momentous decades. It is pretty balanced, and should not offend anyone with biases one way or the other. The author is an authority on the two dominating figures of those decades, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, and I read his dual study, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, on October 7, 1995, with much appreciation. Cooper writes in a clear style, and even tho this book read like a college textbook, hey, it is fun to read a college textbook on such interesting subjects as this book deals with. A good and worthwhile book.

This book is the only one I have seen of its vintage which discusses operations of US Army counterintelligence agents. Some of the stories have been confirmed by people I have had the chance to speak with. Some of the the details were altered to protect certain items. Careful research of the ESP/PSI related bits in other publications may reveal differing views on the outcome of some operations.

It's relatively high level of veracity, easy flow, it was written at the 10th grade level, and humor made it a good read for anyone interested in this topic.

After waiting quite some time to get a copy, I found the book to be an interesting insight on the genesis of the US Special Ops community. Today, Emerson has capitalized on this early research and is now in the forefront of documenting terrorism. It would be interesting to see if he is utilizing many of the sources he obtained while writing this book.
I thought he had excellent sources, and many of these chapters could have been easily expanded into more in-depth stories. The Iran-Contra mess certainly weighed heavily while writing this book, and unfortunately, Emerson tried to cover the scandal without getting too bogged in that mess...that being said, I don't think he succeeded very well in drawing the ties between IRan-Contra and the organizations he covered so well throughout the book. Nevertheless, a must have for any library on US intelligence operations...a great read!

Most of the information contained here and seems to have been cross checked with multiple sources. Mr. Emerson has produced a fascinating look at the capabilities and foibles of the special and covert operations community during the 80's. Highly recommended for folks wanting to learn more about the "silver age" of US special operations.

Mr. McMurry's purpose in writing this book was to try and explain why the Army of Northern Virginia was so successful, and why the Army of Tennessee so awful. Although I did not agree with some of his conclusions, he does provide some compelling evidence to support his arguments.

I found this book to be very informative, and an easy read. I recommend it for anyone looking to better understand how the South fought the war, why the two great rebel armies had such different levels of success on the battlefield, and possibly why they did not have the ability to win the war.

I'm not a student of the Civil War, so I cannot comment on the merit of McMurry's main points, but as a student of the Old South I thoroughly enjoyed this book. McMurry's analysis of the two armies is very well organized and easy to read. Simply, it's a page turner. This book is at once both highly focused on a single topic and illuminate of larger Civil War issues. I really enjoyed this book and will read it every so often in the years to come. I recommend McMurry's book without reserve.

The title definately underscores how masterful Mr. McMurray has been in detailing the main differences between the Army of Northern Virginia and The Army of Tennessee. From the basics of command on through key strategy and deployment, both armies are beautifully dissected by McMurray's research, mirrored with an easy to understand style of writing.

This book not only discusses how important the upper command structures were to both armies but how the various infrastructures such as railroads, food supply, communication and weapons production differed from east to west.

This book can be summed up as an impressive literary study of the two great armies. It sheds light on the many differences as well as similarities and gives the reader new insight into the complex study of military history.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in an intense study of both armies.

Well done Mr. McMurray!

Peter Haining has published a huge number of volumes on a variety of topics, which tend to be both well illustrated and very carelessly researched. This latest addition to the stack unfortunately follows that pattern.

First the good stuff: the book offers a large number of well-reproduced covers from a wide variety of pulps. The images are photographs (two are out of focus slightly), and so do not have the problems seen in several similar recent books which had electronically-scanned covers displaying a color palette nothing whatsoever like the actual covers.

Now for the bad part. The text is mainly just a description of particular magazines which happen to be in the author's personal collection. Where the text departs from what is really just a catalog of the collection, to provide background on publishers, specific titles and authors, the material is so riddled with errors as to be of very limited use and reliability. So much of the text is clueless, every reader will have his favorite (and different) gaffe. Mine is the reference (p. 203) to "famous American space artist Chester Bonestall." He's apparently not as famous as I thought!

To summarize the contents: Chapter 1 provides a confused account of the origins and types of pulp magazines. Chapter 2 is devoted to the very-soft-porn pulps usually sold from under the tobacco shop counter. Chapter 3 deals with detective, crime and gangster pulps. Chapter 4 covers the "spicy" pulps and their imitators. Chapter 5 introduces the weird fantasy pulps, of which the best and best known were WEIRD and UNKNOWN. Chapter 6 surveys the "shudder" pulps which featured heavy doses of sadism and torture. Chapter 7 fairly casually dips into the huge sea of science-fiction pulps. Finally, chapter 8 shows us a little bit of the little-known world of British pulps and pulp publishing. (About half the space actually is devoted to paperbacks rather than pulps.) Notable complete omissions from the book are the most popular pulp genre, westerns (perhaps half of all pulp titles at peak), and the justice-figure pulps such as THE SHADOW, DOC SAVAGE and the SPIDER, which are the best remembered pulps today. Also largely ignored are the general fiction titles, such as BLUE BOOK, ARGOSY and ADVENTURE. With such omissions, the present book cannot be considered very valuable even as a pictoral survey of the pulp era.

Buy it for the cover reproductions and you won't be too disappointed. But if you try to read the text, you're in for dismay and frustration.

The colorfully covered, cheaply printed pulp magazine of the 1920s and 30s great out of the 19th-century dime novel and served as the forerunner of the comic books and paperback novels of today. In its heyday, pulp magazines were a staple of popular culture that offered every genre of readership the thrills, adventures, and entertainments they craved -- often to the dismay of parents, teachers, and clergy! Virtually creating the now popular literary genres as science fiction and the hard-boiled private eye mystery, these magazines were the incubators of such American literary talents as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and a legion of others. An outstanding recommendation for personal, academic, and community library collections, The Classic Era Of American Pulp Magazines tells the complete story of these colorful pulps and those that wrote and published them, with a wealth of colorful cover art giving today's readers an accurate sense and taste of what the glory years of pulp magazines had to offer their enthusiastic readers.

Obviously the politically incorrect covers are the first attraction. You can't ignore the cultural significance of the covers and thus, if you are a teacher of semiotics or visual interpretation, I can't think of a richer source. Congrats to the publishers for printing such a glorious book. For those more interested in what's between the covers, Haining gives insightful critical analysis of the different genres. A great gift for anyone; a wonderful coffee table book for yourself. It's worth every penny.