ERA Reviews

A native Kansan, Goodrich obviously knows the history of his state. War to the Knife provides a very vivid look at the conflict between pro-slavery and free state settlers in Kansas in the lead up to the Civil War, drawing heavily from personal accounts and local newspaper reports. This approach also helps Goodrich maintain a balance in presenting the views of both sides of the conflict, their hatred of each other and their diametrically opposed agendas. The one area where the book was lacking was in its discussion of the role of the federal military and government in the conflict. Goodrich does discuss the few times the military did intervene in the conflict and the lack of power that the multiple territorial governors had over the settlers, but I found myself wanting to know more about why the military and government did not take a stronger role in preserving law and order in the territory. Despite that, the motives of the various free state and pro-slavery leaders are discected fairly well -- especially John Brown whose raid on Harpers Ferry is used to open and close the book.

It was just a coincidence that shortly after reading the book I met the author at a civil war reenactment. This book is mainly constructed through letters and diaries from the period, and little is left to the imagination as the author chillingly describes the savagery of this particular time. An excellent read for those interested in Civil War history, and to hear a knock at the door in the middle of the night, being asked if you are "Pro-slavery or a Jayhawker", and knowing that a wrong answer would probably mean death is harrowing just thinking about it.

Goodrich adds to his works on US Western history with a well-paced history of the guerilla warfare between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces in the struggle for statehood in Kansas. The author relys extensively on personal accounts of the violent and brutal actions of both sides of the conflict. Readers will find his impartial examination a valuable asset. The more experienced historian may find the book long on drama, short on analysis, particulary the impact of these events on the Eastern political establishment. Nonetheless, a valuable addition to the literature and a great follow-on to his earlier "Black Flag" which describes the events that follow in the Civil War itself. I found this a timely book to read after Russell Banks "Cloudsplitter", a fictional account of John Brown which includes many events found in "War to the Knife".

This is a wonderful book. The family includes grandparents, parents, and 4 children. It shows the family as the farming class, middle class, upper class, and after the war. The costumes are beautiful and historically accurate.It could be used in the classroom to show children what the costume our forefathers wore were like. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the colonial period, or just love paperdolls. It may not be suitable for very young children, as some of the ladies' costumes have fragile headdresses.

This paper doll set was one of many that I found extremely interesting and fun. The clothing items were gorgeous...much nicer than some others I have gotten lately and Tom Tierney has once again created great characters for all paper-doll collectors.

With American Reformers, Walters has composed a fine synthesis of secondary literature on the varied antebellum reform movements. In doing so, he argues that the reform impulse emerges out of evangelical Protestantism but by the Civil War takes a more secular turn more involved in legislating social controls than converting the hearts of individuals. As he develops this argument he addresses the different forms that this reform impulse took and organizes the book thematically. He discusses in successive chapters utopian movements and secular communitarians, abolition, the women's movement and the peace movement, temperance, health reform and spiritualism, working man's reform, and institutional reform, into which he groups mental hospitals, prisons and schools.

Walters demonstrates the secularization of reform in the realm of communitarian societies. Thus, the early nineteenth century utopian settlements that often emerged out of pietistic impulses gave way to more secular experiments in social engineering such as Owenism, or as in the case of Oneida, how a once religious community endured only as a commercial venture. Similarly he shows institutions such as asylums wove their religious inspiration with the science of the times but like prisons and almshouses became holding pens for outcasts rather than places for healing and reform.

Walters also situates the emergence of reform in the particular circumstances of antebellum America. He argues that the emergence of the middle class created made it possible for people to devote time to reform, and that technological advances in printing made it possible for people to actually make a living as an "agitator." He also argues that reform helped shape the identity of the emerging middle class. This point come through particularly clearly in his chapter on working man's reform.

Walters' synthesis suffers from its grand scope and short length. In it he sacrifices a certain amount of detail and analysis for space and clarity. The section on utopian movements, for example, traces the personalities of the major reformers and a brief outline of the community that followed without in-depth analysis. Throughout the book quotations from primary sources would have been helpful in giving a feel for the particular movement under discussion. The lack of primary source material allows Walters to sacrifice documentation, and the reader sometimes wishes for some assistance in discerning the origin or fuller development of a particular point. To his credit, Walters provides a good bibliographical essay at the end, but the lack of documentation sometimes proves frustrating and thus interrupts the otherwise smooth flow in the text. Nonetheless, American Reformers is a very readable and useful synthesis of the secondary sources on antebellum reform. As such, it is a helpful and welcome addition to the field.

American Reformers is a wonderful resource book. Walters has done a beautiful job blending information with intersting anecdotes. A great book for anyone interested in reform movements of the 19th century, and how they infuence contemporary society.

Belle, is actually a gentel book. It's the kind of read that Bram Stokers Dracula is. I suppose we are all brought up today for the sensational and the roller coaster type entertainment, but this aint it. If you like a movie more like Wings Of A Dove, with it's undersuggestion and almost quiet poignancy (with a little lust and spanking thrown in) then this is for you, but if you grew up on Terminator or Raiders... pass! I was a bit dissapointed in some of the "almost" happenings and teases that flourish through out the book. When the kinky stuff is too well received and overlooked by those in power then it tends to loose it's sting... if we aren't breaking any rules with interracial sex, or girl on girl, or old man and teenager ... then you may as well describe a married couple in thier thirties who are into spanking. I know, I know..."If they concentrate on the racial issue as being somehow wrong then it's racism"... yeah, ok, but if I promise to keep it between you and me that we're being sexuall and lusty and not belittling someone for race or creed, can I get aroused on my own? I promise to give to the NAACP. One really needs to dig deep into the imagination to find anything but a mild buzz from this civil war time story of anything goes, but if that's ok for you... then the book is well written anyway.

This is a very good book.

I am against all kinds of slavery but this is just fantasy so go along with it. Everyone loves action flics but no one really enjoys seeing people getting blowned away either, right?

Anyway, I never imagined that a novel taking place in a plantation/slavery enviroment could be erotic. "The Captive" series is one thing. Pure and good erotic fantasy. But plantations existed and there was slaves being whipped there. So how could it be erotic?

Well, this book blown me away. The air that your breath once you star reading the book feels and smells erotic. Maybe it's the heat. Or maybe it's very well portrayed cast of characters. There are the submissive types (but not the "puppet-like") and the dominants.

But there is more than that. There is a whole cumplicity among them. A resignation of sorts that is just amazing to see in this kind of book.

The whipping scenes are very detailed, very ritualistic and yet very erotic and exciting. It's just too bad that thera are not more of those. The author shouldn't have hold back on us readers.

But you will love it and mark some of the pages, I garantee you.

Enjoy

Here's a book that grants the reader a degree of freedom to question where a number of the quotes came from. The voices of the children are still missing.

For thirty-five dollars it lacks merit. But for someone with little understanding of slavery its an interesting library read.

This absorbing book both confirms established information (e.g., the prevalence of children among domestic workers) and challenges popular assumptions about slaves' lives (Schwartz suggests that antebellum planter families frequently ignored injunctions against teaching slaves to read and that many, perhaps most, slave children learned the alphabet and basic reading skills, even if few became competent readers). Schwartz draws on WPA narratives of former slaves, as well as the memoirs of former slaves and slaveowners, to construct a surprising vivid picture of young children's lives under slavery. Her writing is smooth and clear, though occasionally repetitive.

Sheridan published his book in 1975, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of turmoil, mass killing, disintegration, unjustice, economic failure and human tragedy in general as disastrous as no other in the Chinese history, maybe with the sole exception of the Great Leap Forward (1957-60), another Mao Zedong's orchestrated descent into hell, this time featuring mass starvation (30 million deaths?) and stupidity as signs of the era. Apart from this, the whole Mao tenure was marked by the Gulag. Sheridan was, one have to suppose, a scholar on the subject of China in general, even if his book is devoted to the so-called Republican Era (1912-1949). How could he ignore so blatantly the consequences of the movements, decisions and political clashes he was reviewing? Because he was obsessed with words. Sheridan loves one word above any other: integration. His book is all about integration, his central theme: integration is supposedly that thing that turns feudal or semi-feudal or backward countries into modern players in the world stage, like Mao's China, as he naively suggests in his introduction. The book itself is named China in disintegration, and his message goes like this: the Kuomintang didn't integrate, so it lost. The Communists did integrate, so they won. Quite simple. There's other words Sheridan loves too, like modernization: like so many other 60s and 70s scholars, he hails Mao as the founder of the "modern" China, whatever it means, like that's good (or bad), like it wasn't Chiang Kai-shek who won the beloved seat and veto in the Security Council for the Republic of China. Maybe, he had to say all this empty words to make a point in the furiously anti-communist environment of Vietnam War U.S. I don't care. That's over now, the people who were supposed to listen to him are doing something else now, and his empty words remain empty. In A People's Tragedy, the Brit Orlando Figes portrays the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as a bloody business from both sides points of view. In his study of the other Great Agrarian Uprising, he shows clearly how the communist won not because they were nice guys who wanted to help the peasants and won their simple hearts, as Sheridan tries to demonstrate in the Chinese case, but because their policies looked better in the long run for the majority of a largely apolitical mass of people who wanted Land. Only Land (even if they were finally cheated, and ended up with No Land At All). Mao Zedong knew perfectly the basics of the Kidnapping of the Agrarian Revolution, that old communist strategy, as expressed in the notes written by the CIA case officers in Arbenz Guatemala (1954) or later by J.P.Vann in South Vietnam. Sheridan ignores it all. His revolution is a Bad Guy-Good Guy struggle, a young, brilliant, idealist Communist with History blowing his sails, versus that old creep who would kill his mother for money, the Kuomintang Confucionist Chinese. That's the weakest point of the book and one real important, because the Communist-Nationalist struggle is the key of the Republican Era, the one thing that basically weakened the Kuomintang's capacity to "integrate" China and finally gave birth to another China, 39 years of bloody soul-searching that ended up with a sell-out in exchange for Coca-cola. Sheridan, apparently unable to read either Chinese or French (the language in which so many excellent books about China are written), as I suppose after checking his sources, didn't have access to many authors that traveled behind the communist lines during the 30s and the 40s and wrote what they saw before 1975. In fact, when he's got to speak about Mao's revolutionary base in Yenan, he doesn't provide a single footnote identifying the sources of his lack of any knowledge whatsoever about the place, though he later states how helpful was for him Red Star over China, that piece of propaganda rubbish courtesy of Mao's friend and frequent guest Edgar Snow. The rest of the book, when one doesn't have to cope with the idealization of Mao and the reds, is well written, even occasionally insightful about the many flaws of the Kuomintang regime and the Warlords wars. Too bad all the names are in the Wade-Gilles transcription, which is currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and is (I believe) inferior to the pinyin transcription used in communist China, and confusing, especially since there is no Chinese characters or pinyin translations anywhere in the book. There you have one of the very few communist successes in history, and Sheridan doesn't take advantage of it.

This is the second in a series of books on modern China published by The Free Press, a division of McaMillan Publishing Co. Although published in the mid 1970's the series still has value for college undergraduate and graduate level instruction.

The writing style of the entire series easy to read and yet conveys much correct scholarly history. Professor Sheridan is the author of a number of books on China and he seems to favor writing on the warlord era of China--1912 thru 1949--having written this book and a biography of the famous "Christian Warlord," Feng Yu-hsiang.

This particular book, "China in Disintegration" deals with the period of time from the 1911 Sun Yat-sen democratic bourgeois revolution up to the time of the 1949 Revolution in China. During this time much of the centralized character of Chinese society and governance was broken apart. Various regional warlords controlled local areas of China and ran them independently from the wishes of the central government under Kuomintang Party of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus the title of this short 294-page book.

'The China Reader'offers a good selections of reading on Chinese culture, politics, education, media, economy and foreign relations in the post Mao era. Though some of the articles should prove useful in the long run, many of them will be hopelessly dated in a very short time (the fate of any book dealing with contemporary Chinese issues).

Nevertheless, I found the book to be very interesting and useful in augmenting my understanding of current affairs in China. I particularly liked the articles in the chapter entitled 'Society' that dealt with crime, the environment, and poverty and population issues.

Schell and Shambaugh are 'old China hands' and know their material well- so this book won't be disappointing for serious China watchers. I recommend it.

In 1998 I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the People's Republic of China for One Month with the American Forum for Global Education. I participated on this trip as a representative of a New York City High School in the Bronx.

As part of the preperation for this trip of a lifetime we did a series of intensive workshops on Chinese history, culture, politics, society etc. During one of these workshops we were told the following which I feel describes this wondeful collection of primary and secondary sources on modern China. We were told that if you visit China for a week you can write a book on China. If you visit China for a month you can write a magazine article on China. And if you visit China for a year you could barely write an article. In short, the less of China you see the more you think you know and the more of China you see the less you think you know.

And I know from from more than just reading how true this is. But this collection illustrates this fact very well. This is a great collection of primary sources from Chinese and world leaders as well as some great secondary source articles by many of the China experts.

I especially enjoyed reading the contributions of editor Orville Schell. I think of all the China experts he is most on the money and I found his comments the most interesting. I encourage anyone interested in China to look at his book Mandate of Heaven.

China is a complex issue. The legacy of Mao, their attempts at capitalism without democracy, relations with Taiwan, the occupation of Tibet, and of course trade and human rights. Again, I feel the more we know about China the less we know.

But regardless of your stance on any of these issues: trade, Taiwan, Human Rights, Tibet anyone looking at this collection should walk away understanding why we need to have as much contact with China as possible. We have many issues with China and many disagreements but a nation of 1.2 billion people can not be ignored or punished by isolation.

This is a great book but as with anything involving China more information often means more questions and less answers.

I also highly recommend the recent "A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China", Mark Salzman's classic "Iron and Silk", Simon Winchester's "River at the Center of the World", and the recent novel "The Peking Letter" to anyone interested in China.

As indicated, I have mixed sentiments about this book. The story is engaging enough, and Kessler delivers it in a readable, comfortable manner. However, it often seems as if she is acting more as an apologist for Bentley, rather than giving a fully candid evaluation.
Bentley's career as teacher, communist, spy, and FBI informant is enticing and worth investigating, but there are some irritating flaws. Most prominent is the lack of footnotes; there is an endnote page, but no numbers in the narrative that correspond with it. There is also the unnerving sense that something is constantly amiss. For all her organizational skill, and apparent value to the Soviet spy network, Bentley is repeatedly duped, manipulated, and outright naive. The author never adequately resolves this paradox, and thus somewhat undermines its historical credibility. In fact, she ( Bentley) almost never seems to understand the implications of her actions, and is striking for appearing so intellectually shallow. Indeed , not very clever at all.
Despite these limitations, it is entertaining, but should be read with the cautionary anteenae in place.

The subject of the book is hard to understand, even with all the facts laid out so admirably. Kessler's writing style commands attention without getting in the way of the facts, but those facts are so twisting that at times even the most diligent student of history may be confused. That's a small quible, however, in an overarching work of vigor and suspense. Well worth a read.

This book does a fairly good job of explaining and illustrating basic concepts of psychodynamic therapy. Clinical material fleshes out the conceptual aspect of the book. The writing is clear and accessible, making the book didactically useful.

The book is somewhat uninspired in quality. It does not make for an exciting or penetrating description of therapy.

There is no consideration or integration with other theoretical approaches. This is not surprising in a book on dynamic therapy, but it would have been useful for the authors to consider how dynamic techniques might interface with strategies from other approaches. The book gives the impression that dynamic therapy is simply the way to go, aa view not at all supported by research.

One annoying and rather bizarre characteristic of the book is that the authors write as if dynamic therapists were almost all physicians! They consistently write things like, "The psychiatrist should remember..." "The physician conducting dynamic therapy..." One wonders what planet they live on, in that everyone in the mental health field knows that the vast majority of therapy is provided by psychologists, social workers, and couselors, and psychiatrists spend most or all of their time prescribing medications.

Excellent book that is factual and clinically sensitibve. The authors must be superb clinicians as well as teachers.

Ideal for those starting out on their study of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era (as one would expect from a university history text), Owen Connelly's modest volume has much to recommend it: fresh, readable style; decent maps, a comprehensive bibliography (pointing the way for future purchases!) and quite a few interesting little kernels that one seldom comes across. I particularly enjoyed his insights into the siblings of Napoleon; Jerome's sponsorship of Gauss, Louis' campaign for breast-feeding, Joseph's conversion of El Prado into an art museum. I heartily recommend this book as an excellent staging ground for future operations into the hinterlands of Napoleonic literature. I also recommend Connelly's BLUNDERING TO GLORY as a vey good next step on your journey.

I completely agree with the previous review in every respect except I feel the book deserves more stars, given the "rating inflation" prevalent with so many of the titles reviewed. I wouldn't want anyone to be put off getting this book. Connelly has squeezed an incredible amount of information into a small amount of space. As usual, he is clear and entertaining. People interested in the period should check out his other titles.