Ford Reviews

A Time to Heal by Gerald R. Ford provides a very frank and open view into the one-time First Family of America. The first 123 pages provides Ford's life story until he enters the presidency. The remainder of the book covers the Ford Administration. For one who lived through the Ford years, the book provides a reminder of the key stories of the day as well as their presentation from the Presidential perspective. One of the most endearing features of this book is President Ford's candor. In commenting on events and personalities with which he was involved he is not constrained by an aversion to giving offense. Some of his comments are more in the nature of what one would expect to hear in your own family room, rather than in the autobiography of a national politician. Illustrative of such snippets are his reaction when he heard of Spiro Agnew being tapped for Vice-President ("I shook my head in disbelief.") and his reaction to Nixon's resignation speech: "at the end I was convinced that Nixon was out of touch with reality. The fact that he was linking his resignation to the loss of his Congressional base shocked me and disturbs me still." My one disappointment in this book is the sparse treatment of his Congressional career. One would think that Ford's long service in the House and years as minority leader would provide a basis for a book of its own. He could have provided a valuable insight into some of the major legislative battles of the fifties through the early seventies. He chose, however, only to mention those incidents which were of particular importance to his family life or career. Overall, A Time To Heal is a very interesting book which is well worth the reading.

Because Gerald Ford was a President about whom I knew nothing, I figured I'd do a little reading on the man. For better or worse, I've started with his own memoirs.

Conscious of the fact that all former Presidents use their memoirs to make themselves look like the best leader we've ever had, I have to say that Ford's were the best I've read.

Superficially, his writing style flows very well and he seems to cover all the bases. In terms of content, the book is very well written, although Ford lays out his administration like a laundry list of events and his responses to them. I definitely want to know more about the emotions he must have been feeling when he was named as VP and then as President, during the Nixon pardon crisis, and during his bid for election (I almost wrote reelection!).

What impresses me about Ford is that he considered himself to be just as presidential as any of his predecessors, despite the fact that he had never been elected by the American people as even VP, and, perhaps even worse, he was named VP by Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned in shame and the Nixon administration itself had begun falling apart.

I think history will look upon Gerald Ford very favorably, for the courage he exercised in pardoning Nixon and in accepting this awesome responsibility in such a bizarre situation.

I also think it's high time someone wrote a definitive biography of Ford, as he unfortunately will not be around for much longer, and his passing will surely raise calls for a look back at this courageous man.

i can remember reading this book years ago and thinking it was so much better than i expected. her insights were valuable and one gets a good look into the life of the white house.

Vikki Carr is one of my favorites
and glad to read about her! I heard
that she is quite comfortable with both
President Ford and Betty.

Love ya Vikki!

Leighton Ford gives a scholarly approach to viewing leadership through the example of Christ.

Leighton Ford has written an excellent book for the Christian leader. Among the principles Ford covers include:

1. Treat others as people created by God, not things to be used.
2. A leader has a transcendant purpose and is not distracted from it.
3. The servant leader depends on God's timing and seeks to glorify God.
4. True leadership is marked by servanthood, not lordship over others.
5. Leaders will always face conlict, just like Jesus did.
6. Those who display toughness at all times probably lack inner security.
7. God is more interested in our character instead of our actions.
8. We need times alone with Christ to see if we are serving Him or self.

An excellent and highly recommended book for leaders and aspiring leaders (everyone is a leader in some way)!

I admit to a bias. Helen Dore Boylston was a cousin of my grandfather's and I've been feeling terribly cheated since I read this book because I never met her. The story is remarkable. Two young women decide to drive from Albania to Paris. Their adventures are not, perhaps, quite as colorful as one might hope, but their daring and imagination in deciding upon such an voyage make your realize that Laura Ingalls Wilder really raised one heck of a brave and free daughter. I'd recommend it to anyone who's read the Little House Books or any of Helen Dore Boylston's books about Sue Barton.

Rose Wilder Lane- Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter- and Helen Dore Boyleston- author of the Sue Barton - were friends and traveled by car from Paris to Albania during the 1920's. This book is basically excerpts from their diaries and provides some wonderful insight into their lives and is great just because it is surprising in the way that people you never imagined were connected are.

This book is about what I expected after seeing the Knitter's Companion. The various charts and explanations are helpful, and it will be a good reference book.

I'm a beginning weaver. This book has all the loom parts and the information a beginner needs. It also has some information that more advanced weavers may appreciate (but I don't yet understand).

My daughter fights me everytime I try to comb her hair. This book has helped her understand that it doesn't have to be a battle. Also, she can read the book aloud when she gets her hair styled.

A positive, self-affirming book for every little African-American girl with the incredibily impossible but beautiful, curly, long, tangled and naturally textured hair that occurs only in youth, and before all the chemical treatments we subject our beautiful hair to as we get older. Mothers and daughters will relate to this simply rhymed, easily read and enjoyable book. Sure to become a favorite, especially just before the weekly/daily hair combing tug-of-war, which will strike a chord with many African-American children. Lovingly illustrated with true-to-life and entertaining pictures. An excellent children's book at a very low price!

Looking for an introduction to wine? Looking for some ideas for get togethers with friends? Then this book and record binder are for you. Ridgeway provides a great overview to the different types of wine, and breaks down the lessons into 12 easy to follow installments that can benefit the beginner or the aficianado.

The only downside that I have experienced is that some of the lessons require a large number of different wines, and unless you have a relatively large number of people at your tasting, you may have a lot of leftover wine.

A group of friends used this book as a way to renew old acquaintances ... and we had a ball doing it! The lessons are non-threatening and very well compiled. You can get as fussy as you choose to be (although we started out with the best of "pretentions" we just had too much fun to keep it up. We're now on the 11th tasting and we can smell an oaked Chardonnay from a block away! The session on fruit flavors was especially interesting as was tasting the difference between French and California wines. Very informative, without the snobbery ... have fun with it!

Life, the Universe, and Everything is rather different from the preceding two books in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy. It's quite funny, particularly in a few rather memorable sections, but it is not consistently funny from beginning to end. Parts of it were so unspectacular that I barely remembered what I had just read, and one aspect of the concluding scenario is still rather incomprehensible to me, a case of deus ex machina I just can't place in the context of the whole story. All of our favorite characters are back: Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, Marvin the woefully depressed android, and even Slartibartfast; unfortunately, they are rarely together, and I sometimes lost track of Zaphod in particular after reading a number of chapters that ignored him entirely. Much of the action is also rather contrived, such as the sudden appearance of a couch on prehistoric earth upon which Arthur and Ford travel forward in time to the last two days of earth's existence. On several occasions, characters seemed to zap to another place and time by no discernible means. The game of cricket is particularly important here, to the point that I really wish I understood what the sport is all about, but I admit it was a clever plot device to tie the sport to a particularly nasty, universe-threatening planet ten billion years in the past. The planet of Krikkit, you see, set out to destroy the rest of the universe because its people basically just wanted to be left alone. Throughout the novel white Krikkit robots appear out of nowhere to seize special items needed to unlock their planet from the Slo-Time envelope established around it at the end of the Krikkit Wars. This is a bad thing because the people of Krikkit still want nothing more than to destroy the entire universe. In a rather murky way, Arthur Dent is called upon to save the universe, and that is also not a particularly good thing.

There are a few highlights to the story. The subplot involving Agrajag is particularly good. In the course of Arthur Dent's journeys through space and time, he has been responsible for the deaths of a great number of creatures-insects, flies, at least one rabbit, etc. Quite coincidently, as Arthur tries to argue, every single one of these creatures was Agrajag in his multiple reincarnated forms. Naturally, a body develops a hatred for the brute who keeps killing it time and time again, but Agrajag has gone so far as to build a veritable shrine to the entity he hates most in the cosmos, complete with a gigantic statue of Arthur Dent simultaneously killing him in a great number of his past life forms. I also particularly enjoy Adams' take on learning to fly; it takes a special knack, one which consists basically of throwing yourself to the ground and missing-the easily distracted Arthur Dent is a natural at it.

Overall, the plot just meanders too much to suit me. Transitions of characters from one time and place to another make very little sense, major characters are abandoned for too long at a time, and the plot is not laid out neatly enough for it all to make sense to me. On the whole, much less seems to happen in this book than often happened over the course of a few chapters in the first two books of the trilogy. This is still an entertaining read, but even the comedy lacks some of the satirical and witty zest that typified Adams' earlier successes.

..but that dosen't mean anything, in the long run. Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series is, first and foremost, about social commentary and his incredibly sharp wit. Life, The Universe and Everything dosen't really push things forward too much, and almost could be considered filler, but it's filler with fun, and makes for a bit of a lighter and sillier read then the previous books. A great time killer.

Adam, Douglas, Life The Universe and Everything. United States: Harmony Books, 1982

One of the Funniest and Most Bizarre Books Ever!

Life, The Universe And Everything is the third out of five Hitchhiker books. This hilarious book follows Arthur Dent. Ford Prefect, Slartibartfast, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Trillian as they try to save the universe from the white killer robots of Krikkit. The dialogue is hilarious, creative, and inventive.
Though this is the fourth one I've read, I can certainly say it's my favorite one, and once you've read them all there's even a movie for the first one. All and all the best thing I can say is to go out and read it. If you've read the other ones or just need a good book, this one's for you. You've read the rest now read the best.

Daniel Edens

The infamous "Hitchhiker's trilogy" should have stayed as an official trilogy. Douglas Adams' first three books were marvelous, if not haphazard and over-the-top goofy, sci-fi adventures. So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish doesn't fit AT ALL. Not only does it take a lot of the happy-go-luckiness away, it doesn't even come into play in the overall trilogy. The book presents many questions, and doesn't answer any of them. And the next book, Mostly Harmless, doesn't play off So Long in any way. This book is worthless. Unless you want to know what God's final message to his creations is, or the fate of Marvin, skip it and go straight to Mostly Harmless. It would be like nothing had happened.

Let's face it, Earth is a boring place. And that's all this book was about.

This is the fourth volume in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy and it is just as good as the first three books of this increasingly inaccurately named trilogy. Douglas Adams brings Arthur Dent back to Earth after a long trip hitchhiking across the universe. Yes, Arthur Dent is back on the same Earth that was destroyed by the Vogons to make an intergalactic highway. Exactly how the Earth and all of its original inhabitants are recreated is teased and hinted at and if you pay attention to what you're reading you'll easily figure out why (more why, than how).

Arthur Dent is back on Earth and pretty confused as to exactly how there is an Earth to be back on. Throughout this novel we learn that all the dolphins are gone (which is old news and no longer newsworthy), and we meet a Rain God, find out what God's Final Message to Creation is, revisit Marvin the robot, and find out that Arthur finds love with a woman named Fenchurch. That's a whole lot to fit into one book. On top of that, we have levitation, a small house that walled in the entire ocean, Ford Prefect, and the world's stupidest dog. All of this is handled with the offbeat humor that we expect from The Hitchhiker's Trilogy.

This novel, for a change, focuses on Arthur Dent and takes place almost entirely on Earth. In this way, it is different from the Universe hopping we got in the first three novels. In both quality and content, this is a worthy addition to Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Trilogy.

"So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish" is without a doubt the best book in the entire Hitchhiker's trilogy (even though its book four).

This book strikes me as having a very similar tone to Adams' Dirk Gently novels--of which I am a huge fan. While there is every bit as much hilarious caper going on in this book as there was in the previous three, we get the added bonus of some great character development, a few of the most poignant moments in the entire series, and Marvin's moving farewell to life, the universe and everything.

We also discover God's final message to his creation.

Woven throughout all the other stuff of this story is a tale of Arthur falling in love. I was surprised by Adams' ability to write a great love story. Rarely have I encountered one as powerful in any form of popular fiction (the only other that deserved to stand with it is Stephen King's "Wizard and Glass"--but that's apples and tank treads).

Now that I've managed to blather ineffectively about this great book...just take my word. Get it. It is more than worth it.

The first third is captivating and well-written, the middle third begins to lag, and the final third is a bit tiresome. The ending really let me down.

Having spent a great deal of my life reading, travelling and studying adn teaching Greek and Roman history, I have to admit that I can be a bit jaded about historical novels about the era. In my experience, only a few novelists have come forward to tackle the crowded and oft overwritten era of the Greeks and Persians. One is Steven Pressfield and the others all run far behind.
Michael Curtis Ford has risen above the fray and put forth a novel that puts ancient Peloponnesia into focus for the non-historian. The book is an excellent look at the larger picture and the story of the "The 10,000," but it really doesn't delve into the essence of being GREEK.
The story is amazing. Epic, even. . .but the novel is not. Some of the literary tools left me longing for Pressfield's descriptive skills and some of the actions seemed forced.
Is this a book that should be read? Yes. Is it the best of the genre? No.
Other good authors in this area include:
Steven Pressfield
Peter Green and

Margaret George (Cleopatra)

I normally don't write reviews, but I just finished this incredible book, and when I looked it up on Amazon I was astounded to see the weird conclusions being drawn by a previous reviewer. Tissaphernes a woman?! Holy cow, the text makes it quite clear that the woman was the Persian general's daughter, not the general himself! The story ended halfway through!? The reviewer admittedly draws his information from some high school term paper dredged from the Web. Yikes. Some facts need to be set straight here, and since I loved this book, as well as the original material it was drawn from, I guess I'll do it.

This book is a tremendous novel--a readaption and fictionalization of the Anabasis, Xenophon's recounting of the march of 10,000 Greek soldiers against the most powerful army on earth, and of their struggle for survival after their defeat. Ford accurately, even poetically, describes the bulk of this historic journey, ending only when the Greeks have made their way to safe haven. His rendering covers the original story up to its climax. He thankfully omitted the rest of Xenophon's original work, which is much less novel-worthy. Ford's work is a brilliant effort, and part of its brilliance is in knowing just when to stop. In fact, in an endnote, the author recommends that readers look up the original account.

This book is a great achievement, one that IMHO surpasses even Gates of Fire in its pacing and battle scenes. Don't let bizarre reviews dissuade you from what will definitely become a classic in historical fiction.