Average customer rating:
- Competent but routine crime novel
- BEAU NOT UP TO FORM
- JUST OK
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A More Perfect Union
J.A. Jance
Manufacturer: Avon
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Payment in Kind
ASIN: 0380754134 |
Book Description
A shocking photo screamed from the front pages of the tabloids—the last moments of a life captured for all the world to see. The look of sheer terror eternally frozen on the face of the doomed woman indicated that her fatal fall from an upper story of an unfinished Seattle skyscraper was no desperate suicide—and that look will forever haunt Homicide Detective J.P. Beaumont. But his hunt for answers and justice is leading to more death, and to dark and terrible secrets scrupulously guarded by men of steel behind the locked doors of a powerful union that extracts its dues payments in blood.
Customer Reviews:
Competent but routine crime novel.......2002-10-24
"J P Beaumont"-known as "Beau"-is a Seattle homicide cop with a private income ,a man whose job fills a need in him more emotional and psychological than monetary.While acting as technical adviser on a movie being shot near Lake Union,he stumbles across a body floating on the lake.Tha case is officially the provenance of the ultra ambitious cop "Paul Kramer"who insisits it is an accidental death;Beau is unpersuaded and continues to delve into the case.
The body is that of an ironworker-one of the people who put up iron girders on skyscrapers-and soon another ironworker is killed,by a fall on the job.
Beau's delving into the vase earns him official displeasure but he is vindicated when the deaths turn out to be murder and related one to the other.The bulk of the book concerns his unravelling of the case and it winds its way to a smooth but predictable climax.
These words sum up my view of the book0it is neat and tidy in execution but ,for me ,it never really took flight and transcended the functional level of being an agreeable time passer.
Beau is a character I have problems with mainly because in many respects he resembles the gifted amateur sleuth beloved of the "golden age "writers,and who just happens to be a cop.I could not swallow porsch driving cop with an apartment in Seattle's more upmarket area.
Polished and professional this will most likely be enjoyed by lovers of the "medium boiled "crime story
BEAU NOT UP TO FORM.......2001-02-10
This J.P. Beaumont novel was not up to the same standards as the others I have read. There was no emotion. I also am seeing the same M.O. Beau tries to do some sleuthing on his own time, gets accused of murder and then goes to jail where the officers are hateful to him. Beau then makes a few phone calls and the officers apologize for their behavior and all is well.
In this novel Beau is investigating the Iron Workers Local after several workers die under mysterious circumstances. In order to work on the case he has to beg Kramer to let him on. How thoroughly sad.
The highlight of this book is that even when J.A. Jance isn't at her best, she is still better than most.
JUST OK.......2000-03-15
If JA Jance is Seattle's Dashiell Hammett, I am moving to San Francisco. This is pretty OK. But keep in mind I read Louis LaMour sometimes too. I am just not proud of it.
Average customer rating:
- Great
- Can't teach the Constitution without it!
- Excellent!
- Great Review of Constitution!
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A More Perfect Union: The Story of Our Constitution
Betsy Maestro
Manufacturer: Collins
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The New Americans: Colonial Times: 1620-1689 (The American Story)
ASIN: 0688101925 |
Book Description
This easy-to-understand book tells why and how the Constitution of the United States was created. "Simple, attractive, informative....The most accessible history of the Constitution to date."--School Library Journal.
Customer Reviews:
Great.......2007-01-20
This book gives an understandable view of how our Constitution came to be. It is good to read in context with studying other aspects of the colonial time period as well as the Revolutionary War. There is a great map at the beginning and resources at the back with the preamble as well as an explanation of the Articles and Amendments. There is a list of all the signers, a summary of important dates and bit of interesting facts about the convention and delegates. Definitely a good resource.
Can't teach the Constitution without it!.......2004-07-18
Maestro reviews the reasons for the Constitution, but fails to mention the Articles of Confederation. The text includes the Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut Plans. The book can easily be read as an introduction to the Constitution in one class period. Students could complete a drawing or group of drawings on a picture web to narrate the important details from the story.
Excellent!.......2004-07-02
I came across one book by Betsy Maestro "The Discovery of the Americas" and I loved it. The text is simple and the illustrations are great. It is historically accurate as well, a must in my checklist. I didn't realize she also wrote the historical series "You Wouldn't Want to..." They are my favorite!! I recommend all of her books, especially for teachers.
Great Review of Constitution!.......2000-12-12
This book is great for Middle School Students or even High School Students who want to review the events leading to the Constitution. I am a Middle School Teacher and plan on using the book to review my lessons with my students. Next year I plan on using it to introduce the topic!
Book Description
Many important questions regarding the creation and adoption of the United States Constitution remain unresolved. Did slaveholdings or financial holdings significantly influence our Founding Fathers' stance on particular clauses or rules contained in the Constitution? Was there a division of support for the Constitution related to religious beliefs or ethnicity? Were founders from less commercial areas more likely to oppose the Constitution? To Form a More Perfect Union successfully answers these questions and offers an economic explanation for the behavior of our Founding Fathers during the nation's constitutional founding. In 1913, American historian Charles A. Beard controversially argued in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States that the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution were less interested in furthering democratic principles than in advancing specific economic and financial interests. Beard's thesis eventually emerged as the standard historical interpretation and remained so until the 1950s. Since then, many constitutional and historical scholars have questioned an economic interpretation of the Constitution as being too narrow or too calculating, believing the great principles and political philosophies that motivated the Founding Fathers to be worthier subjects of study. In this meticulously researched reexamination of the drafting and ratification of our nation's Constitution, Robert McGuire argues that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Mason and the other Founding Fathers did act as much for economic motives as for abstract ideals. To Form a More Perfect Union offers compelling evidence showing that the economic, financial, and other interests of the founders can account for the specific design and adoption of our Constitution. This is the first book to provide modern evidence that substantiates many of the overall conclusions found in Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation while challenging and overturning other of Beard's specific findings. To Form a More Perfect Union presents an entirely new approach to the study of the shaping of the U.S. Constitution. Through the application of economic thinking and rigorous statistical techniques, as well as the processing of vast amounts of data on the economic interests and personal characteristics of the Founding Fathers, McGuire convincingly demonstrates that an economic interpretation of the Constitution is valid. Radically challenging the prevailing views of most historians, political scientists, and legal scholars, To Form a More Perfect Union provides a wealth of new findings about the Founding Fathers' constitutional choices and sheds new light on the motivations behind the design and adoption of the United States Constitution.
Customer Reviews:
A Compelling & Thorough Look at the Economic Interpretation.......2004-01-31
"In To Form a More Perfect Union, Robert A. McGuire attempts to provide the first solid modern analysis to quantify the impact of the personal economic interests of the Founding Fathers on the structure and content of the U.S. Constitution. Readers familiar with the literature in this area will immediately, and correctly, associate this book with Charles A. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, [1913] 1935). In that book, Beard concludes that the delegates' personal interests shaped their behavior with respect to the drafting and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His hypothesis was generally accepted until the 1950s, when most scholars began to question the analysis. An onslaught of counterevidence came during the 1950s and early 1960s, and today most academics believe that Beard's original interpretation was too narrow and that the general political philosophies of the Founding Fathers had greater importance in determining the nature and contents of the U.S. Constitution.
"McGuire essentially resurrects Beard's hypothesis and offers substantial evidence in favor of the view that the Founding Fathers' personal interests had a significant influence on the process of constitutional design and ratification. In light of the substantial body of empirical evidence this book provides, it is likely to bring the personal interest view back into widespread acceptance among academics. Although McGuire draws some of the analysis presented in the book from his previously published journal articles, at least half of what he offers is new and original. What makes the book so compelling is the use of today's significantly better empirical methodology to analyze data, in contrast to the techniques available during the 1950s, when the counterevidence to Beard's hypothesis was presented.
"Readers searching for a middle ground in the debate over whether personal self-interest shaped the U.S. Constitution will find refuge in this book. McGuire repeatedly makes clear that these personal interests were relevant at the margin in the Founding Fathers' decision calculus and that many other factors (such as general political philosophy) influenced these individuals' overall behavior. Among the most compelling findings: (1) personal interests played a bigger role in the specific content of the U.S. Constitution than in the document's overall design; and (2) the framers' debt holdings and slave ownership and the degree of commercialization in their local communities are significantly correlated with their observed behavior and, hence, with the content of the constitution they produced....
"One of the book's strengths is the amount of underlying background data and statistics provided. For example, McGuire includes tables that show not only each individual delegate's vote on an issue (the data used for the dependent variable), but also the predicted probability of a yes vote for that delegate from the estimated logistic regression model. As anyone who has estimated a logistic regression model knows, it is possible for these models to fit well overall but still do a poor job of predicting individual votes. Throughout the book, however, McGuire provides the evidence necessary to comfort readers worried about such potential problems. The book's main weakness is that at times it becomes rather lengthy and dull, but this aspect is simply a cost of being thorough, which is necessary in this case because of the controversial nature of the theory being tested.
"For the great number of readers who are likely to use the results of the book as a single-sentence footnote or reference in their own research, the eleven-page prologue provides all of the background and summary information necessary to make an informed citation of the work. The remaining three hundred or so pages merely fill in the sufficient details to support these conclusions. In that sense, the book reminds me somewhat of Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
"Had I been a reviewer for the book prior to its publication, the only suggestion I might have offered to improve it would have been for the author to include a fuller discussion of the debate surrounding the adequacy and structure of the document that preceded the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation.... Had McGuire presented this discussion, he would have provided a fitting framework in which to view the Founding Fathers' choices as marginal institutional changes relative to the existing constitutional order.
"To Form a More Perfect Union undoubtedly will elicit additional research in this highly debated area of constitutional research. Future research will benefit from the 122 pages of raw data and empirical results provided as appendix material. McGuire's book most likely will meet with a better initial acceptance than Beard's book received (it was banned from high school libraries in Seattle and condemned by President Taft and by the president of Beard's own university).
"One important implication of McGuire's book is that the condition of a Rawlsian `veil of ignorance,' putatively necessary to produce a `just' social contract, is not and cannot be satisfied in reality. Any constitution or social contract will be shaped by its designers' individual self-interests. Modern public-choice scholars who favor theories based on the premise of methodological individualism will find comforting reassurance as they read To Form a More Perfect Union."
------------------------------
Excerpted from a review by Russell S. Sobel in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004.
Book Description
The surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis and his entire army to the United States at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, stunned the world. The thirteen-foundling United States had won their impossible revolution. They could not know that their victory was but a shifting from a war with musket and cannon to one with tariffs and border disputes. With the country sinking into bankruptcy, the leaders in the thirteen states agreed: Come together, or America is doomed.
May, 1787, fifty-five desperate men met in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. For more than four months they sweated in a sealed room and harangued and debated and compromised. The Constitution they produced established a government like none since the dawn of time, and changed the world forever. A More Perfect Union tells the story of that government's creation.
Customer Reviews:
Disappointing.......2007-03-01
I have read the entire 9 volumn series by Ron Carter and just loved the first few books. When I got to this volumn, I was so disappointed. Mr. Carter lost his story line and wrote a sleeper. I really struggled to get through more than two or three pages at a time before falling asleep. I resorted to skim reading through the Constitutional Convention and somehow made it through the book. Subsequent books were back on the story line and very interesting. He could have covered the Convention in a chapter, but dragged it out for an eternity.
Book Description
Hana Schank had never given much thought to her wedding, or to marriage in general, for that matter. That, is until she found herself newly engaged and trying to plan the "Happiest Day of Her Life": spending weeks crafting save-the-date cards, worrying incessantly about every minute detail -- even matching her cocktails to her wedding colors -- and obsessively reading Martha Stewart Weddings magazine. Hana soon decides that if she is going to follow traditions like wearing white and walking down the aisle with flowers, she wants to know why. In her search, she turns up several interesting wedding facts and ultimately casts a critical eye on a $72 billion wedding industry that pressures women into becoming obsessive-compulsive Bridezillas.
Part confessional memoir, part social critique, A More Perfect Union chronicles a year of wedding planning, capturing as it does not only the stresses but also the undoubted joys of becoming a bride.
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"Hana Schank had never given much thought to her wedding, or even really imagined herself married, so when she found herself suddenly sporting a brand-new engagement ring she assumed planning a small, low-key wedding would be no big deal. But soon she finds herself adrift in Wedding Land, a world where all brides are expected to want to look like Cinderella, where women plan weddings with fantasy butterfly themes, where a woman's wedding is, without question, the Happiest Day of Her Life. Part confessional memoir, part social critique, A More Perfect Union chronicles a year in Wedding Land, capturing as it does not only the stresses but the undoubted joys of becoming a bride.
Customer Reviews:
A Thoughtful, Humorous, Ultimately Moving Look at Modern Wedding Planning Mania from a Modern Urban Woman.......2007-04-30
Hana Schank lives up to the promise of the subtitle ("How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life") to her marriage memoir A More Perfect Union with humor, history, and a self-aware look at just how this modern, feminist-minded woman got caught up in everything from flower colors to save the date cards. "In just a few weeks they had become my new vital statistics," Schank writes about the post-engagement facts of her life as strangers swarm her to find out every detail of her nuptials, her "Rosetta stone" of a ring blaring to anyone she meets that she is about to get married.
Using her own foray onto wedding website The Knot's message boards and reading of wedding magazines as background, Schank proceeds to recount the ways the process getting married changed her, and what she learns about the wedding industry along the way. She's telling the story as both an observer and participant, going back and forth with facts she doles out about the corporate and cultural pressure on brides to how these intimately affected her.
Schank talks about the things one isn't usually supposed to mention when it comes to the joy of weddings--namely divorce, baby pressure, the picking and choosing of religious traditions. She acknowledges the clashes she and her husband have over the wedding planning, such as his anger that he's not once asked his opinion about their flower choices.
This is not simply a tirade against the wedding industry, or it would not be such a delight to read. Schank and her fiancé Steven are able to laugh at those around them--and themselves--pretending to shoot at each other with the scanner while adding to their registry, or joking on their way to retrieve her wedding dress:
"I feel like I should be yelling at some imaginary kids back there or something," I said.
Steven turned his head to the back of the van. "Stop hitting your brother!" he yelled.
I laughed. "Who wants to watch the Finding Nemo DVD again?" I asked the backseat.
What becomes crystal clear from page one is how much of their wedding planning is not only inclusive of, but dependent on, their families, from what to wear during the wedding weekend softball game to how Schank's divorced and divisive parents will be able to come together. Reading her final chapter, in which her fiance's brother gets a concussion during the softball game and various mishaps occur, I certainly teared up when Schank's parents join her to walk down the aisle, adding a blissful conclusion to the often-stressful weekend. "And right then I realize that this was the moment I planned the entire wedding for. If weddings are about fantasies, then this was mine: I wanted my family back together again, even if it was for a few fleeting seconds. And right then, as I bask in the warmth of my family, it is all worth it. The months of tears and obsession and ribbon and Martha Stewart. It is all worth it."
These sentences show that while her marriage is, in large part, about, as the rabbi tells Schank, "sovereignty," an us-against-the-world partnership between the bride and groom, in many other ways it is about joining two people, and two (or more) families, about the negotiations and compromises Schank and her relatives and her fiancé and his relatives all have to make to create this "happiest day" of her life.
Her final chapter, a post-script about the reactions to her book from various sides of the wedding world, is the most illuminating. Schank concludes that even so-called "bridezillas" don't think they're any more wedding-obsessed than anyone else, and even though she has herself marveled at why anyone could care so passionately about ribbon, she emerges with a sympathetic attitude toward brides of all stripes. When Schank writes about her feminist critics that, "It makes it easy for people to tell you you're not being the right kind of girl," she could be writing about any number of female realms, from mothering to sex work to bikini waxes to breast implants, in which women's choices are debated and attacked with viciousness. This isn't a how-to book (or a how-not-to book), but I'd imagine that many prospective brides and grooms will enjoy and learn from Schank's story, or at least have someone to commiserate with.
What makes this book special is that it's both a laugh- and cry-out-loud memoir, and an insider's look at the ways wedding hype has descended on Americans, particularly New Yorkers. Schank is smart enough to know when she's being manipulated, but it's her very awareness, sharpened by historical facts long with the very modern reality of one-bride-upsmanship and the quest for perfection in every area, even as she goes through the process of being (sometimes) swept away, that adds depth to A More Perfect Union.
A hilarious, down-to-earth look at the wedding planning process.......2007-04-11
This book was such a fun take on wedding planning.
Useful & Hilarious.......2007-03-19
"The wedding obsessed story of a bride to be who believes that matching napkins colors to bridesmaid dresses will determine her future happiness - hilarious!"
An essential reflection on the wedding industry and modern bride experience.......2006-07-05
Hanna Schank's story of "How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life" is essential reading for any bride, groom, family member, wedding party member, newlywed, wedding guest, literature fan, or memoir fan. I read this book just a year after planning my own wedding, I had repeated moments of identification with Schank's experience. I would have loved to have been given this book as a bride-to-be.
Schank was a highly successful 30-year-old New York woman when she got engaged. She experienced a year of the tug of Bridezilla-ness despite her best efforts to keep her wedding plans in check. The became obsessed with her wedding colors despite her original plans to allow everyone to dress as they wished. She initially spurned registries and then became irritated with people who didn't believe in them. After laughing at the notion of Save the Date cards, Schank painstakingly hand-tied bows on hundreds of them, and was then crushed when they didn't garner effuse praise from the recipients. At some point, Schank succumbed to the belief in "My Day" and flew off the handle at vendors who refused alter their standard packages to meet her unique needs.
In addition to her first-hand bride experience, Schank possesses research skills and an MFA in non-fiction writing, so she is supremely qualified to reflect on her experience with the modern bridal industry. She muses about the invention of the registry, about the social networking of wedding site The Knot, about the "once in a lifetime" mantra of the wedding industrial machine (spend the money, this is once in a lifetime), and about traditional Victorian etiquette versus the realities of modern life.
Grammy serves as the perfect foil to all of Schank's wedding planning. Over the telephone, Schank has to repeatedly explain to her aged grandmother the wedding plans, the reasons behind traditions, and what she needs from her relatives. Schank's witty prose ties the story together well. One of my favorite passages is about the trickle of wedding gifts that start arriving after the invitations are mailed: "Other people called our parents and informed them that they didn't see anything on the registry they liked, and therefore wanted to know what else we might want. This was particularly confusing because the whole point of having a registry in the first place was so that people won't have to call you up and ask you what you want. In theory, everything you want is on the registry. And really, who cared if the gift-giver didn't like anything on the registry? It wasn't going to them ... People want to sent you something that they see as representative of their personality, even if their personality representation isn't necessarily something you want hanging around your house. You therefore must live with a butt-ugly set of ceramic dessert plates or a set of Judaic art depicting a Jewish bridge and groom in renaissance costume, as opposed to the really nice set of crystal highball glasses you spent several weeks hunting for."
The combination of personal experience, terrific research and historical perspective, and witty naration makes this memoir a surefire winner.
A MUST for wedding goers........2006-05-03
Whether you are planning a wedding or about to attend a wedding, I recommend reading this book. Hana Schank will take you step-by-step through all that one goes through when venturing down this path.
For the bride and groom, Hana's book will help you think through many of the important decisions that one needs to make in wedding planning (location), as well as to help you to decide which trivial details you may choose to avoid without regret (the city of the postage cancellation on the invitations.)
If you will be attending a wedding anytime soon, Hana's book really will help you to appreciate all the excruciating fine-tuned detail that goes into planning a wedding. (Don't complain if there's no cake, there's a dessert bar and there's a reason for that, that's what the bride and groom wanted!)
Personally, what I really liked about the book is that it gives some explanation and history about certain wedding traditions to help you put into perspective those ideas which you may want to preserve and those that you may want to drop. Hana also encourages people to be creative at their wedding, even if they are breaking tradition.
Best of all, Hana describes all of this with her great sense of dry humor as she describes the various characters and situations she is confronted with while dutifully attending to weddingland antics.
Hana is definitely a non-traditionalist. As a reader, I felt sympathetic to Hana while trying to buck convention on various wedding traditions. However, we realize that even the staunchest of people can get caught up in the pressure of the media, and our guests expectations in dictating to us 'how a wedding should be.' Thank you, Hana, for giving me a fresh perspective on weddings. I will never look at them the same way.
Book Description
A More Perfect Union is the kick-off adventure of the Paragons campaign setting for Mutants & Masterminds, the Worlds Greatest Super-hero RPG. In this all-new world of super-powered adventure, players take the roles of otherwise ordinary people suddenly blessed (or cursed) with superhuman powers. In A More Perfect Union, heroes new to their powers must investigate strange and sinister goings-on in rural America. Someone or something is offering citizens unconditional happiness but you better believe there are strings attached! Can the paragons resist this seductive spell and stop the plot before it's too late?
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|
Toward a More Perfect Union: Six Essays on the Constitution
Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
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Civil Procedure
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ASIN: 0887069266 |
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- How A Word Shaped a Nation
|
Dreams Of A More Perfect Union
Rogan Kersh
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0801489806 |
Book Description
In a brilliantly conceived and elegantly written book, Rogan Kersh investigates the idea of national union in the United States. For much of the period between the colonial era and the late nineteenth century, he shows, "union" was the principal rhetorical means by which Americans expressed shared ideals and a common identity without invoking strong nationalism or centralized governance. Through his exploration of how Americans once succeeded in uniting a diverse and fragmented citizenry, Kersh revives a long-forgotten source of U.S. national identity.
Why and how did Americans perceive themselves as one people from the early history of the republic? How did African Americans and others at the margins of U.S. civic culture apply this concept of union? Why did the term disappear from vernacular after the 1880s? In his search for answers, Kersh employs a wide range of methods, including political-theory analysis of writings by James Madison, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln and empirical analysis drawing on his own extensive database of American newspapers. The author's findings are persuasive--and often surprising. One intriguing development, for instance, was a strong resurgence of union feelings among Southerners--including prominent former secessionists--after the Civil War.
With its fascinating and novel approach, Dreams of a More Perfect Union offers valuable insights about American political history, especially the rise of nationalism and federalism. Equally important, the author's close retracing of the religious, institutional, and other themes coloring the development of unionist thought unveils new knowledge about the origination and transmittal of ideas in a polity.
Customer Reviews:
How A Word Shaped a Nation.......2001-07-10
Rogan Kersh's "Dreams of a More Perfect Union" tells the story of how a simple phrase shaped (and may continue to shape) the United States. It's a book written in elegant prose, intricate detail, and with suprising wit. This is not summer beach material. But if you have a passion for politics and history, read this book.
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- Sierra Wildlife Coloring Book
