Average customer rating:
- "A Lifetime In Every Moment," is an absolute gem.
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A Lifetime in Every Moment
Joseph F. Littell
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0395737923 |
Book Description
From Hankow to Honolulu, from the front lines of World War II to some of the most prestigious offices in publishing, Joseph Littell's memoir charts a self-reflective journey through uncommon terrains. Honest and spirited, it reveals at once a portrait of a singular family and a firsthand chronicle of one of the most devastating battles in history. A "mish kid," son of an Episcopal missionary bishop, the young Littell traveled with his parents and siblings from China to Hawaii in the 1930s. But his cosseted life came to an abrupt end when, after his time away at boarding school, he was inducted into the 106th Division of the U.S. Army. Unsuspecting and largely untrained, his division was calamitously poised for its capitulation to Hitler's armies in the Battle of the Bulge. In vivid detail, Littell recounts his regiment's grueling captivity, his serendipitous escape, and the fateful blunder that landed him and two comrades in Buchenwald. In 1945, returning from the horrors of war, he de
Customer Reviews:
"A Lifetime In Every Moment," is an absolute gem........1998-05-18
Hollywood, where are you? The autobiography of Joseph F. Littell would indeed make a stupendous film. Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, are you out there? This is an exciting and provocative literary work, offering insights into the life of an extraordinary man, not to mention, it is of historical significance. The book deals with Mr. Littell's youthful experiences in pre-Mao China, as the son of a missionary. His compelling and very much life threatening misfortunes on the front lines in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge, and an existence, that no one should have to endure in a Nazi POW camp, make for a truly thrilling adventure. This is a very open and honest narrative of a boy , who grew up in a dysfunctional family, overcoming extreme hindrance, to create and become the head of a very successful publishing entity. Not to downplay the seriousness of this epic, it also contains a bit of that sardonic Littell wit, that can be more fully appreciated in his earlier works (i.e. "The Man Who Found the Loch Ness Monster," from New World Publishing). "A Lifetime In Every Moment," by Joseph F. Littell, is very much a definitive compendium of survival and success over evidential adversity. It is a book that you won't want to put down, as one chapter compels you to read the next, in eager anticipation of the cliff-hanger style outcome of each of these events. It is a great story and certainly a worthy addition to any literary collection. There is something here for all, young and old. Read it and learn. In closing, I reiterate, Hollywood, where are you?
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A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin
Alfred Kazin
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0060928328 |
Amazon.com
In On Native Grounds, the classic work of literary criticism published in 1942, Alfred Kazin helped to define American literature and its relationship to the time and place from which it emerged. The intervening decades have not always been kind to the tradition of literary criticism that he helped create or the literature he helped define. "Where," he writes, "is the writer to be found who will have the inner certainty to see our life with the eyes of faith, and so make the world shine again?" This collection of journal entries follows Kazin's journey into dismay, if not despair, as well as his inward search for something that might provide a foundation for hope.
Book Description
From the journals of one of our most distinguished critics comes an extraordinary panorama of the intellectual, social and political culture of the last half century. Written with the vividness and power of first-rate fiction, it brings to life the great artists and thinkers who shaped the times, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Hannah Arendt, and shares Kazin's insights on politics, literature, Jewish life after the Holocaust and American society. It is an immensely rich and resonant memoir from an observer whose eloquence can imbue each moment lived with a lifetime of thought and passion.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on January 1, 1998. The length of the article is 786 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin.
Author: John L. Brown
Publication:
World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1998
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: v72
Issue: n1
Page: p144(1)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from International Bulletin of Missionary Research, published by Overseas Ministries Study Center on January 1, 2000. The length of the article is 3040 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Missionary Kid Memoirs: A Review Essay. (book review)
Author: Jonathan S. Addleton
Publication:
International Bulletin of Missionary Research (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2000
Publisher: Overseas Ministries Study Center
Volume: 24
Issue: 1
Page: 30
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This engrossing anthology gathers together a remarkable collection of writings on the use of strategy in war. Gérard Chaliand has ranged over the whole of human history in assembling this collection--the result is an integration of the annals of military thought that provides a learned framework for understanding global political history.
Included are writings from ancient and modern Europe, China, Byzantium, the Arab world, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. Alongside well-known militarists such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Walter Raleigh, Rommel, and many others are "irregulars" such as Cortés, Lawrence of Arabia, and even Gandhi. Contrary to standard interpretations stressing competition between land and sea powers, or among rival Christian societies, Chaliand shows the great importance of the struggles between nomadic and sedentary peoples, and of the conflicts between Christianity and Islam. With the invention of firepower, a relatively recent occurrence in the history of warfare, modes of organization and strategic concepts--elements reflecting the nature of a society--have been key to how war is waged.
Unparalleled in its breadth, this anthology will become the standard work for understanding a fundamental part of human history--the conduct of war.
"This anthology is not only an unparalleled corpus of information and an aid to failing memory; it is also and above all a reliable and liberating guide for research. . . . Ranging "from the origins to the nuclear age," it compels us to widen our narrow perspectives on conflicts and strategic action and open ourselves up to the universal."--from the Foreword
Customer Reviews:
An Anthology of Strategy & Strategic Thinking.......2007-05-13
A monumental reference book! The title of the book in French (I have it both in French and English) would roughly translate into Anthology of Strategy in World History. It puts the accent on the concept of Strategy rather than War. And that's how I use it. I would even call it the History of Strategic Thinking. I am a management and technology expert and this book is one of my reference books on Strategy and on my shelf it sits alongside books on Strategy.
What I like most about it, is its historic depth and scope. There is, to my knowledge, no other work on Strategy which has such a historic scope ranging from Ancient history to modern days with so much information and intelligence.
I strongly recommend it to all those interested in the History of Strategic Thinking.
I am a regular reader of Mr Chaliand and when I read his books I have the same experience as when I read Nietzsche: a feeling of freshness.
An Absolute Must for Strategists (and even Business Leaders).......2006-02-17
This anthology provides a wonderful history of the Art of War in a compact and readable format. Presented in the form of brief biographies and historical vignettes, there is literally something for everybody in this treatise. Whether you are a student, organizational leader, or military strategist, this book has information you can put to work today.
An essential reader on strategy.......2004-07-23
A wonderful edited volume that makes a great introduction to the subject of military strategy. Organized chronologically, the works of nearly all the major strategists in history appear including non-Europeans.
Deep into military history.......2000-04-21
This book is an excellent compilation of the best military writers throughtout the ages. The book begins with authors from ancient Rome, Greece and China and progresses through history. It goes on to include the best works of about 100 military geniuses. Excerpts are from Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Erwin Rommel and many others. If you want a book on military history and generalship through the ages, this tome will provide it. Be forewarned though, this book is over 1000 pages and not all the early writers are easy to read. But, overall, an excellent book for anyone who loves military history.
Book Description
Should we care that wealth in the United States is unequally distributed--and getting more so every year?
Should we worry that America's most wealthy, in just a generation, have doubled their share of the nation's wealth?
Should we be alarmed that America's richest 1 percent now holds more wealth--over $2 trillion more--than America's entire bottom 90 percent?
Apparently not. Our nation's top elected leaders see absolutely no reason to challenge, or even discomfort, America's remarkably grand concentrations of wealth.
That reluctance, Sam Pizzigati argues in his new "Greed and Good", endangers us all.
Over recent years, academics and activists the world over have generated a broad and often brilliant body of work that exposes just how concentrated wealth is poisoning everything we hold dear, from our health to our happiness, from our professions to our pastimes, from our Earth to our arts.
In "Greed and Good", author Sam Pizzigati brings this critically important body of work together, for the first time ever inside a single book, and builds upon it. His riveting pages make undeniably plain the horrific price we pay for accepting, as an inevitable given, wealth's domination.
Along the way, "Greed and Good" engagingly dissects and demolishes what amounts to the case for greed, the old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trop out to justify the gaps that divide us.
These gaps, Sam Pizzigati counsels, can be narrowed. And what can we do to create a significantly less unequal America? "Greed and Good" explores the most promising options, then offers a practical political guide for moving toward the boldest option of all, a "maximum wage", a national ceiling on annual individual income that would rise if and only if the minimum wage rose first.
A century ago, with wealth concentrating at levels much like today's, Americans arose in anger. "Greed and Good" reminds us all, powerfully, and unforgettably, why such concentrations once again need to be feared--and fought.
Customer Reviews:
Can you say...Communism?.......2006-11-12
Honestly, there's not much that's new in this book. It's interesting to draw parallels between the arguments in this book and the arguments the early, and present day communists make. They're identical. It's all about limiting freedom, taking your property and money and distributing it to everyone, making everyone equally miserable.
In short, this is a great snapshot of the exact same broken record argument that socialists and communists have been making for decades, just wrapped in a shiny new cover. It's painfully clear to everyone who has ever suffered in a communist society, socialism and communism is a MISERABLE FAILURE.
I commend the author for trying to repackage these same old ideas once again. His heart, I believe, is in the right place. Just like the communists, I think he really does care about the human condition, albeit in a skewed way. It's just that socialism is not the answer. Additionally The book is structurally superb and is a great read.
I recommend you read this book to put the great socialist failures of history in proper perspective, and to understand the idea of taking power from the individual in the name of "the greater good" will never go away.
A nutty book full of misinformation.......2005-07-26
What can one say about this book other than that it is some socialist fantasy. Pizzigati's central proposal to rid our country of its gross inequities is to limit all households from making more than about $111,000 a year (that is combined income of both adults if there are two) and any income earned above that would be taxed away at 100%. Setting aside the fact that an idea like this does not have a prayer of ever becoming the law of this land (not least of which is because there are way too many people who make that much, or do with their spouse, or aspire to) this is just a nutty idea. It would also be dangerous were it not so unrealistic. You just don't get the kind of equality that Pizzigati desires without massive coercion. The author seems to be fine with this and like so many Utopians before him he is quite content to break a few eggs in the name of creating an earthly paradise. What the author misses is that freedom creates inequalities in its wake. As a disciple of the Church of Egalitarianism, Pizzigati would gladly crush the economic liberty of the creative and sucessful to deliver us to his promised land of sameness and mind-numbing equality. The GDP of the United States would plummit if this author's ideas were inacted, as incentives to create would nearly vanish, and capital would flee this country as we have never seen before. A good antidote to this book is Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom or his Free to Choose - both explore the relationships between individual liberty and the capitalist system. If you have read Sam Pizzigati's books I feel your pain, if you have not, let this modest review be your warning.
Most important book I've read this year.......2004-07-26
The past 30 years have seen tremendous growth in the United States in productivity and wealth, and yet we don't all seem very appreciative. In fact, as Yale political scientist Robert Lane has documented, surveys have found Americans' assessment of their level of happiness declining significantly. The same is not the case in other developed countries.
The United States contains less than 5 percent of the world's population and spends 42 percent of the world's health care expenses, and yet Americans are less healthy than the residents of nearly every other wealthy nation and a few poor ones as well, as documented by Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington.
What's going on? We spend more on criminal justice and have more crime. How can that be? We're richer and have more poverty. Why is that?
Sam Pizzigati, author of a new book called "Greed and Good," thinks he has both an answer and a solution to these and several other riddles. Pizzigati focuses on the extreme increase in inequality that the United States has seen over the past generation. The Federal Reserve Board has documented gains by America's wealthiest 1 percent of more than $2 trillion more than everyone in America's bottom 90 percent combined. We are now the most unequal wealthy nation on earth and have reversed the relationship we had to Europe when the founders of this country rejected aristocracy. Today Europeans come to the United States to marvel at the excesses of wealth beside shameful poverty.
Many of us would like to lift up those at the bottom. Few of us want to bring down those at the top. Pizzigati argues that you cannot do one without the other, because the super wealthy will always have the political power to avoid contributing to bringing the bottom up. This will leave it to the middle class to assist those less fortunate even as their own situations are slipping and their concept of success -- based on the lifestyles of the CEO-barons -- is being driven further out of reach. The middle class won't want to do this, and instead will support policies that benefit the super wealthy.
But the existence of the super wealthy, Pizzigati argues, has a long list of negative impacts on all of our lives. Get rid of vast concentrations of wealth, and all sorts of things happen, including lower murder rates, lower blood pressure, and lower housing prices. Or so says the extensively documented research gathered together in "Greed and Good".
Take the few points I mentioned above: happiness, health, and crime. Research suggests that when people see their situations improving over time and when they see their situations as acceptable by the standard of those around them, they tend to be happy. We had this in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when working families prospered and income over $200,000 was taxed at roughly 90 percent.
Developed societies with the healthiest and longest living people, extensive research shows, are not those with the highest average wealth, but those with the greatest equality of wealth. Explanations for this fact vary from consideration of the levels of stress caused by economic insecurity, to the focusing of health care on plastic surgery and other luxuries at the expense of treatment of actual illnesses.
Research also shows that a country's murder rate varies with its inequality, not its overall wealth or its criminal justice spending.
Pizzigati proposes a new system of income tax that would lower taxes on 99 percent of Americans and allow the wealthiest 1 percent to lower their taxes by lobbying to raise the minimum wage.
Pizzigati calls his proposal the Ten Times Rule. It would work as follows. If your household brought in less than the income of two full-time minimum wage workers, you would pay no income tax. Above that level you would pay 1 percent. Above twice the minimum wage you would pay 2 percent. And so on up to 10 percent. Any income above 10 times the minimum would be taxed at 100 percent.
This would mean significantly lower taxes on 99 percent of us. It would also mean an economy focused on products for a once-again expanding middle class, rather than our new aristocracy. It would mean a country without what Senator John Edwards has called the two Americas.
A Vitally Important, Mind-bending Book.......2004-07-21
Did you know that in 1943, the highest marginal tax rate, on incomes above $200,000 (approximately $2.4 million today) was 94 percent?
That throughout the 1950s, the decade conservatives so often claim is their ideal, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent (despite being mostly peacetime) and one out of every three American workers was unionized?
That in 1942, FDR actually called for a $25,000 ($300,000 in today's dollars) maximum income -- and the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told reporters he had to "analyze the situation carefully" before he could make a "well-considered" comment?
As the Virginia Slims ads say (do they still say this?), "You've come a long way, baby." In the wrong direction. This spring, Fortune magazine reported that the 587 billionaires on the planet, who are collectively worth 20 *trillion* dollars, actually increased their wealth by a half-trillion dollars -- that's almost a billion dollars each -- in the year 2003.
In other words, a group of people who already had more wealth than they could personally spend in a thousand years each had their wealth increase by $100,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- and nobody said boo, no one raised an eyebrow. No one, as far as I know, even wrote a protest song about it -- not even a funny one. We have all been so thoroughly brainwashed to believe that millionaires generate many times more wealth than they keep that we can barely dare to think, much less say out loud, that most of those billions are in fact, taken -- legally stolen -- from the rest of humanity.
Greed and Good is a mind-bending book. Its premise, taken from the introduction, is simple. "That some people have too much," writes the author, "is not just *a* problem. It is *the* problem, the root of what ails us as a nation, a social cancer that coarsens our culture, endangers our economy, distorts our democracy, even limits our lifespans."
The book is a tour de force that panoramically (perhaps too panoramically) builds the case for that point. In the process, it debunks both the conservative and the neoliberal economic myths that have turned extreme wealth into a non-issue. You probably didn't know, for instance, that a solid body of epidemiological evidence shows that inequality is strongly correlated with poorer health and lower longevity within populations. Not poverty -- inequality. And not just for poor people, but for middle-class people as well. In short, unequal societies are bad for your health -- but don't expect a Surgeon General report on this anytime soon, even if (or when) Kerry is elected.
In situation after situation, the author shows how the potential to make extreme wealth has warped our society. In his chapter on the professions, for example, he talks about how this phenomenon has affected smart young college aged people. If you're a high-achiever -- and you want to follow the sciences -- but scientists start at $50,000, while corporate lawyers are starting at $80,000 and up -- and the lawyers are then pricing up all the local real estate, so a scientist may end up living a second-class life -- what do you do? Not surprisingly, the "best and the brightest" aren't going into science the way they used to. As for investment banking - would you believe that in 1966, an investment banker started with a salary of $9,500?
Pizzigatti, a labor journalist, builds his case meticulously, yet for the most part, quite readably, carefully explaining any and all technical terms or arguments. If anything, he is too careful -- the book could have benefited from an editor to chop some of the less convincing arguments and the over-explanations, to make it move a little more quickly. But especially in the first third, where he debunks the arguments for greed ("greed as an incentive," "the greedy as deserving" and "the greedy as benefactors"), he makes many arcane topics clear and engaging.
As a liberal baby boomer, it's infuriating and yet strangely affirming to read this book and realize the extent to which an incredibly reactionary counterrevolution happened stealthily behind the scenes while I was going about my life. I didn't realize that back when I was a kid, CEOs did not make more than the President. Now they feel it is their right to make $3 million, or $15 million, or have stock option windfalls of $69 million, while their companies go down in flames (as several stories in the book describe). If you've had the feeling that something terribly wrong happened over the last thirty years, but you can't quite put your finger on just what it was, this book will feel like a revelation to you. While many excellent books on the right-wing takeover of our politics explain what happened politically, this book does something unique -- it explains what happened to society as a whole as a result. It answers such questions as why, in a society that is by far the richest in human history (and many times wealthier than it was in our childhoods) we supposedly can't "afford" universal healthcare, and why we all seem to be working harder and are more anxious about our material well-being than ever.
The book ends with an absolutely audacious proposal -- for America to adopt a "Ten Times Rule," for the most part lowering or holding steady all taxes on income up to ten times the minimum wage, then taxing all income above it -- FDR's "maximum wage." I'm not sure of all of his math -- this would at this moment be a top individual income of $107,120, which seems too low to me (although if this were somehow suddenly the law of the land, you KNOW the minimum wage would be doubled in an instant). Even though I think it's unrealistic to imagine that a society will tax away everything at the top (I'll settle for a top marginal tax rate of 95 percent), his vision of a possible world, which he lays out quite credibly (and which, he shows, will not result in economic apocalypse and is wholly compatible with modern capitalism) is the most hopeful vision I have read or heard about in decades.
At the very least, this book will make you, too, yearn for an America that has far fewer millionaires and far happier, healthier and more involved citizens. Sometimes visions come out of nowhere and catch hold, eventually changing whole societies. I truly hope Pizzigati's vision is one of these.
Of Utmost Importance.......2004-07-08
This excellent book is a thorough exploration of how unbridled greed is undermining the essential fabric of our society. If we have any hope of renewing and saving our democracy (let alone deal with the issue of terrorism in an unjust world) we must face head-on the greed that is polluting the very soul of our own nation. "Greed and Good" carefully examines the deep roots that greed has planted and offers alternative approaches to how wealth is distributed in our country. Most importantly, the author makes an excellent case for the concept of establishing a maximum wage. President FDR brought this idea to Congress back in 1942- today, in the age of the ENRON scandal, and in the age of modern-day billionaire kings, perhaps the time for a maximum wage has arrived. "Greed and Good" provides much food for thought and is written in an easily readable style. I highly recommend it.
Book Description
This book exposes how water flow links nature and society through water's many parallel functions as the 'blood stream' of both the biosphere and the imbedded anthroposphere, and the resulting conflicts that arise. The authors argue that a sustainable future depends fundamentally on our ability to manage these trade-offs.
They advocate an ecological approach to land/water/environmental problems and argue for viewing precipitation as the gross water resource. Distinguishing between terrestrial aquatic ecosystems they show how an ecological approach can be expressed in water-related trade-offs, incorporating criteria for long-term resilience.
Based on per capita needs for an acceptable nutritional diet, the authors analyze the amounts of water needed for global food production by 2050 and identify potential sources. Drawing on small-scale experiences in Africa and Asia, they also cover the vulnerability of the semi-arid tropics, disentangling it into green and blue water scarcity components.
Books:
- A Man Called Peter: The Story of Peter Marshall
- A Passion to Win
- Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry
- Albert Einstein: Out of My Later Years Through His Own Words
- All Encompassing Trip
- All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
- America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (Washington Paperbacks, Wp-68)
- American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
- An Italian Affair
- And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969-
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
- Resources of the Earth: Origin, Use, and Environmental Impact
- Silent Prey
- Murder on Mulberry Bend
- Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive
- Rhythms of the Brain
- Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God: The Life Story of the Author of My Utmost for His Highest
- Claes Oldenburg Drawings in the Whitney Museum of American Art
- Rocky Mountains: Wilderness Reflections
- Bacteria in Their Natural Environments
