Book Description
On Women Turning Fifty honors the new faces of aging with powerful, positive images of fiftysomething women who share stories of mid-life discovery. Accomplished by beautiful photographs, these candid and engaging interviews reveal women whose challenges, conflicts, and triumphs are reshaping our attitudes toward work, relationships, and personal growth. From Gloria Steinem, Isabel Allende, Ellen Burstyn, and Mary Ellen Mark to single-parent school teacher Deanne Burke and breast cancer survivor Barbara Eddy, the diverse voices in On Women Turning Fifty offer exhilarating models of confidence, courage, and celebration.
Customer Reviews:
Insightful and Significant .......2006-03-28
I just happened to notice this book on the shelf at a bookstore, flipped it open to one of the brief interviews, and began to read about a breast cancer survivor who had turned her experience into a career helping other women find their own individually appropriate breast prosthetics. Isn't this inspiring? I thought. This book is filled with the experiences and thoughts of women who've entered their fifties, stepped back from their lives for a moment of introspection, and agreed to share their insights and personal opinions on the process of maturing as part of the "baby-boomer" generation. I have learned so many little details about what can happen physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually to women of a "certain age", and how to spin straw into gold. At times humorous, poignant, radical, thought provoking, but always articulated with sincerity, sometimes with poetry. This is one of those golden books that shares promises fulfilled and achievements that go outside the standard definition of the word "success". Like sitting down with a really inspiring friend who encourages me to remember, as the saying goes in Zimbabwe, "If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing."
Inspirational stories for women over 50.......2001-12-30
The author of On Women Turning 50, Cathleen Rountree, is an artist, wrier and lecturer specializing in women's issues. Her book is made up of photos of and interviews with 18 women in their 50's and above. Some of these women are famous, some not, but all of them are fascinating.
I really enjoyed the portraits in this book because they do not aim at a Vogue-model, fake-beauty effect. Instead, they artistically reveal each woman's character, personality and wisdom. The prose narration is also excellent, because Rountree presents each woman's experience with growing older in her own words. The result is that this book reads like 18 short, interrelated autobiographies.
There aren't a lot of good books out there geared at encouraging women over 50 in a sexist society that tells women they are worthless without youth and beauty. Of those I've seen so far, this is the best written and most respectful of older women. As such, I recommend it not just to women over 50, but to the men and younger women in their lives who love them.
women speak out about their experience of turning 50.......1998-08-14
This is a collection of interviews of famous and not-so-famous women who have navigated their fiftieth birthdays. The women as individuals may be described as admirable, fascinating, witty, and even awesome (check out Dolores Huerta who has spent most of her adult life as a full-time human rights activist, living in poverty or near-poverty, while giving birth to 11 children--most of whom are now college graduates--and periodically catering to the demands of one of her three husbands). A more interesting aspect of this collection is what these women have in common. They each find this time in their lives more free, more focused on making a contribution to society, less focused on physical appearance and pleasing others, and less concerned (if not unconcerned) with having men in their lives. Tabra Tunoa, a jewelry designer and manufacturer, said, "You waste a lot of time in your thirties trying to look twenty and in your forties trying to look thirty"--one comment from among several in the interviews which imply that the forties are for clearning up the vestiges of denial of age, and the fifties are for embracing its gifts. Said Gloria Steinem, "I learned that to be defiant about age may be better than despair--it's energizing--but it is not progress." Rountree has done a fine job of asking the right questions, eliciting illuminating answers, and photographing 18 women who are worth hearing from.
Customer Reviews:
fair, balanced and packed with incredible information.......2007-03-27
fair, balanced and packed with incredible information
worth 6 stars !
the best.......2006-06-30
This is the best book on this subject! You should also get his book on the last stand.
A Total Picture of The Sioux War: Before and After Custer.......2000-12-31
This is a great book to learn everything about the 1876 Sioux War from the political and economic situations that fueled the conflict (gold and the Black Hills, dissolving the 1868 Peace Treaty), the behavior of the independent Sioux, Grant's ultimatum, the Sheridan three prong attack on the Sioux, the political (Custer and Grant) and weather problems hindering he start of the campaign and General's Crook and Terry's frustrating attempts to catch the Sioux and Cheyenne who fragmented into smaller groups after the Little Big Horn. Also covers Crook's March campaign that resulted in a controversial but failed battle on the Powder River and the critical battle of the Rosebud in June 30 miles southeast of the Little Big Horn which occurred just 8 days prior to Custer's annihilation. Crook, the great Indian fighter with twice Custer's number, becomes displaced out of the Sheridan attack plan due to the furious attack by the Sioux and Cheyenne. Gray also documents how the winter roamers left the agencies to join the summer roamers (Sitting Bull, Gall, Crazy Horse, Two Moon) which peaked with one of the largest villages ever on the North American continent at the time of Custer's attack. The book completes the story by detailing the aftermath of Custer's battle with Crooks and Terry's joint and separate campaigns and the addition of General Nelson Miles. Not a total story on Custer, for that you should read Gray's "Custer's Last Campaign" but start with "Centennial Campaign" to get the complete picture.
The Best about the Sioux War.......2000-07-02
In 1981 I made a phone call to a retired medical doctor named John Gray. I told him I had just finished reading his book, CENTENNIAL CAMPAIGN, and would love to talk with him. I figured we would talk on the phone, so I was surprised when he invited me to visit him in his home in Ft. Collins, Colorado. I accepted his invitation without hesitation.
We spent the entire afternoon talking about his book. There was one question that I was anxious to get answered. Why did he write less than a page about the Custer fight itself? Gray didn't really know what happened during that battle, so there really wasn't much to say. I laughed but it made sense.
This book is not about the Custer fight, but about the entire campaign of the Sioux War of 1876 and it is filled with new revelations about the causes and events of this war. Most interesting is Gray's narrative about the White House meeting between Grant and his aides concerning how they should deal with the Sioux problem and why they started a war.
The book is filled with detailed maps of the Indian movements during the campaign, where and when they camped and for how long. The same is done for soldier column movements.
There is an excellent analysis of the size of the warrior force at the Little Bighorn that historians accept to this day. The numbers will surprise you.
If you have not read much on the Sioux war, then I highly recommend this book. You'll learn that the Custer fight was just one of many events of a long brutal, bloody war.
Great detail on troop movements; opinionated and judgmental.......2000-06-01
Gray provides an outstanding insight into all troop movements before and after the showdown at the Little Big Horn. He is particularly harsh in his assessments of Col. John Gibbon, Gen. George Crook, and Capt. Frederick Benteen. On the other hand he is fairly charitable to Maj. Marcus Reno while others have been more critical of Reno. He fairly glows in his treatment of Custer.
As with many historians in their treatment of the Battle of Little Big Horn, he jumps to dogmatic conclusions fairly easily when he seeks to cast blame (as on Benteen for "dawdling") and when he attributes to Custer the wise deployment of his troop resources. See for example at page 177: "---he (Custer) was relieved to see that Reno had halted to form a skirmish line and was only lightly engaged. He should now be able to hold out until Custer's larger force could get into action". Gray does not tell us how he managed to communicate with Custer in the after life in order to ascertain these feelings of Custer. He further ignores the testimony of John Martin (the trumpeter who took the message to Benteen) to the court of inquiry that Custer exulted over catching the Indians "napping".
In reaching some of these dogmatic conclusions, Gray simply buys into the overstatement of many historians who find some thin support for their fictionalized conclusions.
However, this book is an excellent narrative of the troop and scouting maneuvers leading up to and following the battle. He also writes at the beginning of the book an excellent summary of the cultural conflicts that led to this tragedy for all involved----the soldiers and the Indians.
Book Description
"May be the most sweeping and in many ways the most impressive portrait of the culture of the Federal Government to appear in a single work in many decdes....Konwledeable and informative."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Power is the name of the game. But until now, no one outside "the beltway" knew just who was wielding how much--and for what ends. Pulitzer Prize-winning, ex-Washington bureau chief of THE NEW YORK TIMES, Hedrick Smith, tells the whole story. From PACs to influence-peddling from the Pentagon to the WASHINGTON POST, THE POWER GAME reveals Congressional staffers more powerful than their bosses, media advisors more powerful than the media, and money that not only talks but threatens. It's all there, and it's all in here.
Customer Reviews:
All you need to know about Government and then some.......2006-06-07
Hedrick Smith wrote and amazingly in-depth novel about American Politics and Government. So in-depth, in fact, that you have to put the book down every five to twenty minutes to absorb the hundred and one things he just told you.
"The Power Game" is a long read and unless you are superbly interested in politics and government you may not want to read this. However, to everyone that dreams of the Senators at work, taking PAC money and being led by lobbyist (or if you are a Reagan fan), this book is perfect. Smith takes you inside the heart of government. And not the metaphorical heart, he truly shows all aspects of American Politics and Government. I am sure if people were capable or reading so much about politics and government; Smith could have written another 711 pages and still would not have covered everything that HE wanted to. But if it were any longer Smith would not have made a profit selling it.
Smith's analysis of Washington would have brought tears to my eyes, only because of his understanding of the best institution out there. However, Smith's love for Reagan did damper my mood of the novel. Smith seems to have a love affair with Reagan. Though Reagan did shake things up on Capitol Hill, Smith going more than fifteen pages with out mentioning something "great" about Reagan is nothing short of a small miracle.
I would love to Read this book if Smith had written it in the passed five years. Sadly this look at "the Power Game" is almost twenty years old and has no analysis of resent dynamics and shenanigans in Washington. If you are thinking of reading this book, make sure you have time and a lot of love for America. I recommend "The Power Game" because it does give you a deep understanding of Politics and Government. How deep you want to go is up to you. If you can handle knowing everything and then some, please pick up a copy. If you do not really want to know the "then some" or Washington than I would recommend a different novel. There are many novels that will give you an understanding of Washington, with out confusing or boring you. All in all, Great Book.
Why did Hedrick Smith waste years of his life writing this?.......2005-03-23
I have to read this for my AP government class. It is the worst thing I have ever read. Smith goes on for pages and pages repeating his point over and over again. It has become excruciating to read. Some of the stories that he tells are interesting but the rest, about 700 pages, is a complete waste of time.
Pig Circus On The Potomac.......2004-11-07
Talk about your weighty tomes. Hedrick Smith's "The Power Game" takes on the story of politics in Washington, D.C., circa the 1980s. Not only does he dig into every subject imaginable, like the importance of staffers, the intricacies of foreign policy work, and the behemoth of defense spending, but he takes more than 700 pages doing so.
"The Power Game" works best as a series of anecdotes about political life, and the passions that ran riot across the national landscape at various times in the second half of the 20th century. Smith gets some tremendous candor from many of his subjects, like former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, who tells Smith that his "substantive work" suffered most when he was most in the public spotlight. "I was probably a lesser senator when my numbers were going up," Tsongas confesses.
There's great anecdotes about presidential power, too. The book begins with preparations to convert a senator's rambler-style ranch house into a bunker as Ronald Reagan plans a sleepover there, and then dovetails into an account of the symbolic importance of the office. Smith's style is to present such an anecdote at the start of each chapter or section, then offer some insights and overview.
The anecdotes are great, like the one that features Lesley Stahl anchoring a CBS attack piece on Reagan. After, she gets a call from a White House senior official. She expects a tirade, but instead the guy thanks her. Stahl's acid commentary was aired over image after image of Reagan in carefully staged feel-good set pieces, sort of by way of ironic contrast. But the senior official told Stahl no one cared what she said, it was the images that would resonate with the viewer, and those images supported Reagan. Alas, to her chagrin, he was right.
The problem I have is with the analysis and overview. At times Smith is very dry, writing at length about congressional backroom games, staff work, and supplemental appropriations in a way that's probably too elementary for the poly sci student and too dull for everyone else. Elsewhere, he is just wrong, nowhere more so than when he talks about the presidency as a debilitated institution. He discourses on such things as the Democratic control of Congress and the dominance of PAC money as if they are things that will always be with us, when time has shown him wrong.
The last chapter is the book's weakest, not because Smith attempts to offer prescriptions for the ills he ably depicts in the rest of the book, but for the "this could work, but then again..." tone he takes as he offers them up. Smith is a typical reporter; he wants to find fault but not commit himself to anything that smacks of a solution, since his inner cynic tells him such nostrums only bite you back in the end.
There's a great book about Ronald Reagan and his impact on D.C. in "The Power Game" which I sort of wish Smith had hacked from the rest of this book and released in its stead. Smith is no fan of Reagan, but he's a keenly perceptive critic, not blindly partisan but very mainstream media in his generic liberal disdain. He makes some strong points about Reagan's less-than-positive legacy on the economic front, specifically by channeling the artful turncoat David Stockman, who ran the numbers for the early Reagan budgets, then turned around and told everyone Reagan was just in business to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Reagan also got run around by Congress more than popular history remembers, and Smith is there with the play-by-play.
But did Reagan's first term in office see less growth in the national economy than the lone term of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter? Smith says so, but I sure don't remember it that way. He also lambastes Reagan for things that history proved him right on, like his handling of the Soviets, the Contras, and tax relief, and for Star Wars, where the jury is still out. By the end, Smith has worked up such a head of steam that he lumps Reagan and Kennedy alongside Carter, Ford, Nixon, and Johnson as failed presidents. [Here's a clue: When they name a major airport after a president, it probably means he did something right.]
The problem is that the premise of "The Power Game," that Congress is winning, is flawed. Since Smith keeps hitting on that point, it keeps sounding a false note.
But Smith is a solid journalist, and at its best, which it frequently is, "The Power Game" is a fine inside-the-Beltway account of what went on in Washington during a time of great change. In some ways, the book is valuable historical reading as much for what it gets wrong as for what it gets right.
Not Government 101.......2002-12-22
Forget everything you were ever taught or told about how government works. Rick Smith has captured the reality. Though it was written about Washington much of The Power Game is also true of state and sometimes even local government. A must read for anyone with an interest in government or politics.
Cure for the insomniacs.......2002-08-01
This book was assigned to me for summer reading for Advance Placement Government class. I got it through borders and paid high price for it, I highly suggest buying it used through amazon.com. In the beginning this novel seemed very interesting with its unique insider perspective however this insider perspective drowned the novel with annoying anecdotes. The perspective was lost with countless examples that were perfect cure for when I was in desperate need of sleep. The author states his views and makes his points in the first page of two of every chapter and for the next 10-20 pages it just filled with every moment of his 30+ year experience at D.C. This novel is 700+ pages long and could very easily be trimmed down to under a 100 and still have a greater impact. So I would advise to buy it used then just read the first page of every section.
Customer Reviews:
Uncover the Presidential style........2000-10-30
Not just for children, adults, too, will find the secret world of the White House fun, disguised education. Learn how a president personally communicates from the phone operators, calligraphers, special stationary, to how he signs so many letters. There's sections on how the President entertains that is a must for those who like to host elegant parties, includes menu cards. There's lots of fun first-family trivia that history buffs enjoy. For the sports enthusiast, learn how a president keeps fit and trim. Naturally there's a chapter on guarding the First Family. A great reference book to be enjoyed again and again.
Customer Reviews:
A dark but honest portrayal of our democracy.......2000-01-21
I've talked about this book with other people who have read it and the consensus is that it is a cynical book that doesn't educate the reader. But personally, I would rather read a book that is skeptical and willing to explain the problems of Washington to the reader than pretend that everything is fine and dandy while the problems fester. I agree with Mr. Peters that the bottom line is that there is a lack of accountability in the nation's capital. Mr. Peters understands that human beings are rational, intuitive creatures. The thing that was so crucial to the constitution and its success was its ability to get people to work in their own interests but channel that energy into constructive ends. What struck me after reading this book was that our current institutions act in the same rational manner but they have been misdesigned to reward unconstructive ends. America doesn't face a crisis, mind you. I dislike it when people raise alarm needlessly. But I feel that without an intelligent discussion about what our government can an should be, we face the prospect of national stagnation or worse.
A great book for people who are synics of our Government........1999-01-07
Mr. Peters goes through many of his experiences in civil service and how Washingtonians perpetuate a system that does not work for the common man. This book brings insight for those who have not ever been or worked in our Nations capitol.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Washington Monthly, published by Thomson Gale on September 1, 2007. The length of the article is 1978 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: Who's the boss? Forget neocons and theocons. It's the money-cons who really run Bush's Republican Party.(The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked)
Author: Kevin Drum
Publication:
Washington Monthly (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 39
Issue: 9
Page: 58(3)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
In an era of market triumphalism, this book probes the social and environmental consequences of market-linked nature conservation schemes. Rather than supporting a new anti-market orthodoxy, Charles Zerner and colleagues assert that there is no universal entity, "the market." Analysis and remedies must be based on broader considerations of history, culture, and geography in order to establish meaningful and lasting changes in policy and practice.
Original case studies from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific focus on topics as diverse as ecotourism, bioprospecting, oil extraction, cyanide fishing, timber extraction, and property rights. The cases position concerns about biodiversity conservation and resource management within social justice and legal perspectives, providing new insights for students, scholars, policy professionals and donor/foundations engaged in international conservation and social justice.
Books:
- One Soldier's Story: A Memoir
- Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper -- Case Closed (Berkley True Crime)
- Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey
- Reagan: A Life In Letters
- Road Fever
- Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
- Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood
- Siegfried Sassoon: A Life
- Slaying the Dragon: How to Turn Your Small Steps to Great Feats
- Son Rise: The Miracle Continues
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
- Downriver
- Bombay Time: A Novel
- Creative Drama in the Classroom and Beyond
- Digital Wedding Photography: Capturing Beautiful Memories
- Environmental Chemistry
- Fight Back and Win CD: My Thirty-year Fight Against Injustice--and How You Can Win Your Own Battles
- Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond
- Chesapeake Almanac: Following the Bay Through the Seasons
- Mystery and seduction: Orchids of Ecuador
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Fifty Things to Do When You Turn Fifty (Fifty Experts on the Subject of Turning Fifty) (Fifty Experts on the Subject of Turning Fifty) (Fifty Experts on the Subject of Turning Fifty)
Turning 50: Fifty Personal Celebrations
Juicy Tomatoes: Plain Truths Dumb Lies and Sisterly Advice about Life After 50 (Women Talk About)
Turning 50: Quotes, Lists, and Helpful Hints
You Know You're Fifty When
