This book is an awesome adventure. You feel as though you are right there in the action- a part of this journey these men are on. I couldn't put the book down. I just had to see what was going to happen next. I would reccomend this book to anyone and everyone. It's a joy to share in the experience of this journey through the struggles and the victories of these two men!

I didnt want to believe some of Mr Kramers stories until I moved to Indonesia myself. His descriptions are accurate and well thought out. Mr kramer makes no attempts to save the reader from the unpleasant aspects of life in a world that can and will try kill you every day. The book is a favorite of mine to give to folks who want to know what it is like here!

Kramer's thrilling true adventure is more exciting and inspiring than "Survivor." A true "survivor," Kramer writes an unforgettable account of his ordeal in New Guinea. I couldn't put it down. I plan to give this book to several of my friends of different age groups. A terrific read!

Thumbing through Hammel and Lane's book one initially suspects that the pictures are the story. Contrary to this first impression, the book is an excellent telling of the battle for Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll. Augmented by literally hundreds of top quality combat photos the tale flows in a most easily understood fashion. The narrative recreates the action as it occurred on each beachhead and follows it along until a logical point occurs before switching to another beachhead. Progressing along the three initial beachheads the reader follows the action of individual men, squads, and remnants of platoons and companies fighting for a toehold. The confusion that occurred on all the landing zones is told in a most understandable manner. The slaughter caused by the low tide and the reef surrounding the island is well presented.

The maps, placed in front of the book preceding the text, are excellent. The book's weakness lays in its lack of a significant discussion of planning, strategy and the then existing conditions in the Pacific. Tarawa played a key roll in the future invasions of the Marshalls, the Marianas and beyond. This was the first time an amphibious assault was made against a well-defended and contested beachhead. It also marked the turning point for amphibious assaults in that the LVTs (Landing Vehicle Tracked) were used for the first time as troop carriers instead of merely supply vehicles. As Admiral Hill stated, "...this operation was going to be a textbook for future operations." Although mentioned frequently in the text, the index contains no listing for the LVTs. Considering their all-important role, this is puzzling to this reviewer.

Having had a member of my family in the battle it was a outstanding adventure in the Best of Our Nation's Youth and the United States Marine Corps. The graphic pictures matched the historical and well researched commentary. I found that I could not read for long periods of time because of all of what was going on took time to digest and reflect on. You felt that you were crossing the lagoon along with the young Marines and you could almost here the action. There was courage on both sides and the book was fair as to that point. It truly gave a face to the savage nature, relentless, and cruel reality of this Pacific island invasion.

I found myself wondering about the faith and courage that were these young men. To keep their sanity and wits about them was truly remarkable. I also found myself wondering if this could be done again in our time. If the courage and singleness of purpose would be here today? It left me with a large amount of respect for the accomplishment of these men. We owe them our freedom and our sincere thanks.

Using newly uncovered archival photographs of the bloody battle for Betio Island, Eric Hammel and John Lane put the reader in the middle of the action. From the agonizing wade into the beach, up to the last neutralized pillbox, "Bloody Tarawa" is a fine update of a classic on this legendary campaign.

One would hope a book written about race relations thirty years ago would be irrelevant and possibly dated today. Unfortunately, Keneally's stunning indictment of turn-of-the-century racism, in this case that of Anglo settlers towards Australia's native aborigines, remains vibrant and powerful, even after these many years. Literally timeless in its message and articulate and graceful in its execution, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith could have been written about many minorities subjugated during many periods in many different countries.

The basic story is not unique. Half aborigine and half Anglo, Jimmie Blacksmith grows up in aborigine culture. Because he is light-skinned, however, he is able to obtain jobs on white landholdings more readily than other aborigines, and there he is exposed to Anglo culture--with all its stated, good intentions, but its sometimes patronizing attitudes and selfish goals. After being worked hard and cheated from his earnings repeatedly, Jimmie snaps, visiting on his former employers the kind of fatal "justice" which has so often been dealt to the aborigines. As vigilantes and police join forces to apprehend Jimmie, we see all the conflicting attitudes toward life and justice which undermine the creation of a unified, fair society.

The throbbing drumbeat of Jimmie's chants and Keneally's insistent narrative pace combine with our revulsion toward Jimmie's actions, to catch us up in the emotions of both the pursuers and the pursued. Our understanding of Jimmie and our empathy with him make us long for his redemption at the same time that we are anxious for justice to take place. Keneally's resolution is brilliant, fittingly combining the best elements of both of Jimmie's worlds. This is a wonderful novel which deals with a complex and sensitive subject without polemics or convenient, easy solutions, and it's as relevant today as it was when it was written.

This book tackles the tricky area of inter-racial violence bravely and with great skill. It paints a shocking picture of the Australia of 100 years ago, and particularly the plight of the aboriginal community. Keneally's economical style is perfectly suited to this dense narative; he makes every word count. One of the best books I've read this year.

good book. buy it. good movie, too

Latham graduated in Economics from Sydney University in 1982 and became a political adviser for Gough Whitlam, then the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party and NSW Premier Bob Carr. He was a councillor on the Liverpool Council between 1987 and 1994 and mayor from 1991 to 1994. Elected to Federal Parliament for Werriwa in January 1994, he has served in Parliament ever since.

As the work of a member of what Hegel called the “political class”, born and raised to serve in the state machine, altruistically looking after the affairs of the rest of society, this book appears to express the writer’s discovery of a world outside the bureaucracy.

“Social democracy needs to give closer consideration to the relations between citizens rather than simply working from an assumption that all social issues can be resolved in the state-to-citizen relationship.” [p. xl-xli] “Other strands of political thought [as well as social democracy] have taken a strong interest in the social relations between citizens”. [p. 263]

As such, it should be welcomed. Latham has read widely and has plenty of ideas for the political class to reflect upon and we should wish him well. But there are some profound misunderstandings in his work which need to be addressed.

Latham believes that the creation of the Welfare State in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, Fascism and World War Two was based on a series of “old” assumptions about stability, security and conformity. [see p. 199] In passing, it should be noted that Latham’s principal method of argument is to append adjectives like “old”, “crude”, “binary”, “simple”, “raw”, “traditional”, “mechanistic”, “dogmatic”, “linear”, “rigid”, “narrow” or “conventional” to the view he opposes and “new”, “complex”, “profound”, “radical”, “fresh” to the view he advocates. But it remains to be seen whether he is able to distinguish in the new and in the old what should be supported and what should be opposed.

His principal thesis is that the Welfare State was a product of a culture in which Fordist methods of production predominated in the economy, and the Welfare State and the associated methods of macroeconomic economic management, essentially emulated the methods of Fordist hierarchically organised, one-size-fits-all mass production.

Observing the decline of Fordist methods of production in the economy, it is hardly surprising that Fordist methods of government administration are called into question.

“Some commentators have suggested ... that the organisation of government will increasingly reflect these methods of post-Fordist production and service delivery”. [p. 211]

The economy of mass production and its workforce have been replaced by the globalised, information-age economy and its very different workforce. Latham is fully cognisant to the malaise affecting the modern world, its shallowness and individualism, the anomie, widespread insecurity, loss of community, the spread of “downwards envy”, the widening of the gap between rich and poor, the growth of an under-class, etc., etc.

Also to be observed everywhere is the decline in what Latham calls “vertical” “patron/client” relations, alongside the growth of symmetrical, “horizontal” relations. Under these modern conditions, Fordist organisations, such as the Welfare State, are altogether dysfunctional.

“organisations tending towards the vertical have declined most notably in their participation and relevance in recent decades. ... Conversely, some organisations displaying horizontal social capital and the virtues of mutual trust seem to have moved against the tide of social capital depletion.” [p. 278]

Let us agree with Latham the welfarism and Keynesianism were indeed part and parcel of the period of Fordist production and that with the decline of mass production manufacture, these methods of governance must also decline. No rational person could wish to restore them.

But when trying to account for the malaise of modern society, is it rational to ascribe the rampant and burgeoning social problems of our times to the inadequacy of the system of government and welfare distribution? Can a member of the political class be so deceived as to their own importance to believe that the vast social changes witnessed over the past several decades are the result of a failure of government to move with the times?

To put it another way, if modernism has had the effect of replacing “vertical” (hierarchical patron/client) relationships with mutual, “horizontal” relations, why is there a crisis at all? What reason do we have to believe that if the public sector emulates the private sector, the problem will not get far worse, rather than better?

To make sense of this confusion we have to look a little critically at what we could call, to borrow some of Latham’s own adjectives, the old, rigid, binary categorisation of relationships as “vertical” or “horizontal”.

What has been the transformation of person-to-person relations wrought by modernism which has transformed work and society? It has been the replacement of all forms of hierarchical relations (bureaucratic, managerial or traditional) by the commodity relation.

Now the commodity relation, the relation of buyer and seller, of customer to service provider, is a mutual, symmetrical relation based on fair exchange. It is a relation in which each party enters as a free agent with equal rights. This relation is nevertheless the very relation upon which the modern form of exploitation is based, for if two parties enter a fair exchange under conditions where there is a gross imbalance in social power, the outcome though fair is also exploitative. Furthermore, it is a relation in which, rather than collaborating, each manipulates the other for their own ends; it is a relation which isolates people and reduces them to appendages of an object.

This is a horizontal relation to be sure. But not of the same kind as that which, for example, binds together the participants in a neighbourhood project, a football team, a cooperative, a volunteer firefighting group, and so on. I call these relations “collaboration”. There is a third party in all these relationships, which I could call “we”. In the exchange of commodities there is no third, there is no “we”, only them and us.

So when Latham proposes to abolish the “old” patron/client relation in favour of the modern, mutual relation of customer/service provider, he sounds the death knell on the last surviving points of support against capital, and must thereby place enormous pressure on those relations of collaboration which are struggling to develop in opposition to both bureaucratic patronage and commercial anomie.

Mark Latham is one a few Australians who today are actually proposing substantial policy prescriptions instead of being locked into an ideologically based debate which time has now passed over. Latham's prescriptions are both analytical but highly readable in a concise manner. His major proposals are based on 'third way' politics, most successfuly articulated by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Latham's proposals advocate a whole new way for governments in Australia in approaching Industry Policy, Welfare Reform, Income Inequality, Economic exclusion, Employment creation, and Government financing. Latham believes that the politics of the left-right divide are no longer relevant in the 'new economy'. The cornerstone of Latham's view is the vital importance of life-long learning and the need to overcome Australia's third deficit, that is, the under-investment in the skills and inventiveness of citizens. It is argued that the future prospertity of Australians is contingent upon the growth of knowledge based resources, namely the development of human capital. In Latham's own words: "Globalisation has left parties and politicians struggling for solutions. The political Right has not been able to show, once the active role of government is withdrawn, how individual liberty alone can answer the insecurity and remorseless inequity of an open economy. The choice between market freedom, with its army of working poor, and the failings and unsustainable costs of the welfare state, is barely a choice at all. It simply points to the need for a third way". Latham's book is a captivating and highly persuasive read. Moreover it proposes solutions rather than mere ideological dogma. I recommend this book to anyone with a particular interest in the future of Australian society.

I have only just purchased this book today after hearing Mark Latham speak. He started by telling the audience that his mentor advised him on entering politics that "modern politicians these days rarely have time to think, listen, or research" ... luckily for Australia Mark Latham does THINK and his political ideas straddle the Left-Right spectrum (although he describes himself as Centre Left and belongs to a Left-leaning party). Something of an outcast in his own party, he pushes an agenda that ignores sectional interests and instead looks to the best national and international long term outcomes.

It is the discovery of a different kind of love, one which begins with your friendship and follows into a "pit of want." As you read, you just wish that the object of affection feels the same way...and she does. Enjoy your reading!

I'm a gay bloke and I enjoy reading romance. When I first saw Dream Lover in the library and noticed that it was a lesbian romance, I was on the verge of putting it back on the shelf; but something withheld me from doing so. I took the book home and read it. I must admit this is a very nice book- not only did it give me insight into the world of lesbians( which used to be totally alien to me),it was very enjoyable. My heart may not pound wildly when I read the erotic bits(as it does with gay novels), but this book is written in a wonderful style that I've decided to read other lesbian novels.

Jo is recovering is recovering from an emotionally abusive marriage and meets Alex when she goes on holiday to do some thinking. At first it seems a bit predictable-but somehow I didn't care because I liked the characters of Jo and Alex so much. I rooted for them to get together because you could see the genuine caring in the relationship between them. Also I liked that there were no games going on between them. In the pages of this book is a great romance.

As a Canadian version of a bloke with a shed, I found this book fun and interesting. On the other hand, it emphasizes the anachronism, and is really more of a cultural commentary than relevant to the DIY crowd. Being Australia, the sheds are mostly metal.

Who would have thought that backyard sheds could make for such a cool book? "Blokes and Sheds" dives into the murky and mysterious world of backyard sheds, bringing pearls to the surface.

In all, the book is well produced: the photography is awesome, the writing is witty, and the printing is excellent. It's well-suited to both the coffee table and the bathroom.

This book is filled with stunning photos and wonderful stories about Australian men and thier sheds. Mark Thomson's easy writing style is a pleasure to read, a great book!

The novel is about a boy named Seymour, who stays with a fussy old guardian who wont let him out, worried his father might take him away. By chance one day he left the house and met a young girl called Angie, who lives in a messy little flat, renting from an old women. Angie keeps Seymour company by taking him to different places around the suburbs, going shopping and catching trams from here to there. With her little 'so called brother' nagging her to do the right things. But what Seymour dosent know is that Angie is taking drugs.

Came Back To Show You I Could Fly is about an eleven year old boy named Seymour who meets Angie an older avdenturous drug addict, but Seymour does not know this. She is in a great deal of debt to drug dealers and have been dissowned by her family. Seymour too, is having family problems. This is a great book for readers 12 years and onwards.

I read this book some years back but i thought it was fantastic.A little boy makes friends with a teenage girl who has a terrible secret.

One of the country's leading legal philosophers collects a series of essays (most originally appearing in the New York Review of Books) which examine the ... basis for the United States Constitution, and attack the "original intent" interpretation, most famously spouted by Bork.

The book's strength is Dworkin's accessible writing style (which may stem from the popular press origins of most of these essays) and his tight analysis of several cutting edge issues--abortion, affirmative action, free speech, as well as some historically important battles--the Bork and Thomas nominations.

His bottom line is (although he does not say this explicitly) that the recent Supreme Court, abbeted by a series of Republican presidents, has begun a revolution in legal thinking which rejects the 200 year old liberal tradition of judicial interpretation, and in the process has substituted results based, conservative politics for any semblance of judicial reasoning.

The weakness of the book is that many examples and arguments are repeated between essays, covering the same ground in virtually the same words from different times.

A much easier read than "Taking Rights Seriously", although the latter clearly is a more complete exposition of Dworkin's philosophy.

For a counter argument, see any of Judge Posner's recent work, which explicitly takes on Dworkin's philosophy.

Since this book consists of occasional pieces collected under a common rubric, it's persuasive thrust will find its target in a readership that is already sympathetic to Dworkin's legal and political philosophy. The arguments are not finely made, as they are in, say, *Taking Rights Seriously*, or in *Life's Dominion*. Many of the illustrative parables he uses, he's used before. That being said, *Freedom's Law* is a good collection highlighting the contours of Dworkin's fundamental objections to legal positivism. I think it is possible to follow Dworkin's non-interpretivist method without arriving at the same(moral)conclusions. But if you aren't already familiar with Dworkin's intellectual base of operations, a better place to start would be *Taking Rights Seriously* (easy to find) or, even better, his early and very important essay, "Is Law a System of Rules?" reprinted in *The Philosophy of Law* ed. by Dworkin (harder to find). To his credit, in this latter collection, he gives ample space to views contrary to his own, such as Hart's positivism, and Finnis' moral arguments against abortion.

Ronald Dworkin is perhaps today's Bentham. His views on Constitutional Interpretation in this book are so vividly written and lucidly explained. His views on Judicial Activism equating it with natural interpretation are worth considering if not fully acceptable.

First let me say that academically the book is both readable and factual in its content. But I found the book troubling for two reasons. First, Professor Sked writes like an English Lecture. He poses questions which he answers with his own opinions, many times taking other authors opinions to task. Those that he doesn't agree with he speaks of as liberal or extreme or having "missed the point". Secondly as this is a Second Edition,
it should have been brought up to date with information that has been developed over the last twelve years.

As an example of his inability to rewrite his own words (which he takes as sacrosanct) there is an aside that refers to the USSR and the eastern european satellites. He makes a referral to what would happen in eastern europe if the USSR were to go multi-party, hinting at chaos on the terms of Yugoslavia. Where has he been for the last ten years? No chaos, some nations in NATO and others being accepted into the EU.

Lastly, he shows a pronounced weakness in his understanding of military matters. In his discussion of the failure of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, he dismisses the treatment of other nationalities in the Hungarian Crown Lands as being self-defeating but not disasterous. He especially discounts the Croats. Napoleon, not a bad general, described the Croat Cavalry
as the best in Europe, both for their bravery and ability to endure hardship. He used them as his scouts for his intelligence services and gave them credit for helping to secure many of his victories. They would not have won the was for the Hungarians, but they could have been a thorn in the side of both the Austrians and Russians. Instead the helped to defeat the Hungarians at every major battle.

Reading this book is informational, but you must be prepared to spend a lot of time searching around Professor Sked's opinions and biases to get to the facts.

What I am about to type concerning this book will be rather political, so I should make it clear at the outset that the author himself has no political axe to grind. He is simply examining and refuting some common misconceptions about the last century of the Habsburg Empire and the causes of it's fall. If that is what you are looking for, you could not do better than to read this book. This is *the best* book on the subject in English, bar none. If that is your interest, **buy it**, without reservation. Alan Sked's political opinions appear no where in it's pages, which are full of hard facts and strong historical thinking. It is in every way a model piece of historical scholarship.

The reason I see this as a very political text is that the history of the fall of the Habsburgs has been put to ideological use for a long time now. The Habsburg Empire was dismembered by that crusading moralist professor, Woodrow Wilson, in the name of "Democracy", "Progress", and other "enlightened" ideals for which he was willing to kill and send others to die.

It has been argued that the fall of the Habsburgs was a kind of bellwether, proving the inevitable progress of modernity and modern politics over the face of the whole Earth as a reactionary dionsaur of an empire finally died under the weight of it's own anachronism and decrepitude. The author of this book disproves that thesis totally. He demonstrates definitively that the Habsburg Empire was not weak or inept, and that in fact it faced it's worse crisis in 1848, and, having survived that, was viable as a political unit right up until the end of it's life. There was no mass longing for democracy, no mass discontent with the ancient Monarchy of the House of Habsburg, no demand for "national sovereignty" or "self-determination" on the part of the many nationalities of the Empire. They were fiercely loyal to the Monarchy right up until the end of it's existence. The Habsburgs fell, not because of the "turning of the tides of history" against them, but because they picked the wrong side in WWI. Period.

The fact that this is so undermines most of the cherished myths of the modern West. It proves that history has no inevitable current ending up with us, since it shows that the way history turned out was in fact the result of the individual choices of men, rather than the effect of some kind of powerful underlying trend that men could not have shaped. It proves that democratic gov't's are not the only ones capable of being seen as legitimate in the eyes of their people and that a nation of highly cultured and relatively wealthy people (the Austrians) could happily and freely choose to live under a radically different form of gov't, namely a hereditary monarchy. It proves that a powerful multi-ethinc state can be built, if ethnicity is carefully divorced from political power and protected (the Empire of the Habsburgs was virutally a microcosm of Europe in it's vast ethnic diversity). It proves that religion can be effectively joined to gov't - the Habsburg Empire was a confessional Catholic state until the end.

In short, it proves that the supposedly axiomatic modern truths about how politics just has to be are really just so many lies. There was, once upon a time, a strong, viable, multi-ethnic, confessional, hereditarily monarchical empire, that was a living force in world politics right up until the First World War, and that only ceased to be so after it was deliberately destoryed by the victors of that war, who sought to impose their ideology at all costs on the conquered, even if it meant destroying an ancient state and everything that was based on it. We know the results of this well: the wellspring of nationalisms this created has turned the Balkans into a killing field, and it left no strong power in the Germanic world that might have checked the Nazis after Germany itself was raped by the vitorious Allies; thus, the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire cleared the way for Hitler and every horror to follow him in Central Europe. This was the price foreigners were made to pay so that professor Wilson could "Make the world safe for democracy". No amount of foreign blood is too much, apparently, for the ideals of a progressive intellectual.

This text is truly invaluable for students of the Habsburg Monarchy. It's major strength has to be that it is analytical in style, providing explanations for the decline in fortunes of the Habsburg Monarchy. It is also innovative in that it provides a new perspective on the last century of Habsburg rule. Sked's book is an extremely readable text, which is accessible for all. An added bonus is that it provides a background to the historiography surrounding the Austrian Empire. Even if you do not agree with Sked's conclusions, it will certainly give you something new to think about, and is a useful antidote to the more traditional interpretaions of the Habsburg decline. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough!

This series of guides has a well-established format - so it is difficult to understand why they have made this particular guide so hard to follow.

The Great Barrier Reef is over 1,200 miles in length and, thankfully, the book does not claim to be a definitive guide. Refreshingly, therefore, it is exactly what is says it is - a "Guide to the Dive Sites of the Great Barrier Reef" and, generally speaking, it is a good one at that.

The book is divided into the accepted geographical sections of the Great Barrier Reef and commences each of these chapters with an informative introduction followed by brief details of a fair and representative selection of the best known dive sites.

So far so good, but then they go and "spoil the ship for a hapenth of tar!" With very few exceptions, the photographs are generally very good and include some that are quite outstanding. They lose a "Star," however, for blatantly "touching" and "standing on" corals. No photograph showing such bad practises should have been included - and this book features more than one. Furthermore, diving inside the Yongala shipwreck contravenes the "Laws" of Queensland and I was saddened to find a photograph of a human skull being used to introduce Townsville on page 95.

In the English Language, we read from left to right whilst working our way from the top of the page to the bottom. It is, therefore, quite odd to find a book that sets out to do things in reverse order. This book commences in the south and works its way north. Altogether, over 150 dive sites are included - but each chapter commences with "Site No 1" whereas it would be far more useful had they been numbered consecutively from beginning to end. Most unusual of all, however, is the fact that the maps show these sites numbered from the bottom of the page up to the top. Eventually this really does become very awkward to follow. One might also be forgiven for thinking that it is all a very poor attempt to poke fun at Australia - you know, the country being upside down and all that... Maybe not, but another star lost for unnecessary confusion!

In Summary; a rather good book, but in dire need of some serious rearranging. Nevertheless, all the information is there and, when compared to other books on the Great Barrier Reef, this is a good option.

NM

I thought this was a great book for a fresh diver to the reef. It has great pictures and covers a number of locations and dives sites. I found it useful to learn a few tidbits about the places I was seeing while on the boat between dives. Would recommend to anyone looking for a general book on the Great Barrier Reef.

This book does a nice job of detailing major dive sites throughout the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Dive sites are rated for both scuba and snorkeling. The book also has information on resorts, dive operators and facilities servicing the various dive sites. Information on various types of underwater life is also sprinkled in throughout the book. If you plan to dive the Barrier Reef or the Coral Sea this is an excellent guide to lay out your diving plans.