"Guy Fawkes is one of the most celebrated figures in English history - but how did a failed Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605 inspire a religious festival, anti-Catholic riots, political protests, novels and pantomimes, and a œ60 million annual spend on fireworks?"

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

America has The Fourth of July, and the U.K. has Guy Fawkes' Day.

Anyone raised in Great Britain would probably not even read this book, because they are certain they already know everything there is to know about Guy Fawkes, the 5th of November, and the Gunpowder Plot. But I'd be willing to wager they don't know as much as they think they know.

Remember Remember the Fifth of November: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot by James Sharpe, reveals anything (and more) everyone, or anyone, would want to learn about what is commonly known as 'Guy Fawke's Day'.

Being the book was written for readers in the British Isles, with a lot of assumptions being made about 'common knowledge', I had to read the first two chapters twice, before everything made sense to me. Although I have to admit, other than a reason to get drunk and pillage, I still don't understand the longevity of the celebration.

Throughout the centuries there has been huge animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants in England. Depending whether the Royal on the throne (not the ivory one) was a Catholic or a Protestant, determined which followers of what religion would be persecuted. (Hence, the Founders of the United States insisted that religion have no official government office in the Colonies.)

In any case Guy Fawkes, and a handful of Roman Catholics, upset with the Protestant King James, in an attempt to blow up the King, his family, and members of the House of Lords and House of Commons had placed 36 barrels of gunpowder under the Palace of Westminster .

Rumours being he was informed on, Guy Fawkes was caught in the cellars under the palace, the night before November the 5th, 1605, holding the keys to the cellar-doors, three fuses in his possession, while wearing his riding spurs.

Quickly Guy Fawkes and his conspirators were severely dealt with, and since that day, there have been raucous street celebrations the night of November 5th to commemorate the discovery of the Gundpowder Plot.

In the movie 'V for Vendetta' the mask the protagonist wears is that of Guy Fawkes.

If you want to be immersed in the Guy Fawkes' legend, and pick up a good piece of European history, this is a quite entertaining book to do it through.

Begun: 10/31/2008   Finished: 11/01/2008 Purchased:  October 2008
Where:   Daedalus Books

Amazon.com Sales Rank:  817,390
Pages:  Trade, 230pp
Cover price:  £8.99
Purchase price:  $4.98 (new)
Genre:  History, England

"Bernard Lewis is recognized around the globe as one of the leading authorities on Islam. Hailed as "the world's foremost Islamic scholar" (Wall Street Journal), as "a towering figure among experts on the culture and religion of the Muslim world" (Baltimore Sun), and as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies" (New York Times), Lewis is nothing less than a national treasure, a trusted voice that politicians, journalists, historians, and the general public have all turned to for insight into the Middle East . . ."

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East is a book where one can find most of the answers he may have about the various situations in the Middle East. If anyone wanted to get an excellent foundation on the Middle East, its history, religions, cultures, people and mores, this is the book to read.

The work is split into three parts, one of past history, one of current history and one discussing how history is recorded. It consists of 51 different speeches or papers given by author Lewis from 1953 until 2002. Breaking this subject into 51 different bite-size chapters makes it much more easily digestible.

Mr. Bernard Lewis also distinguishes himself from other writers in that he is fluent in several of the Middle Eastern languages and was able to read various source documents that would otherwise be open to 'translation'. He also presents the Middle East, its people and cultures in a totally non-judgemental manner.

While reading, I found it helpful to reference the 'Credits' section in the front of the book to refer to what date each particular segment was written in. However, the later chapters in the book began to list the date right after the title of the chapter.

Also lacking was a map of the Middle East and any sort of timeline chart, both of which would have been quite helpful.

There are footnotes shown in the text and they follow each chapter. Very many of them are simply references, so skipping them really didn't cause much confusion. After finishing a chapter, I would scan through the footnote pages and read anything interesting-looking that I had missed.

Rather like a well-written textbook, From Babel to Dragomans is intensely information dense and would be very hard to sum up in even several pages, so I end with repeating a smattering of quotes taken from the text.

"The serious study of history, one's own or anyone else's, must be based on primary sources, and these must be examined in the original, not through the filter of translation, adaptation, or summary."

"That means of course that the only history that matters is Muslim history, and the history of picturesque barbarians in remote places, even of picturesque barbarians who may happen to be one's ancestors, has not moral or religious value, and is therefore not worth retaining."

"Islam influences, Islam is not influenced."

"The events of the last few years have shown that the removal of particular grievances produces no real alleviation, since the general upsurge of anti-Western feeling soon finds other outlets and expressions."

"For the Arabs, the creation of Israel in an Arab country was an act of aggression; her survival is a continuing act of aggression. Consequently, any action taken by Arabs against Israel is defensive; any attempt by Israel to resist or oppose such action is aggressive."

"And in this sense Islam has, in theory, always been a theocracy. In Rome, Caesar was God. In Christendom, God and Caesar coexist. In Islam, God is Caesar, in that he alone is the supreme head of the state, the source of sovereignty and hence also of authority and of law. The state is God's state, the law is God's law. The army is God's army--and of course the enemy is God's enemy."

reviewed: October 28, 2008

Typos:

Page 143  "...the Turkish forces and then, from 1773 to 1755,  went on a..."
Page 338  "...the water-mill or the wind-mill or the wind-mill,  which are the..." Begun: 09/29/2008   Finished: 10/25/2008 Purchased: July 2008
Where: barnesandnoble.com

USED FROM OUR AUTHORIZED SELLERS
B&N Net Rank: 131,259
Pages:  Trade paperback, 438pp
Cover price:  $18.95
Purchase price:  $4.69 (new)
Genre: History, World: Middle Eastern - Religion & politics - Islamic Studies

The remarkable rise and shameful fall of one of the twentieth century's greatest conglomerates

"At its peak in the 1930s, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. To this day, companies formerly part of the Farben cartel—the aspirin-maker Bayer, the graphics supplier Agfa, the plastics giant BASF—continue to play key roles in the global market. IG Farben itself, however, is remembered mostly for its infamous connections to the Nazi Party and its complicity in the atrocities of the Holocaust..."

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine with its 410 pages of text, 31 pages of must-read notes, bibliography, index, and 16 pages of glossy black and white photos is a monumental work. It clearly demonstrates what happens when Eisenhower's warning of the 'military-industrial complex' is ignored.

I am now certain that President Eisenhower, former commander of all Allied Forces during WWII, was not only prognosticating about a future United States of America, but was remembering about what he had seen first person in Germany during the war.

Growing up in the 1950s, I was familiar with the name I.G. Farben, but wasn't quite sure what it was or its precise connection to Hitler's war effort.

After reading Hell's Cartel in a single sitting, at a speed not allowing for my normal highlighting, I learned that I.G. Farben was a massive corporation formed in 1925 by the purposeful combining of BASF, Agfa, Bayer, Hoechst, Weiler-ter-Meer, and Griesheim, instantly becoming the forth largest business enterprise in the world.

I was so angry after reading Hell's Cartel and learning that I.G. Farben had pretty much made Hitler's War Machine possible. The author chose 'machine' with a very special inference in mind and that is because I.G. Farben formed the corporate core of Hitler's war engine.

I was also reminded of the immense cult of personality that surrounded Adolph Hitler, a cult based entirely on emotion and simple phrases spouted by der Fuehrer and along with Aryan grade-schoolers singing in the background, he easily goose-stepped into power.

During WWII, at great risk to themselves, spies would advise the Allied Powers what factories to bomb and where they were hidden within the ever expanding borders of Axis-controlled Europe.

Using I.G. Farben employees' knowledge of factories visited in Europe and England, both before and during the war, risking few spies, Hitler's Luftwaffe had targeted thousands of places to drop their 500 hundred pounders. Talk about competition, here I.G. Farben was literally bombing their rivals out of business.

And what would I.G. Farben do when their former foreign competitors' factories came under Nazi rule? After Hitler's blitzkrieg shock troops had marched far beyond their war-damaged buildings? They'd buy these businesses at fire-sale prices, rebuild them, re-hire the employees, and begin the manufacture of whatever Hitler needed.

What caused the throbbing of the very marrow in my bones was when I learned of I.G. Farben's plans for the orderly confiscation and takeover of every vital industry, corporation and service in the United States.

The largest and saddest shock for this youngest son of a father (with thirteen brothers and sisters) who grew up speaking only German, was why  one of the largest and most infamous Jewish concentration camps was located where it was, and why this fact is not made common knowledge to students worldwide and held up as deadly proof of what intimate collaboration between government and unbridled corporate greed with neither entity burdened by Judaeo-Christian morality can wrought.

"The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into coverups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys."

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and cancer-causing monkey viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and emerging global epidemics is one of the longest titles of a book not printed  during the 19th Century.

To link together a murder in New Orleans, and polio vaccine laced with cancer-causing simian retro-viruses, (that early 20th Century science knew might be there, but couldn't filter out), Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination, and the world-wide epidemic of diseases never seen before, took some doing. But New Orleans native, author Edward T. Haslam has done a magnificent job in this inch and one-eighth thick, larger-fonted, trade size paperback and then it peppered with black and white thumbnail-sized photos.

Don't let the self-published-look of Dr. Mary's Monkey put you off, for it is printed by Trine Day, a publisher of controversial subjects way too hot for the mainstream press.

Being an older sort, I found the larger font made it easy to read the precise sentences. There are numerous footnotes at the end of each chapter that greatly add to the reader's understanding.

I found author Haslam far from pedantic, or even always certain he was right, for when he could not verify a fact, or simply did not know, or discovered his source lying to him, he said so. All through the book he leaves any assumptions or suppositions entirely up to the reader, and not until the very last pages of the book does he actually reveal the conclusions he's come to over the past 20 years.

Having read a shelf-full of books on John F. Kennedy's life, his assassination, the C.I.A., and also knowing Texas and Louisiana governments to be both misogynistic and crookeder than a dog's hind leg, I found Dr. Mary's Monkey to come closest to explaining three questions I've never found the answers to:

1) Who killed Kennedy. Why?

2) What caused cancer rates to explode in the second half of the 20th Century?

3) Why, all of a sudden, did uniquely simian-only viruses cross over into the general human population, when they had remained steadfastly outside the homo-sapien experience for the previous 5,000 years?

I've always found the answers just a little too simplistic.

1) "Oswald alone killed Kennedy"

2) "Everything but mom's apple pie causes cancer and it's going under the microscope next"

3) "Native Africans ate monkey meat and practice 'unsafe-sex' and that's what caused AIDS"

Broken in about 16 sections, Edward T. Haslam lays out his research of almost 20 years in an easy-to-read and logical fashion that, as the tired-of-being-lied-to reader gets madder and madder, answers the above trio of questions.

Do not be mistaken, or misled, Dr. Mary's Monkey is a serious book that answers serious questions by providing serious documentation, combined with  author-interviews with many of those personally involved with Dr. Mary Sherman, Lee Harvey Oswald, Dr. Alton Ochsner, David William Ferrie, Judyth Vary Baker and other important players.

If you were alive during the November 1963 murder of JFK and have always had nagging doubts about the scenario that a single shooter, recently returned from self-exile in the communist (and Cold-War-Era) U.S.S.R., using the name of A.J.Hidell mail-ordered a 20 year old, bolt-action, Italian made, World War II rifle and managed to (once again, alone) attain employment in a multi-storied building along the highly confidential (and only changed days before) parade route of the most powerful and greatly adored man on the face of the earth, you must read Dr. Mary's Monkey.

reviewed: October 11, 2008

Begun: 09/13/2008   Finished: 09/21/2008 Purchased: September 2008
Where: BORDERS®
B&N Net Rank: 7,222
Pages: Trade paperback, 374pp
Cover price: $19.95
Purchase price: $19.95 (Gift)
Genre: History - Microbiology - Conspiracy & Scandal Investigations - Political corruption

"Here are 100 of the most violent films in cinema history, the ones that viscerally affected moviegoers and stayed fixed in their minds forever. Understand how and why these films work through an illuminating analysis of their influence and iconography in such classics as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and John Woo's The Killer. See how directors kept pushing back the boundaries of acceptable violence, from the slicing of an eyeball in Un Chien Andalou to the chopping of an ear in Reservoir Dogs..."

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

"This book focuses on 100 films that have had an effect on the portrayal of violence in cinema..."

The book is chopped into five chapters, ranging from 'Influence and Iconography' to 'Censorship and Controversy.' The book has a short three paged footnote section that has information that must be referenced during your reading.

Being that the author is British, more British films are included in his listings than a jingoistic American might have thought proper.

Also, the British author, Neil Fulwood (great name for a porn star eh?) sides with the far left politically in the United States, and oddly expresses more hatred for war than is typically expressed by the actual opponents in a war.

I write 'oddly' because, the only reason England was able to become the stagnant, socialist, humanistic, and Muslim-centric entity it is today in the 21st Century, is because of a war (a war during which many citizens also protested of its wrongness). That war was known as World War Two.

The reader, once cognizant of the author's biases will find that, One Hundred Violent Films that Changed Cinema does a bang-up job of examining every one of the listed movies.

Your Mr.Wonderful, being the dummy I am, simply watches movies, not for any particular message, truth or answer, but simply to be entertained, and to momentarily be distracted from my entirely unfulfilled existence.

Thanks to author Mr.Fulwood, I now know that I blithely sat through and supremely enjoyed movies such as Apocalypse Now  when I instead should have been gathering up all these obvious lessons about life, war, love and hate and such.

All in all, One Hundred Violent Films is an excellent work to discover a ton of stuff you might not have known about your favorite violence-packed movies. And I also found it yet another source from which to add a few more pictures to my Blockbuster DVD queue, like I did when I added the movie Baise-moi .

Begun: 09/27/2008   Finished: 09/29/2008 Purchased: September 2008
Where: Mr.Wonderful III
B&N Net Rank: 639,729
Pages: Trade paperback, 144pp
Cover price: $14.95
Purchase price: borrowed
Genre: Movies

"For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, 'a legacy of ashes.'

Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll..."

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

Legacy of Ashes is the book about the Central Intelligence Agency.

As long as the reader realizes that the pinch-faced liberal author and New York Times reporter believes that anything such as law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and certainly war, is perpetually corrupt, a waste of lives, money, and time, while everything that revolves around taxpayer funded social programs (never mentioned in the Constitution) are absolutely critical, saintly-managed, don't waste a dime, and are 100% beneficial and uplifting to the deserving recipients, you will understand the prism Mr. Weiner views the actions of the United State through.

He sometimes complains that all the tax dollars spent on C.I.A. misadventures could have gone to social programs, but oddly he never mentions anything about rebating this I.R.S. plunder back to the individuals who paid it in or say, the lowering the tax rates.

A revealing moment in the book is when author Weiner exposes his sincere belief that Jimmy Carter actually began the process of the Berlin Wall coming down, and then, within pages paints a picture of a President Reagan eating jelly beans and falling asleep at policy meetings.

At least Mr. Weiner could not force himself to lie and state 'we lost' the 1968 Vietnam Tet Offensive (when later enemy diaries revealed we had demolished the North Vietnamese army) and instead termed it a philosophical loss. A philosophical loss that cost hundreds of thousands of Asians their lives, and millions more their freedom.

Because Legacy of Ashes is a major attack on a purposely secret, sometimes criminal, sometimes deadly, function of government that Liberals believe, in their make-nice, fantasy world, post-W.T.T. bombing #1, send-in-the-lawyers-mode, believe should not even exist, it is no wonder this work was listed at the top of so many book lists.

Many of the Left believe that if the U.S. threatens terrorists with an extended trial in civil criminal court, that that specter alone will completely extinguish their desire to slaughter everyone who does not agree with them and everyone within the blast radius of their suicide vest or IUD.

Speaking of the popularity of this book with the Left, one area of the book I find the major media not really focusing on much at all is how Bobby Kennedy (R.I.P.) and John F. Kennedy (R.I.P.) tried so very hard, even going so far as having the C.I.A. enlist the Mafia, in various attempts to murder Fidel Castro, prime minister of Cuba. One attempt, which was to occur on November 22nd, 1963, was preempted by an assassination in Dallas, Texas.

Weiner's intricate account of what exactly happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 will also shatter many myths about the since sainted attorney general and younger brother of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. He also details exactly what non-incident caused Democrat Lyndon Johnson to massively ramp up the War in Vietnam the Left loves to hate which resulted in 50,000 of our citizens dead.

He delves into the C.I.A.-designed Bay of Pigs landing, where I was delighted to discover that President John F. Kennedy had about as much to do with that fiasco, as F.D.R.'s Vice-President Harry Truman, had to do with the Manhattan Project.

Although author Weiner is far better than most left-leaning chroniclers, he still uses the writer's subterfuge of citing 'the administration' when the culprit is known to be a Democrat-led White House. But then he uses the name of the G.O.P. president whenever and wherever the instigator was birthed of a Republican administration.

Be all that as it is, as long as the reader keeps in mind what the author believes: Big Government, High Taxes, Social Engineering = good; Profit, capitalism, corporations and anything involved with weapons more potent than strong words learned at Harvard = bad, one can approach the book with the skepticism author Weiner, with his 155 pages of end notes, attempts to bury.

By the time I had gotten to page 138 in the main text, I had read 59 pages of notes. This leads me to believe that very many people who bought the book did not actually consume its entire 702 pages.

Don't get me wrong, Tim Weiner is far, far more balanced in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA than anything you will hear on NPR, read in the New York Times or view on the Major broadcast and cable outlets. I can imagine he endured a lot of flack for exposing that Democrats screwed up the C.I.A. just as much as the party of Abraham Lincoln did. Why he even reveals that father Joe Kennedy instructed his eldest son John, to keep both F.B.I. head J. Edgar Hoover and C.I.A. Director Dulles in his administration after he assumed office for, 'purely personal reasons.'

The research on the book was prodigious. It will probably be the most comprehensive and historically accurate history of the C.I.A., ever written. And the fact that it is written about an organization secret by design (with many, many of the book's participants long dead) he will find few challengers to his evidence, which often consists of nothing more than one on one oral interviews. If some one person says something, does that make it true?

Nowadays it is sometimes hard to remember what a threat Americans believed the Soviet Union to be. And with thousands of missiles tipped with nuclear weapons, hundreds of bomb-laden aircraft, dozens of advanced missile firing submarines and millions of troops also managing tactical atomic weapons, they were a quite dangerous foe.

We all were taught and believed in the 'Domino Theory' of countries falling one after another to Soviet aggression like dominos. The men at the CIA fed, and fed on this fear and managed a secret budget that was far out of proportion to its actual needs. CIA spies and spy chiefs sometimes, without the President even knowing, pretty much did what they wanted with their vast and secret sums of taxpayer money.

I was amazed at how many politicians the C.I.A., through assassinations, pay-offs, and other means, placed in high offices of other countries around the world, all the while knowing that their chosen one would halt the expansion of the U.S.S.R. into his nation.

However, as we are currently discovering in the Middle East, the C.I.A. discovered long ago, and that is that in countries populated by ignorant, destitute, and powerless citizens, no matter what our wishes are, they soon enough find themselves under the rule of just another generic blood-thirsty and viscous tyrant.

Those of us who lived through the Cold War, when twenty four hours a day hundreds of nuclear bomb laden U.S. B-52 bombers were either flying to their Fail Safe point, outside of the borders of the Soviet Union, or coming back home after being turned around at the same point, reading Legacy of Ashes, and hearing the lies, propaganda and nonsense spread by the C.I.A. and their agents, I can understand why many Soviet leaders honestly believed that we were on the offensive  and hoping to wipe them out with a first-launch nuclear attack.

However, those actions by the C.I.A. could not negate the verbal guarantees spoken by these same Soviets assuring everyone and anyone that they did indeed plan on total world domination and the certain demise of The West.

Mr. Weiner paints the C.I.A. as failure after failure. He colors the directors of the C.I.A. as power hungry, arrogant, unsuited to lead and unskilled in intelligence. Which is quite similar to the traits owned by virtually all of our United States Senators.

He reveals that the C.I.A. always seemed to be penetrated with spies from the other side, which were in turn, a major cause of so many failed missions and so many agent deaths.

Again and again he details that those in management and many of the people in the field did what they felt like and confidently dealt with and paid informers whose information was already known to be virtually 100% invented. In turn, C.I.A. analysts delivered the data (either truthful or made up) that they imagined the director or the pro-C.I.A. congressional members wanted to see.

While I've got to believe that the C.I.A. had a few more successes than the single one detailed in the book, being the plaything of both various C.I.A. directors and presidential administrations, it certainly seems to have never found firm focus or talented personnel, or suffered from proper internal chain-of-command-type management or external Congressional oversight.

However, like all huge government agencies, it did have boxcars of taxpayer dollars to spend.

Begun: 06/08/2008   Finished: 07/20/2008 Purchased: March 2008
Where: History Book Club

B&N Net Rank: 659
Pages: Hardcover: 702pp
Cover price: $27.95
Purchase price: $1.00 (new)
Genre: Political Freedom & Security Intelligence

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