"In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces."

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

If you read only one book on the horrors of late 20^th Century war, make it this one. Like many Baby-Boomers, Mr.Wonderful could have lost his life in this lottery-driven and misunderstood war. Tears streamed down my face as I read the battles that co-author's Moore and Galloway recorded in this 432 paged hardback. I thank God for self less patriots and true heroes like the soldiers immortalized in my memory by the reading of this book.

The people of Southern Appalachia are hill people of Scottish-Irish descent--religious mystics who cast out demons, drink strychnine, and handle rattlesnakes. When the author, himself Scottish-Irish, uncovers records of snake-handling Covingtons, he decides to take up serpents himself. The result is Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers and Garrison Keillor all rolled into one quirky, unforgettable read.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

Over a week or two of bedtimes, I read this incredibly readable and astonishing book to my then twelve year old boy Mr.Wonderful III. An incredible story, made even more so because it is absolutely true. I'll always remember the night when a particular snake handler didn't have any poison to sip or venomous cottonmouths to coil around his forearm, so he just wrapped his arms around the the belly of the glowing Franklin stove that was heating the room.

George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision of "Negative Utopia" is timelier than ever-and its warnings more powerful. Annotation: The year is 1984; the scene is London, largest population center of Airstrip One, part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

I read this book in one evening before I was a teenager. It scared me so bad that I had nightmares for days afterward. The year 1984 came and went, but Orwell's prophecies continue to be fulfilled although not to quite the visible and violent extent he imagined.

This ground-breaking best-seller reveals for the first time how the mighty and mysterious Federal Reserve operates -- and how it manipulated and transformed both the American economy and the world's during the last eight crucial years. Based on extensive interviews with all the major players, Secrets of the Temple takes us inside the government institution that is in some ways more secretive than the CIA and more powerful than the President or Congress.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

At seven hundred seventeen pages (not counting the forty or so pages of footnotes) this is one of the longest books I have ever read. It took several months to finish and I emptied several yellow highliter's on it pages. If you really want to know how the Federal Reserve operates, I can recommend this massive book. The contradictory part about it is, that after demonstrating how the Federal Reserve manipulates the economy to benefit the incumbent President during the election period, the author then claims that the Federal Reserve never does that.

The astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is unlike any other book you have ever read. It is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder - and rebirth - of man's spirit. With this acclaimed work and its immortal query "Who is John Galt?" Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. This is the book that made her not only one of the most popular novelists of our century, but also one of its most influential thinkers.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

I've made several attempts to complete this massive book but never could do it. Ms. Rand predicts pretty much what has happened to America as the socialist, do-gooder's take over and the working American is looked down upon and only valuable to society as a source of tax money.

In 1937 Hemingway arrived in Spain to cover the Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He filed his dispatches, but the real fruit of those years was FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. The story of Robert Jordan, an American fighting with anti-fascist guerrillas in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, the tragic death of an ideal. It lives for us because of the great disillusionment that grew out of WW II, a war fought with such high hopes and concluded so cynically with a former ally gobbling up half of the Europe we hoped to liberate. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Great in power, broad in scope, intensely emotional, it stands as one of the best war novels of all times.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

With so much said about what a great writer Hemingway was, I felt I had to read at least one of his books. He writes vividly and yanks the reader into the pages of the book. I will forever remember the scene in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" where the villager's are marched off a cliff to their deaths.

Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his wife's suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister-in-law, who begs him to return home, and of two school friends asking for his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protestor and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompasses the past and the present in both Europe and the American South, and that leads him to shocking - and ultimately liberating - truths.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

Mr. Conroy's descriptions of the sights, sounds, smells and ambience of modern day Rome could convince anyone to board the nearest Air Italia flight for that ancient city. I had intended to read this hardback during hours long stints at my (now shuttered) Bookstar bookstore (say that ten times fast) but was so enthralled with the prose, I ended up purchasing the book and adding it to my already crowded bookshelves.

This definitive account of the Gulf War relates the previously untold story of the U.S. war with Iraq in the early 1990s. The author follows the 42-day war from the first night to the final day, providing vivid accounts of bombing runs, White House strategy sessions, fire-fights, and bitter internal conflicts.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

I know it seems like this would be a really boring account of the 1990s Persian Gulf war, but it is not. It's an easy read which among other things exposes French soldiers as being more concerned with their afternoon wine and cheese break than winning a war.

Moynahan's spellbinding chronicles of Russia in 1917--the year of Kerensky's fumbling provisional government and the Bolsheviks' October coup--ranks among the most vivid books to date on the Russian Revolution. Former London Times foreign correspondent Moynahan ( The Claws of the Bear ) describes his material in concrete, human detail: Kerensky's brilliant mocking of Lenin (``Karl Marx never proposed such methods of oriental despotism''); women lined up on icy nights from 3:00 a.m. until the shops opened at 9:00, after which they labored all day . . .

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

Intriguing book on the founding of Marxism in Russia and what a coward Lenin was. Also reveals how violent and barbaric life in early 20th Century Russia was.

Three decades after his death, here is the startling story of John F. Kennedy's three years in the White House. Based on previously unavailable White House files, letters and records, and hundreds of new interviews, Richard Reeves has written the first objective account of Kennedy's presidency. President Kennedy is a dramatic day-by-day, often minute-by-minute, Oval Office narrative of what it was, and is, like to be President.

The time for change was yesterday and the time to wake up is now. The problems Sheindlin encounters daily - welfare abuse, juvenile violence, abandoned or abused children, ugly custody fights - reflect the growing destruction of America's families. They are a mirror of what has gone wrong in America, a reflection of how far we have strayed from personal responsibility and old-fashioned discipline.

Mr.Wonderful Writes:

I read this book long before the television personality "Judge Judy" was created. This book reveals what a pit New York City is and how welfare only helps the government employees who dole out welfare benefits because they collect a regular paycheck.