Here is a book that I have been looking for for some time, a book that incorporates the magnificent artwork of the Napoleonic period along with a detailed profile of Napoleon. The result is magic and a pure delight to the eye. Proctor Jones has done a splendid job at merging the two memoirs of Menval (Napoleon's secretary) and Constant (Napoleon's valet) to provide a detailed and intimate account account of Napoleon. This is not a book that details Napoleon's battles or strategic genius but is a book that provides a wonderful insight into his character and personality instead. What comes across is that Napoleon was indeed human with many strengths and weaknesses and is not the ogre or monster as often portrayed by British propaganda. One can see the the unboundless energy, emotion, magnetism and even quirky habits of the man as seen through Menval and Constant. The artwork is plentiful and compliments the events as described in the narrative. This is a superb book, printed on high quality paper and an essential addition to any buff of the Napoleonic period. You will not be disappointed, only delighted.

I will begin this review by saying that I knew Proctor Jones and liked him very much. I had the privlege to travel with him and visit many of his friends while I was living and working France. He was a wonderful man and an enjoyable companion and I will fondly cherish my memories of him.

Even today his memory is still strong for those of us who knew him and his name is a talisman which opens doors which otherwise would be sealed.

Many people claim to have access to special or unknown collections. Proctor was the real deal.

This book was a labor of love for Proctor. He set out to publish pictures that had not been seen in other books...he spent an unbelievable amount of money, time and effort tracking down unpublished art and securing the right to publish it in this book.

He then published this book himself because no publisher would print it at the level of quality he wanted. He was particular about the paper, the binding and the detail of the reproductions...

Proctor then was able to get Jean Tulard to do the preface...virtually impossible for an American author...and even launched the French version of the book at a reception at Malmaison (I was there).

Proctor never intended to make money on the book...It was his intention to bring these works to an audience who would otherwise find them inaccessable. I know for a fact that at the print run he authorized he lost tens of thousands of dollars just on the royalties and fees he paid for the permission to reproduce these paintings.

This book is in a limited print run in English and in French and when they are gone they will be gone. Just like Proctor.

Proctor I will miss you and I thank you for producing this book.

This is a fantastic book as it includes within its cover a feast of great Napoleonic paintings and memorabilia which is worth the price alone. The text is finely edited by Proctor-Jones, comprising of an interwoven thread based on two memoirs of two men who were closely linked to Napoleon. One was his secretary, C Meneval and the other is his personal valet W Constant.
Every dedicated Napoleonophile should own a copy.

Drayton's main point is to show the inter-relatedness of imperial control over nature and people. Natural sciences and political economy became related. That is, an understanding of nature's laws would help improve the administration of people and things/environment. Botany facilitated improvement ["a commitment to the reform of the world as a whole" p. 104], and improvement by the state justified empire.

He seeks to show this by concentration on Kew as a place where science and expansion converged (even while sitting at the very heart of the center. "What matters is Kew as an agent and product of modern history, as a space in which ideas about nature, economy, and legitimate authority interacted with concrete policies over Imperial Britain's nineteenth century." p. xvii. "From the 1780s onwards, however, it became a de facto national collection, to which seeds and bulbs were sent from every part of the world. More strikingly, Kew became a source of plants, and of gardeners, sent outwards to Britain's overseas dominions." p. 108.

He offers this summary: "Botanical knowledge, linked to the global transit of exotic commodities, had come to symbolize an imperium both rational and divine." p. 25.

"Systems of classification, as much as sextants and chronometers, allowed Europeans to perceive themselves as the magistrates of Providence, equipped by their knowledge of its laws with responsibilities over all of creation." p. 45. This knowledge justified their dominion. "British 'improvers' moved, at home and abroad, in the faith that they ultimately knew better than those on the ground. Their confidence depended, in part, on the assumption that they possessed a more profound understanding of how Nature worked." p. 90.

Drayton wants to upset the idea of imperialism being simply the center imposing itself on the periphery, rather: "Over all, we should begin to conceive of European 'expansion' as the colonization of Europe by extra-European interests." p. xviii The periphery changed the culture at the center: "Tropical nature [and its defiance of categories framed by the likes of Linnaeus] had again overthrown a system too provincial in its dependence on Europe..." p. 19.

Having superior knowledge justified exploitation of foreign lands despite natives, but it also justified conserving resources despite native demands when it suited the empire. These points are Drayton's most interesting for me (I could have used a lot more thinking about this-perhaps at the expense of stuff on personal politics in and around Kew).

Drayton insists botany pave the way for empire in a number of ways: knowledge and expertise lent legitimacy to foreign intervention (the enlightened know best), botanists themselves were local agents of empire, and knowledge allowed for redistribution of plants for profit in the center and around the imperial periphery.

This is one of the most exciting books I have ever read. It connects so many different strands of intellectual history, British history, and world history into one elegantly organized story which works over four centuries. It is packed with original arguments and suggestions-- almost too many, at times it is difficult to keep track of all the arguments that are in play at the same time. Drayton has a gift for keeping lots of balls in the air. It is the kind of book which leaves you feeling smarter in a dozen kinds of ways. I thought the conclusion was pretty prophetic about the world of 9-11.

Drayton has penned a remarkable history and historical sociology of the planting of empire, science and of course, plants. A remarkable achievment, complemented by the high quality of production by Yale University Press. Highly recommended, even to those who might believe that they have no interest in either science or empire...deserves more than five stars!

This excellent volume combines 2 books by the highly readable Viscount Norwich. His history of the Normans in south Italy and Sicily in the 10th and 11th centuries fills a gap in our knowledge of these fascinating mercenaries who-would-be-kings and rings true even today with the impact of Europeans on the Arab world and vice-versa. Remember, the Normans (of Norman Conquest of England fame) were the descendants of Viking raiders who settled in France and their military prowess against the Byzantine Empire and conquests in Italy were just as important as their better known invasion and conquest of England and Ireland in the same centuries.

Norwich is a storyteller as much as he is a historian. He resembles Barbara Tuchman -- you might not base a doctoral thesis on his work, but he certaily provides a great read. In many ways, this work is superior to his Byzantium trilogy. This may be because he has bitten off a more managable slice of history. This allows Norwich to go deeper on the main personalities and events he is covering. You really come a way with a feeling for this remarkable adventure of the Normans in Southern Italy and the advanced and powerful state they were able to create. It also highlights thier impact on the crusades, Byzantium, and the broader struggle between the Pope and secular power. I really enjoyed this book -- so much so that I travelled to Sicily to visit some of the many amazing artifacts left behind by this underdocumented "other conquest" of the Normans.

This fascinating book covers the conquest of the Lombard, Byzantine, and Muslim areas of Southern Italy and Sicily by Normans, originally drawn to that region as pilgrims and mercenaries. The Normans came into their own in 1053, when they destroyed a Papal army meant to destroy the upstarts from the north. They later became Papal protectors and their leader, Roger II, was crowned King of Sicily by the Antipope Anacletus II in 1130. The Kingdom lasted until 1193, when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II inherited the country.

Like Norwich's other works, this is "merely" a well-written, enjoyable, non-scholarly (but why should scholars have all the fun?) reciting of "the other Norman conquest," a history that few people have ever heard of. Norwich's dry humor keeps the reader entertained and amused throughout. For example, after describing Bernard of Clairvaux' complaint about Anacletus II's family's Jewish origins -- "it is to the injury of Christ that the pffspring of a Jew should have seized for himself the throne of St. Peter" -- Norwich comments, "The question of St. Peter's own racial origins does not seem to have occurred to him." Comparing a mosaic of King William I with the chronicler's descriptions of hs extreme handsomeness, Norwish writes, "After all we have heard of William's beauty, that round face, fair scrubby beard and slightly vacant expression come as a faint disappointment."

This book is at least as good as Norwich's Byzantium books.

A journalist observes the seasons in a garden in Canale, Etruria, and recounts the tribulations and satisfactions of creating it. Readers who fantasize about getting a sweet little cottage set in romantic countryside, planting a garden there, and becoming part of a traditional community-that is, practically everyone who isn't actually doing so at the moment-have created an insatiable demand for stories like A Year in Provence and In Tuscany to color their daydreams. Marble's cheerful garden chronicle sticks to the established formulas of the genre, and revolves around the adventures of a sophisticated but sympathetic couple with some unspecified source of income who go off in search of their spiritual home in some not-yet-fashionable patch of countryside. They build a touchingly modest house with thick stone walls and a tile roof for a reassuringly low price, and adjust awkwardly to the lack of American comforts. The grudgingly productive farmland is gradually coaxed into luxuriant, decorative bloom, and there is the assortment of entertaining eccentrics and local yokels (who use dynamite to dig an orchard and wreak havoc with the water pipes) close by in the background. This particular specimen of the myth offers plenty of incidental pleasures: Marble's prose is witty and reasonably charming, and she presents some sharp, precise observations on semitropical gardening (including a wonderfully detailed chapter on seed germination). Yet the little town of Canale never quite comes into focus either as a landscape or a society. Portraits of the indigenous population, including Massimo (a bulldozer driver with a mysterious past) and DeDe (a plant wizard with a sleazy husband) have a creepily condescending tone, as though it never occurred to the author that they might tell their stories for themselves, or that the perceptions of the people who have worked the land for generations might be as valid and interesting as a newcomer's. Now that would be a refreshing variation on the theme. Pleasant fodder for armchair travelers and gardeners, if not appreciably different from the many other works of its kind.

A truly delightful book about Italians, human behavior, history, travel, and gardening. The author paints a picture with her words, captures your imagination, and makes you chuckle at the unique Italian way of living. From buying land and building a house to sinister business deals, to marriage contracting, gardening fetes and disasters, this book will charm and delight you on many different levels. I enjoyed this book so much more than "Under the Tuscan Sun." This is truly a gem of a book.

I love to travel but I have never added to the sales of those memoirs of hapless outsiders who renovate a barn or farmhouse in Provence, Tuscany or Umbria. No matter how well-written, most are self-conscious narratives recycling the same ingredients: coping, making friends--and enemies--and eating well. Joan Marble's book is refreshingly different. She and her husband built rather than renovated, and in Etruria, off the touristic track; they nurtured unforgiving soil producing delights for the table. But it is the delight of armchair gardening that makes this book such a good read. There is humor and pathos in how this couple celebrate life. Highly recommended.

This tale reveals nothing can warm a person more than winter's arrival. Walks in the cold, warming beverages and the aroma of something baking combined with interaction among people we love makes for a compelling read. Thank you Ron for taking me to Germany and bringing back memories of my boyhood in East Central Ohio, where the Bavarian influence is hard to overlook.

In this first person account, told with gentle humor and much love, Ronald L. Harmon relates his fascinating experience as a quasi-member of a wonderful German family he has known for 30 years, who live in a Bavarian farm community. Once Upon a Bavarian Winter, a heartwarming story that takes place in the picturesque rural village of Oberammergau, Germany, explores the Bavarian landscape through language, culinary delights, customs and lifestyles. The small village is well known for its woodcarving industry, and Harmon's anecdotes catch the essence of this intricate art: dedication, commitment, and beauty.

Once Upon a Bavarian Winter gives a compassionate account of living in the community where the famous "Passion Play," performed every ten years, provides a notable backdrop for the entire village. The "Passion Play" came into being because of a vow to God during the 16th Century when the Black Plague threatened to wipe out the entire village. The people of Oberammergau promised to provide the world with a remembrance of the martyrdom of Christ, if they would be saved from the Plague. The Plague did, in fact subside and today people from all over the world come to the village to see the play created from a promise made to God nearly 400 years ago.

Throughout the book, Harmon, a well-known artist, and photographer, paints colorful verbal portraits of the neighbors, shopkeepers, and the family about whom he cares so much. The vignettes are sketched with humanity, warmth, and great appreciation and respect for the customs and culture of traditional German life. In the best manner of "innocents abroad," Ronald Harmon knows how to make light of his own blunders and through this descriptive style, allows the images to effortlessly Appear in one's mind's eye, inviting the reader to be an intimate companion on this journey of discovery and wonder.

The chapters contrast the iron-cold of winter snowstorms with the atmosphere of a warm-cozy kitchen and the delights of sumptuous regional cuisine. Recipes sprinkled throughout the book offer the readers a chance to try, for themselves, the German cuisine that brings an extra interest to the book.

The scene on Christmas Eve, when the author stands alone in the living room of his "German's Family's" home, reflecting n a quote by J. M. Barrie, as spoken by a minister when Harmon's father passed away, is really the crux of this remarkable book.

"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."

This charming, beautifully written book takes the reader on a double journey -- a journey through a tiny German village, where the breathtaking scenery, as well as the kind, friendly, hard working people, warm the heart, and a journey through the life of one incredible German family, as seen through the eyes of their long-time American friend -- artist, photographer and writer, Ronald Harmon. Join Harmon as he celebrates Christmas and New Years with his "adopted" family, and you will experience these holidays in a way you never have before. With each page, you will feel like a child opening his presents on Christmas
Day. In this deeply moving testimonial to love, faith and the important of family, Roald Harmon has given us a wonderful gift.

Henry Friedlander provides a compelling and accurate portrayal of the origins of the Holocaust in the elimination of the mentally ill and physically handicapped. He starts with a description of the origins of German theories of racial superiority based upon social Darwinism which began long before the Nazis came to power. Many German physicians believed that the handicapped were a burden to society and that one of Medicine's chief functions was to be merciful and weed out the lame and feeble and remove them, painlessly, of course. With the advent of National Socialism and coming to power of Adolf Hitler, these doctors willingly joined in the sterilization and euthanistic practices of the Master Race. Gypsies and Jews were the main groups selected but all handicapped were gathered up. The author describes in detail the frustrations experienced by these teutonic genetic warriors because they could not more efficiently kill and maim and remove the untermeunschen. This book is a nightmare which can happen again. The world still witnesses the open genocide of Central Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. While Hitler's bodily presence has been gone for 55 years, his philosophical dementia remains with us. This book is an excellent reminder of science misused and politicized.

As a Deaf person and an activist for the rights of the disabled in education and medical care, I was appalled to find out that the disabled were singled out for sterilization and euthanasia long before the Jews had been. I was even more upset that prior to medical school, I had never even heard of the willing collaboration of doctors and scientists in Germany with the Nazi political machine to rid their race of defective people (it didn't seem to matter when impairment began or how, or these people were educable and able to work). Not to ever dismiss the horror of the Jewish Holocaust and the amount of lives taken, but it is imperative that we remember and we teach that the slope leading to extermination of races began with the ideas of Social Darwinism, natural selection, and survival of the fittest, which were the scientific theories/beliefs used to justify the removal of anyone with a difference. This belief system still pervades society today, when someone like Kervorkian (who only worked with dead bodies) could take it upon himself to decide whether someone's life was of any worth, on the basis of 'normalcy'.

Henry Friedlander does an excellent job of writing and researching into the lives and minds of the doctors and administrators who ran the secret programs that killed first, German children who were born with disabilities, then led to the removal from schools and homes of older children with disabilities to meet their deaths through starvation and drugs, and finally to include adults with disabilities in mass murders. It was on these people that the Nazis perfected their instruments of genocide, and yet, even at Nurenburg their suffering was dismissed as "lives unworthy of life" just because of their disabilities.

This can happen again, especially with the completion of the human genome. NO laws have been suggested to curtail the use of information gleaned from the genome to prevent discrimination of any kind against the disabled. It is of great concern that the disabled community watch opponents of the Americans with Disabilities Act try to get this civil rights act revoked as being expensive, especially since it serves those who many (including Clint Eastwood apparently) feel are not productive members of society. The slippery slope begins at this point, and with these mindsets.

It is imperative that students of medicine and students of science be made to read this book. It is only through education and remembering the children and families whose lives were destroyed that we can avoid allowing this Medical Holocaust from ever happening again. Karen Sadler, Science Education, University of Pittsburgh

From Euthanasia to Genocide is a very very small step. This book is the best and wisest on the subject. It illustrates exactly how easy it was for Nazis to use the American psuedo-science of "eugenics" to aclimate Germany to "life unworthy of life." How simple to use the idea of "mercy death" to rid society of "useless eaters." The members of T4 were ruthless in their quest to define and rid Nazi Germany of deformed infants, the mentally ill, the deaf, the old, the young, the indigent, the DIFFERENT. No marginalised group was safe.

Of the killing centers, Hadamar is the best known -- a hub, so to speak. Nobody really knows how many people were gassed there. The buses arrived like clockwork, on schedule... Day in; day out.

Significantly, there was little civilian protest until T4 moved on to private Christian instutions. The "euthenasia" program was halted "officially" after several churches protested the gassings of institutionalised patients. (Unofffically, the program went on until AFTER the end of the war!) The members of T4 were absorbed into the killing machine known as the Final Solution. Which, of course, was the goal all along....

I reread The Origins of Nazi Genocide periodically just to remind myself that ANYONE can be marginalised -- including me and thee.

This was the most ammasing book I have ever read. It kept moving along and never got boring. One adventure leads to another. This is the best book I have read and it is pretty hard to beat. This book deserves 6 out of 5 stars!!

excellent! a great book for projects on greek olympics! Five-star book, Blacklock did an absolute thriller adventure ride.

PANKRATION: THE ULTIMATE GAME reflects the ancient but brutal sport of Pankration combat. It had but one rule & everything else was allowed even fighting to the death and/or maiming one's rival. .... The rules of combat are defined in the book. The book has an intriguiing love story which causes two cadets to fight for the same woman both men desperately crave.

I have been interested in the Holocaust for some time, and picked up this book because it seemed like it would be a good overview, and still give me the human side of the story. I was happy to find out that it was very well presented--every two pages is a new topic, and it is laid out with pictures, graphs, and personal recollections which make it easy to grasp. The book is laid out chronologically, which makes it easy to follow, and the language isn't difficult to understand.

Mr. Gilbert's grasp of history and what makes history accessible is discovered during the reading of this book. He seems to know that, with this topic especially, the use of personal stories personifies the experience for the reader.

A very good book, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Martin Gilbert, better known for extremely detailed, research-heavy histories and biographies, has chosen to work from established primary and secondary sources in this history of the Holocaust. As a result, the reader with a strong background in this history will not find much new. However, the book is extremely well-written and very accessible--I read it in two sittings, and my 12-year-old brother has just started it.

In addition to effective writing, Gilbert includes some chilling photographs and reproductions of other primary sources. Especially disturbing are German documents cold-bloodedly noting that so many Jews arrived at such-and-such a camp, of whom X were killed immediately, and Y put to work.

Parents who believe their children are of an appropriate age might consider reading this book together as a way of introducing the most important, and most horrific, crime of this century. It is important.

When one of the world's most eminent historians takes on the single most amazing phenomenon of the century, the Holocaust, it gives one pause for thought. So here we have Sir Martin Gilbert, a noted Holocaust authority, writing masterfully about the events leading up to and including the systematic persecution, deportation and murder of the Jews of Europe. His stirring and singular narrative is regularly punctuated by a number of poignant and shocking eyewitness accounts of many who lived through those numbing events. The test is extremely approachable and easy to read, so that the non-historian can appreciate the breadth and scope of his recounting of the events during the 12-year reign of terror levied by the National Socialists in Nazi Germany.

His approach is chronological, much like that employed in his best-selling three volume series on the 20th century. While he relies heavily on established secondary sources for his documentation, the power of his prose and his well-organized approach makes this an entertaining and educational tome to venture into. Although nowhere near as comprehensive as some other tomes such as Klaus Fischer's "History Of An Obsession", he does trace the centuries' long tradition of anti-Semitism culminating in the official state sanctioned approach codified in the institutionalized Nuremberg laws. In all this, Gilbert brilliantly employs survivor's recollections to paint the atrocities in the hues and colors of real human beings, ordinary and identifiable individuals caught in the insanity of the Third Reich. Furthermore, he pursues their individual identities and humanity by giving the reader information on the postwar futures of these people.

So much has been written about the Holocaust that it is difficult to imagine much new or novel to arise some fifty years after the end of the war. Yet the stage always remains open for the unusual display of finely crafted historical perspectives and brilliantly executed prose. The brilliance in this dazzling book is, as Oscar Schindler would have said, in the presentation. Although I have read a number of other books about these times and events that were more detailed, more graphic, or more comprehensive, this is without a doubt the single most impressive, cohesive, and authoritative volume I have read to date regarding the Holocaust in its enormity, and placed in an understandable and comprehensible context. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in owning the single best one-volume book summarizing and explaining the realities of the Holocaust.

This is a first rate travel book on Greece, covering some of the mainland and several interesting islands in the Aegean Sea. Author Katherine Kizilos, daughter of a man who emigrated from Greece to Australia, does not cover all of the country, but such is not her intention. She brings to life some of the various corners of Greece, and does so with wit, enthusiasm, and in an informative manner.

She begins the book with visits to several islands. We travel to Syros, an island that is struggling but is still productive, with a declining though still active seaport. She takes us to Thira, the shattered island as she calls it, the ancient name now in use again, though in more recent times it was known as Santorini. Once part of the Minoan civilization, a cataclysmic volcanic eruption nearly destroyed the island around some 3500 years ago and may have been the source of the eventual extinction of the Minoans. The island's ruins boast many of the hallmarks of that great civilization, including multi-storied villas equipped with running water and flushing toilets. Now, it is filled with sweating, complaining tourists she writes, many of whom are not appreciative of the ancient ruins or even of the old ways of the islands, and has gone in part from an island of proud fishermen and farmers to one of shopkeepers and waiters dependent on tourism. We also visit Lesbos, most famous for being the island of Sappho, less so for the undeservedly obscure Theophrastus, who was renown in ancient times, esteemed by Aristotle; regrettably the island's more famous ancient artist overshadows him. The island is subject to periodic pilgrimages by lesbians, to the combined embarrassment and wonderment of some of the island's residents. I would have liked that the spent more time on the island of Ikaria, but she was pressed for time. Not one of the "stony, sun-flooded" islands that dot the Aegean, instead it is rich and verdant, and for a time was an independent country, as it was the first northern Aegean island to free itself from Turkish rule.

I really enjoyed her visit to Patmos, the so-called island of the apocalypse. It was on this island where St. John wrote the Book of Revelation, his "esoteric and doom-laden prophecy." I loved how she compared it with Thira; in that island, the results of an apocalyptic upheaval are easily visible, yet on Patmos "the dark thread of apocalypse" was invisible, difficult to see, but perhaps more real. Kizilos visited the shrine where St. John was said to have written, yet was unable to get any sense of the man or his writings, instead encountering yet more tourists, oblivious to the deeper meanings of the cave where he worked, directionless hedonists, filled with "manic, purposeless haste."

I was surprised she made a trip to Istanbul, home to a small and declining Greek population. Caught in a perhaps an increasingly Muslim society, victims still of a past (though perhaps improving) Greece-Turkey rift, many stubbornly hang on in that ancient city, once capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire, and still home to the head of the Greek Orthodox Church. I enjoyed how she contrasted the Greeks who call Istanbul home to the non-Greeks who call Thrace in northeastern Greece their home. There we met Turks, Muslims who have been in Greece many generations and know no other home, as well as even a small community of Nubians, descended from servants of an Ottoman emperor and a group of nomads, the Sarakatsans, who had once grazed their flocks on the peaks of the Balkans, but now have largely abandoned those ways. Yet all of these people are part of Greece too, ethnic minorities that are not always accepted or understood by those in Athens but are all a part of Greece.

A good portion of the book was spent in the towns of the Peloponnese near the Gulf of Corinth where her father grew up. It was here more than anywhere else in the book I got a sense of what it was like to live and grow up in Greece. Like most of the rest of Greece, it is a land of declining villages, as sons and daughters flee to busy Athens for jobs or even overseas. Olive groves grow weedy with brambles, grape vines are no longer tended, houses once inhabited for generations lie abandoned, in some areas only the scattered shepherds remain, particularly in the "cold and solitary country" of mountainous Peloponnese. Whereas there was once a complex relationship in families between the pethera, or mother-in-law, and her nifi, or daughter-in-law, the nifi made to do many tasks to prove her worth, sometimes the target of vented frustration from the pethera's days as a nifi, now the pethera are anxious to please the often well educated nifi, immensely pleased when she visits her mother-in-law's village from the busy and prosperous city.

Vividly the author shows that Greece is a land struggling to cope with its past. Its people still sometimes obsess about the Greek-Turkish rift, even though the author makes apparent that is more of a problem for Greeks than for Turks. The country still struggles with the German occupation during World War II and the later civil war, smaller villages still bearing scars where neighbor turned against neighbor and whole families were betrayed over petty greivences. She provided the stories of several who were caught in both conflicts and they make for gripping reading.

The country though is also trying to cope with the future, with declining rural populations, the rising importance of the tourist industry (some Greeks actually upset that all many foreigners ever want to see are old stone ruins), and even with Albanian refugees, disliked but needed as rural workers. Kizilos, like many in Greece, is uncertain about the future, but I think she is ultimately hopeful, as the Greeks have more than anything else proven to be a resilient people

This book is about travel in Greece. It is not organized with care, and this is one of the things I most enjoyed about it. The reader sorta follows along as the writer takes him to this or that corner of the mainland and the islands without a preestablished itinerary, and that's the way it should be in a relaxed place like Greece. The descriptions of some places are superb and there are lots of interesting characters, each with his own emotional baggage and fascinating story. Some of them are likeable and others are pretty awful. The best thing about the book is the close connection the writer has with some of the people she writes about. They are her family and some of them have suffered fiercely from wars and political conflict, but the worst suffering is what the land itself is undergoing in the name of "development:" abandoned groves and fields, empty villages, people unaccustomed to the modern world and left without hope for the future, some not even able to understand the possibilities of the future. Since she is an Australian of Greek descent, the author knows there is no going back from Western values and attitudes, but her book asks what is so great about such attitudes and ambitions if embracing them means we have to leave behind the tenderness, beauty and love of the land that are still the basic principles of life in many areas of Greece. Interestingly, the writer is remarkably even-handed in dealing with Greek/Turkish relations. I would recommend this work to just about anyone, even those who are not particularly interested in Greece.

Sparked by childhood stories told by her father and a natural curiosity for the truth, Kizilos retraces the steps of her father to find the heart and soul of her roots. This entails a journey of not only the mainland, but several small islands and villages where the past struggles violently with the future.

Told in a concise and vivid way, she is both straightforward and philosophical. In contrast to other travel accounts, Kizilos' writing is accessible and often emotional because she is both a journalist who understands how to write for the public and a woman who feels life.

Because she travels to several "unknown" places in Greece -- not just Athens, Mykonos and other popular places frequented by tourists -- readers looking for something off the beaten track can appreciate her more.

I have known and worked with the author for 30 years so I might be considered prejudice. I can honestly say however that I enjoyed the book on it's own merits. Naturally being able to visualize Bob as he described his daily adventures enhanced that enjoyment. Most of those who know Bob as a conservative banker(retired) whose main idea of excercise was to walk out to his garage for a drive in his Mercedes were shocked when he announced he was going backpacking across Spain. This was completely out of character as was acknowledged by his wife Marie and other family members. However, true to character when Bob said he was going to do something you knew he would. For me the highlight of the book was his thoughful planning and preparation prior to the actual trip. I also enjoyed his colorful description of the people he met on the trial and how they watched out for each other. I actually grew to like George and Margaret and hope someday to meet them if they ever come to visit Bob in Chicago. As Bob described his daily travels his doggedness, attention to detail,honesty, frugality (he loved those $6.00 a night refuges) and dry sense of humor kept emerging. I found myself smiling often and thinking "that's Bob". I may never hike the St James Trail but Bob's book was an inspiration to rethink what is possible when you have a dream, set a goal and achieve what you set out to do.

I was impressed by the writer's thoughtfulness to address the preparations prior to making his historic walk. Bob Tuggle's diary format of his journey makes it easy reading, as well as placing the reader in a position to actually visualize the trek without have to do the walk. The writer's descriptions of relationships developed during the trek also added some drama and enjoyable reading of his book.

After wading through book after book about the mystical or cultural significance of the Camino, I was thrilled to find such an honest and down-to-earth guide. Mr. Tuggle made it personal enough to keep me interested, but factual enough to give me a good idea of how to plan my upcoming trip. I finally feel prepared to go. Another thing that is so great about this book is that Mr. Tuggle offers his personal email address for readers to ask questions and such. I wrote to him, not really expecting a reply, but he answered all of my questions thoroughly and with such grace and kindness that I am even more enthusiastic about my trip and his book. It is a fast read and a must for anyone who just wants to walk the trail and not worry about cosmic visions, reincarnation or the power of ley lines. Thank you, Mr. Tuggle.