Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of

NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST

One May day in 1896, at a dining-room table in Cambridge, England, a meeting took place amidst a Romanian-born maverick Jewish intellectual and twin learned Presbyterian Scotswomen, who had assembled to inspect assorted pieces of rag paper and parchment. It was the improbable begin to what would prove a remarkable, continent-hopping, century-crossing saga, and one that in galore ways has revolutionized our sense of what it means to lead a Jewish life.
 
In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poetical and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most critical cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, cash orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole fetch modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have justly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography and share meditation on the supreme value the Jewish persons has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption.

Review“Beautifully written, learned and lucid, Sacred Trash is a treasure that will have to not be concealed . . . Exquisitely realized.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A literary jewel whose pages turn like those of a well-paced thriller, but with all the chiseled elegance and flashes of linguistic surprise that we associate with poetry . . . Sacred Trash has made history pretty and exciting.”
—The Nation
 
“Hoffman and Cole unfold this saga with dramatic flair, peppering their narrative with the Geniza’s own distinct voices, from the ancient and medieval to the modern and contemporary. Skillfully they embed the drama contained within the old texts with the contemporary dramas of the humans handling the texts . . . It is a testament to [them] that they have fleshed out these ghosts, and in a patient manner constructed a vivid, humane saga each bit as extraordinary as a miracle.”
—Haaretz (Israel)

“Both lively and elevating . . . An extended act of celebration of Cairo’s historical Jewish community, their documents, and their documents’ 20th-century students . . . wondrous revived by Hoffman and Cole.”
—Anthony Julius, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A multi-layered work that provokes wonderment and stimulates the imagination on a lot of levels.”
—Moment
 
“Hoffman and Cole’s bright portrayal of the invention of the ancient Cairo Geniza . . . is equivalent elements treasure hunt for the sacred and historical, and Herculean rescue of crucial texts . . . Sacred Trash is a terrifically accessible and stimulating account of ‘numerous heroes, medieval and modern’ and their discoveries of artifacts that have transformed our understanding of the interplay among history and religion.”
—The Boston Globe
 
“The real behind-the-scenes story of the Cairo Geniza and the Western scholars who retrieved and studied it is . . . likewise a very humane story, as Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole show in their charming and unobtrusively erudite new book.”
—The Jewish Review of Books

“A wondrous enthusiasti and lively account of a civilization we could not have imagined existed and of the men and women whose a feeling of excitement and commitment brought it to light.”
—Gabriel Josipovici, The Wall Street Journal

“Absorbing  . . . Hoffman and Cole are adroit in their exegesis . . . [Sacred Trash is] an accessible, neatly narrated story of hallowed detritus and the resurrection of almost 1,000 years of culture and learning.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“What a delight to have the story of the Cairo Geniza, it is romantic recovery and spectacular contents, told here by two such brilliant wordsmiths as Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. This book takes readers to the very navel of the medieval world, east and west, Arab and Jew, shattering a heap of preconceptions along the way.”
—Janet Soskice, author of Sisters of Sinai

“Hoffman and Cole spun an extraordinary tale of intellectual adventure and lasting scholarly accomplishment. The men and women who brought the Cairo Geniza to light are staged here in painstaking detail, their quirks and their splendor exposed in equivalent measure. Carefully researched and beautifully written.”
—James Kugel, author of How to Read the Bible

“Sacred Trash is a jewel of a book: a lively and deeply informed account of the Cairo Geniza, a magnificent Egyptian treasure-house of Jewish religion, literature, and history that was forgotten for centuries, and of the extraordinary crew of scholars and impresarios who saved the documents, fitted the scraps back together, and made them speak and sing.”
—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
 
One hundred and twenty years ago, time travel was all at once realized: With the invention of the Cairo Geniza, medieval Jewish life in all it is sacred and routine efflorescence came tumbling out in thousands of manuscript fragments, each one a distinct and living voice of an ancestral civilization. No longer may we speak of the seven wonders of the world—in this astounding and acutely applicable tale, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have uncovered a remarkable eighth; and in it is connection to our own humanity, it surpasses all the rest.”
—Cynthia Ozick

“Sacred Trash is a little masterpiece. The romance of Hebrew scholarship has never been so vividly conveyed. This book is extraordinary in characterization, thought, and prose style. It will instruct mutual readers, Jewish and gentile, how much spiritual tradition owes to the biggest scholars. This instructing comes through delight.”
—Harold Bloom

About the Author

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which was named a best book of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review.
 
Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His a great deal of volumes of award-winning translations include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950––1492. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.
 
Hoffman and Cole live, together, in Jerusalem and New Haven.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
 
Hidden Wisdom
Cambridge, May 1896
 
When the self-taught Scottish scholar of Arabic and Syriac Agnes Lewis and her no-less-learned twin sister, Margaret Gibson, hurried down a street or a hallway, they moved—as a friend later described them—“like ships in full sail.” Their plump frames, thick lips, and more or less hawkish eyes made them, theoretically, identical. And both were rather vain in regards to their dainty hands, which on special occasions they “weighed down with ageold rings.” In a poignant and peculiar coinci­dence, each of the sisters had been widowed after just a few years of happy marriage to a clergyman.
 
But Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson were distinct to those who knew them. Older by an entire twenty minutes, Agnes was the more ambitious, colorful, and domineering of the two; Margaret had a quieter intelligence and was, it was said, “more normal.” By age fifty, Agnes had written three travel books and three novels, and had translated a tourist guide from the Greek; Margaret had contributed amply to and probably helped write her sister’s nonfiction books, edited her husband’s translation of Cervantes’ Journey to Parnassus, and grown adept at watercolors. They were, meanwhile, exceptionally close—around Cambridge they came to be known as a single unit, the “Giblews”—and after the deaths of their husbands they devoted themselves and their sizable inheritance to a life of travel and study together.
 
This followed rather naturally from the maverick manner in which they’d been raised in a little town near Glasgow by their forward-thinking lawyer father, a widower, who subscribed to an instructional phi­losophy that was equivalent parts Bohemian and Calvinist—as far-out as it was firm. Eschewing the fashion for treating girls’ minds like fine china, he assumed his daughters were made of tougher stuff and schooled them as altho they were sons, instructing them to think for themselves, to argue and ride horses. Perhaps most important, he had instilled in them early on a passion for philology, promising them that they could travel to any country on condition that they first learned it is language. French, Spanish, German, and Italian followed, as did childhood trips around the Continent. He also encouraged the girls’ closely familial friendship with their church’s progressive and intellectually daring young preacher, who had once been a protégé of the opium-eating Romantic essayist Thomas de Quincy.
 
After their father’s sudden death when they were twenty-three, Agnes and Margaret sought consolation in strange alphabets and in travel to still more distant climes: Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Cyprus. By middle age they had learned, amongst them, numerous nine languages—adding to their European repertoire Hebrew, Persian, and Syriac written in Estrangelo script. Having also studied the latest photographic techniques, they journeyed broad all around the East, taking thousands of pictures of ancient manuscript pages and buying piles of others, the most interesting of which they then set out to transcribe and translate.
 
As women, and as devout (not to mention eccentric and notoriously party-throwing) Presbyterians, they lived and worked on the boundary line of largely Anglican, male-centered Cambridge society—women were not granted degrees at the town’s illustrious university until 1948—and they counted as their nearest friends a whole host of Quakers, freethinkers, and Jews. Yet Agnes’s 1892 invention at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai of one of the oldest Syriac versions of the New Testament had brought the sisters respect in learned circles: their multiple books on the subject ranged from the strictly scholarly A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sinai Palimpsest to the more talky and usual How the Codex Was Found. Somehow the rumor disseminate that Mrs. Lewis had just happened to recognize a fragment of the ancient manuscript in the monastery dining hall, where it was being employed as a butter dish. In fact, the codex was held under tight lock and key, and it is very fragile condition—to say not one thing of it is sacred status—certainly precluded it is use by the monks as mere tableware. It took severe erudition and diplomacy for the twins to gain access to the manuscript in the monastery library; they then worked painstakingly over a amount of time of years to decode the codex, as it were. “The leaves,” wrote Agnes, “are deeply stained, and in elements ready to crumble. One and all of them were glued together, until the librarian of the Convent and I separated them with our fingers.” She and Margaret proceeded to photograph each of it is 358 pages and, on their return to Cambridge, processed the film themselves and labored over the text’s decipherment. Later they arranged for an expedition of assorted discerned Cambridge scholars to travel with them to Sinai, where they worked as a team, transcribing the codex as a whole.
 
All these far-flung intellectual adventures had been stimulating but likewise exhausting. And even though the twins had resolved to spend a quiet season in Cambridge, immersed in the proofs of the respective texts they had not long back copied from manuscript, they set out in the early spring of 1896 on still another Middle Eastern trip—their third in almost as some years—bound for Palestine and Egypt. The reason for the journeying was reported later in what sounds like purposely vague terms: “News we received from Cairo,” Agnes wrote enigmatically, “seemed to indicate that there might be some probability of our finding something there.” Weary as they were from their former travels, they had not been eager to take this peculiar trip, “and yet,” as she would confess in retrospect, “it had not been the least fruitful in results.”
 
This understatement was typical of Agnes, and gives little sense of the startling events that had come to pass one historic May day in 1896, soon after the twins’ return. Suffering from what her sister, Margaret, described as “a severe rheumatic illness, caused by unjustified exposure on the night when we had lost our tents in the valley of Elah,” Agnes had decisive that morning to stretch her legs. While out strolling in down­town Cambridge, she was exceptionally glad to bump into a good friend— and, strangely, another twin who likewise took great pride in his beauteous hands—the Romanian-born Talmud scholar, Solomon Schechter.
 
Even more of an oddball in the donnish context of Cambridge than Agnes and Margaret, the very Jewish, very blustery Schechter must, too, have cut a remarkable figure as he strode down King’s Parade. With his bushy, red-tinted beard, unruly hair, and tendency to gesticulate broadly as he spoke, Schechter had been known to set off in the broiling heat of midsummer wrapped up in a winter coat and assorted yards of scarf. An acquaintance remembered first meeting Schechter, with “his dirty black coat, smudged all over with snuff and ashes from his cigar, hands unwashed, nails as black as ink, but rather nice fingers, beard and hair unkempt, a ruddy complexion… One ear was stuffed full of wool, hanging out, and he was always very abrupt in his speech.” Another recalled that his socks never matched. His resemblance to a bag lady apart, there was, as another colleague put it, “the magic of prophecy with regards to the man.” He likewise had, his wife would write years later, “a talent for friendship; he loved persons and they loved him.” Since his 1890 arrival in Cambridge, where he was first given the odd title Lecturer in Talmudic and later appointed Reader in Rabbinics, Schechter had gained the deep respect and affection of a range of the town’s leading intellectuals, including the radical Scottish Bible scholar and Arabist William Robertson Smith (who arranged for Schechter to join Christ’s College, where particular kosher meals were prepared whenever he came to dine); the Africa explorer Mary Kingsley (with whom he much enjoyed swearing); and the pioneering anthropologist and reclusive author of The Golden Bough, James Frazer, perchance Schechter’s best friend at the time. The two took walks together various days a week, talking about as they rambled “all things, humane and divine.” Frazer himself praised Schechter as “great in his intellect and learning, more outstanding even in the warmth of his affections and his ebullience for each high and noble cause.”
 
By turns fierce, warm, brusque, tender, biting in his wit, and thun­dering in his manner, “the king in any society in which he found him­self,” Schechter was often times described in exceptionally zoological terms. Now he was “a demanding lamb,” now an eagle or a bear. “I may see him in my mind’s eye, at the height of a debate,” wrote yet another friend, “rising from his chair, perchance kicking it down, and pacing… the room, like a wounded lion, roaring retorts.” Lamb or jungle cat, he inspired awe and devotion in most people, though one imagines that the formidable Agnes Lewis would not even have blinked as she sailed—however arthritically—toward Schechter that day in the street.
She and Mrs. Gibson had, she hastened to tell him, expended the last few weeks devising the photographs and sifting through the manuscripts they’d brought back from their most recent trip. Their purchases included what Agnes would later describe as “a bundle of documents from a merchandiser in the plain of Sharon… [and] a similar bundle purchased in Cairo.” Margaret, whose turn it was to do the sorting, had managed to tell apart most of the items that they’d carted home in a trunk—and which had closely been con&…

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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Discoveries that radically change our understanding of the past
By Israel Drazin
Imagine you are a forty-year old who was severely injured in an automobile crash and suffered amnesia that wiped out thirteen years of your life, two periods: ages 10-12 and 21-30. Then after enduring the dark space in your memory, sometimes agonizingly, you stumble on several trunks in your attic. You open the trunks with difficulty and find old, frequently torn, moldy, disheveled letters, scrapes of paper, and memoranda that were written during these thirteen years. You read them with astonishment. Like the plot of a mystery novel, you find that these papers reveal facts about your life that you had forgotten. They disclose things about you that are radically different than your image of yourself. This is what happened in a synagogue storeroom, called a Geniza, in Egypt, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Civilization lost its memory of Jewish happenings during the first half of the second Temple period, from about 536 until about 165 BCE, and for centuries of the Middle Ages. Then, like the amnesiac in the example, scholars unearthed some three hundred thousand documents from these periods.

Jews and many Christians considered God’s name so holy they felt it was wrong to treat the name as trash and toss it like garbage. Thus, in ancient time, they stopped mentioning or writing God’s name and substituted “Lord” for y-h-v-h. This sensitivity was later extended. Jews began to bury papers containing God’s name, as people bury relatives, with respect. Soon, in Cairo, Egypt, from about the eleventh century, Jews placed many of their unwanted documents in a storeroom in the Cairo synagogue, as well as other synagogues, and they buried some as well, even papers without God’s name, for writing too, they felt, has a holiness.

This well-written, easy to read, well-researched, and informative book tells about the remarkable materials found in the Cairo Geniza and about the lives of the people who made the finds and the difficulties they encountered. I suggest that readers of this review read my review of Rabbi Mark Glickman’s Sacred Treasure of Cairo Genizah (the latter word can be spelt with and without a final h). That review discusses some of the significance of the finds, and places them in perspective with the Dead Sea Scroll finds and those of the Nag Hammadi Library. I will not repeat this information here.

Among many other discoveries in Cairo were the following. Scholars knew that the famous book by Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus, composed in the second century BCE and quoted frequently in the Talmud, was composed in Hebrew, but the original Hebrew was lost. It was found in the Geniza. Many of the poems of the seventh century poet Yannai were unearthed; we only had a fragment of his writings until then. He was probably the first poet who composed poems for synagogue services. Writings by the famed philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) including compositions in his own handwriting with corrections he made were in the Geniza. There were interesting palimpsest, writings written over scratched out prior writing, a process used to save parchment. Modern science is able to restore the underlying older, frequently more valuable text. Manuscripts penned by members of the Jewish sect Karaites, who rejected rabbinical innovations, were in the cache, including marriage contracts that disclose interesting stories of how fortunes were made and lost and wives retaken after a divorce. There were business contracts, trade documents between Jews and India, letters that tell tales of family life, information about common people and community leaders, records and deeds, a host of scholarly writings, letters finally revealing what happened to the famous Jewish poet Yehudah Halevi during the final years of his life, and much more. There is even a document by Maimonides containing the ingredients of a medieval Viagra.

In summary, like amnesiacs who see themselves differently after the attic finds, civilization now has a new perspective of its past after the Geniza discoveries. And, what is more, scholars are still today continuing to decipher and disclose the secrets that were buried in the Geniza.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A delightful reading
By Jose R. Villalon-Sorzano
I was very much impressed by this book. Impressed, first by the authors for the excellent writing and research. This goes for the entire book, but I was literally delighted by the brightness of style in the first chapters. (All the part on Schechter). The authors succeeded in keeping this reader’s full interest after the first chapters, which read like a thrilling novel, after the disappearance of the earlier heroes and the turning of the book towards broader subjects. I bought the book because I had certain knowledge about genizas and wanted to learn more. I also bought the useful Sacred Treasure, by Max Glickman. But this one is much more than just a splendid story of the Cairo Geniza. It is a new view of certain aspects of Jewish history; it is also a much needed confirmation of the high level and elegance of Arab and Islamic civilization of old. We westerners are brought down to our size at that period in time. But I was also impressed by the book’s editorial excellence (Schocken). I think the edition is novel, outstanding, and clever. Although I had already some knowledge of rabbinism, (consulting Strack-Billerbeck, Bonsirven, Gilman&Zipes, etc.) I received a new light about the relations between the Torah, the Tanach, and rabbinic writings: no diminution for the Tanach, but higher appreciation of the contributions of Talmud (this time especially Palestinian Talmud), rabbinism and its originality. I wish I had read the book before attending a local symposium on the spirituality of the Second Temple period. I couldn’t let the book down. No need to be a Jew to enjoy thoroughly. Catholics might enjoy knowing this part of the story of Ben Sira’s book, which they have always honored. The book is not written for specialists, but many a specialist might learn a lot with it. It is written for people with some background that enjoy good writing in cultural history. Good aperçus in British scholarship. A high praise for Adina Hoffmann and Robert Cole. They have grasped many subtleties that many a specialist seems to ignore. They have fascinated me with their book. My profession is a reading profession, but his time, pleasure was the main oucome.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A Slice of the Genizah
By Eric Maroney
Hoffman and Cole tell a compelling story about the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, and the subsequent fate of its collection and the people who have studied them. The book sheds light on how one generation of scholars will consider material not worthy of study, while another will base a lifetime of study on it.

For example, Hoffman and Cole explain how Solomon Schechter, who collected most of the Genizah for Cambridge University, was interested in big names found in the collection. He crated business documents and other miscellaneous material and labeled it trash. This “trash” remained in the attic of the Cambridge library becoming, in a sense, a second Genizah, until it was re-discovered Solomon Goitein, who went on to detail the everyday life of Jews and Gentiles in the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.

This book shows how dynamic really top-notch scholarship can be; it is a perfect illustration of how a group of documents can turn an entire field on its head and not only provide new information about a lost world, but reveal something of ourselves and our interests and the changing tastes of the times.

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Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of Pic

Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of Picture

Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of Picture

Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of Picture

Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of Pic

Sacred Trash The Lost And Found World Of Picture

The Teachings Of Don Juan A Yaqui Way Of

From Library JournalOriginal publisher University of California Press here offers a 30th-anniversary edition of Castenada’s Teachings. Along with the original text, this sports a new introduction by the author, who, it was revealed recently, passed away earlier this year. Though this is reasonably priced for a hardcover, libraries requiring multiples copies may opt for the paperback.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review”It’s totally unlikely to view the world in rather the same way after reading him. . . . If Castaneda is correct, there is another world, a at times pretty and once in a while frightening world, right before our eyes at this moment–if only we could see.”–”Chicago Tribune

From the PublisherIn addition to the publication of Magical Passes, 1998 marks the momentous occasion of another event in the works of Carlos Castaneda: the publication of a 30th anniversary edition of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This particular edition includes a new introduction by Carlos Castaneda, which provides a rare glimpse into the author’s own view of experiences that partly include a broader the total teachings of the shamans of ancient Mexico. What begun thirty years ago with The Teachings of Don Juan has unceasingly captivated readers worldwide, and this introduction will rather perchance offer the single most essential overview of Carlos Castaneda’s work.

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197 of 219 people found the following review helpful.
The Beginning of a Journey You Will Never, Ever Forget…
By Chris Peters
“The Teachings of Don Juan” is the first in a series of about 15 books by Carlos Casaneda describing the author’s experiences with Yaqui Indian shamanism in Northern Mexico. As a studier of religion for many years (although not as knowledgeable as some scholars) I find these books to be utterly unique in their scope and subject matter. They are not like other New Age books. The journey that Castaneda takes his readers is mind-boggling, and his experiences are simply beyond what most people have even remotely encountered.

Castaneda first met Don Juan in the early 60′s, before the hippy movement, before psychodelic drugs became popular. He was studying anthropology in Los Angeles, and Don Juan served as a field source for some fading knowledge of tribal and shamanistic rituals in Northern Mexico. Castaneda was specifically interested in peyote, a plant that gives its users hallicinations and mixes the senses in strange ways, and which LSD was meant to be a chemical reproduction of. Castaneda’s first book presents a very detailed scholastic interpretation of his experiences. All books after the first simply focus on Castaneda’s experiences with Don Juan.

Castaneda’s drug experiences are different from other accounts I have read, because they are intimately tied with the Yaqui philosophy and mythology. The drugs only serve as a means to an end, not as the end in themselves. The first 2 books in the series describe Castaneda’s drugs experiences with Don Juan, but from the 3rd book on, the drugs disappear forever and Carlos’ experiences are actually more fantastic, more amazing, more unbelieveable as he slowly becomes a practicing sorceror, traveling to alternate dimensions and battling other sorcerors. Many of the books seem to reach a definitive conclusion, only to have Castaneda’s perceived understanding of Don Juan’s teachings completely destroyed in the next volume. Again these experiences do not in any way compare to magic and sorcery you might find in pagan, christian, or celtic mythology, nor does the “world-philosophy” of Don Juan resemble in any way the wholistic ideals of Eastern religions like Hinduism or Buddhism. How can you describe things most people have never seen before? Castaneda does a good job, considering the fantastic nature of some of his journeys. However, while the visions and magical feats are mesmerizing to read, I often found that Don Juan gave his most profound knowledge while simply talking to Castaneda.

Do to its subject matter, most Christians will find these books offensive, but I promise you that nothing in any of these volumes will turn you onto the path of Satan There is a certain participation required from the reader – Castaneda repeatedly affirms that everything he has ever written is absolutely true, but intelligent readers will be constantly wondering if such fantastic things could possibly exist. By turning off this little nagging “naysayer” in my own head and allowing myself to simply sink into the mood of the work and believe, I found that I was better able to intuitively understand the very abstract concepts that overwhelm you. However, because these accounts are SO unbelieveable, SO fantastic, SO unlike our everyday life here in the US, I found that I never confused my world with Castaneda’s. It’s like reading a book about walking on the Moon – you can understand and appreciate what it must have been like, but you don’t start wearing a spacesuit to work!

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
An Excellent and Entertaining Book
By D. W. Casey
I enjoy Carlos Castaneda’s books because they always offer an escape from reality — in this case, I mean that quite literally.

Castaneda’s books involve an age-old technique of storytelling, the teaching of a body of knowledge from a master to a pupil. In this case, the master, a Yaqui Indian known as Don Juan, teaches the ancient Toltec art of sorcery to a young, first-person narrator, Carlos Castaneda. This narrator is dubious and incredulous as Don Juan shows him things about the nature of reality and our perceptions of it, but increasingly he has to conclude that the world of Don Juan is an accurate description of the may facets of reality, and our modern world is merely one narrow view.

There is controversy over whether Castaneda’s books are “real” –Castaneda was granted a PhD for his “field” work; but other scholars have found a lot of Castaneda’s research to have no anthropological authenticity. Supporters of Castaneda dispute this.

That there is even an argument over whether the books are “real” or not indicates how good the stories are — like the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, people really, desperately want to visit Castaneda’s world. His books are riveting, fascinating, beautiful, and also very scary.

Although later books in the series (Tales of Power, for instance) are better than this introductory work; I think it is important to read the books in their order of writing, in order to get the “lessons” that Castaneda learns in the correct order.

I am a great fan of the books, even if they are 100% fiction. But one is really just never sure if they are. . .

48 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
Enthralling book, but only until you realize it was all fantasy
By Michael
That might not come from reading this book alone, as it is the most believable of the series. When I was a student, I like many others I know who will confess to having read a Castaneda book or two when pressed, went through a couple of years of Castanedism, reading the 8 classics 2 – 3 times each, and even the later four, quite different books a couple of times. Being someone who likes to give the benefit of the doubt until conclusive evidence proves otherwise, I must admit to only getting suspicious by Journey To Ixtlan, the third book. The second book, A Separate Reality, picks up on the supernormal happenings, but these are still within the realms of possibility when one considers Spiritualist literature. By Tales of Power, when at the end Carlos throws himself off a cliff and only survives by becoming pure perception, bouncing elastically back and forth 17 times between the two inherent realms of all creation, the tonal and the nagual, the game was up. In Carlos’ terms, my assemblage point had just experienced a considerable shift into the realms of disbelief. The cocoon had burst. I read the remaining books still interested, but with the growing realization that I’d been had. Bizarre ideas not found in any other spiritual traditions, such as the necessity for people on the path of knowledge to kill their children to reclaim the power they’d lost to them, plus fill in the holes in their cocoons the children had caused, made me wary. This was surely not a philosophy the whole world should turn to, or else we’d be living in a fearful, lonely world with every man for himself.

However, this would be fine if the books weren’t made out to be non-fiction. While I have seen these books placed with science fiction books in many libraries, in most European bookshops they’re still sold with real, non-fiction ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ books. The reason I give this book such a low rating is that an intensive study of his works, the books by his various colleagues, plus Richard De Mille’s intelligent criticisms, can only lead to the conclusion that Castaneda, the writer, used Don Juan and Carlos, two fantasy characters, to verbalize his own beliefs, which were culled from his own spiritual and academic experience. That there are some useful nuggets of wisdom, or advice in these books I do not deny. That is their very attraction, plus the belief that it all really happened, and is a new spiritual revelation. But as these are mixed up with increasingly bizarre assertions and beliefs (by the Art of Dreaming it seems all pretence at non-fiction had been given up), it is doubtful whether a lifetime devoted to these practices (as opposed to say, real shamanic practices) would lead to spiritual improvement. If you must have a Castaneda book in your library, rather get The Wheel of Time, a selection of the spiritual highlights of the first eight books, but consider it rather ‘The best of the personal philosophy of Carlos Castaneda’ than anything to do with Don Juan or Shamanism. This understanding may not have the romantic mix of wild Mexican deserts, ancient wisdom, wise old men and naive westerners which captures the hearts of so many, but it is a lot closer to the truth.

The anonymous ghost-writer at Schuster and Schuster who corrected Peruvian immigrant Castaneda’s English for at least all of his earlier works (a sample of his writing from 1969 reveals it was still far from perfect, not like what is in books), giving the books their special character, certainly deserves more credit than he or she gets. But they are not written well enough to succeed as fiction, hence their continued classification as non-fiction, besides the intense academic embarrassment it would cause copyright holders UCLA to have to admit such a dramatic change in classification, from fact to fantasy, after having previously given the author a doctorate for his work! I give this book one star on the basis that any book claiming to represent the truth which is later found to be fraudulent deserves no stars by definition, so I must give the minimum rating allowed. The day this book is reclassified as Fiction, I will up my rating to 3 stars though, as it is a quite entertaining and authentic piece of fiction-posing-as-non-fiction.

At this point many a true believer will try play the only card they have left – the allegory or metaphor card, with the implication that the critic is not deep enough to have gathered that by now. However, there is a vital difference between a Castaneda book and an allegory – the latter always make it perfectly clear at the start that what follows is not to be taken as fact. A misunderstanding would mean losing the effect of the allegory. The Castaneda books, on the contrary, always start out with the reassurance that what follows is definitely fact. As UCLA Library stack request records prove that Castaneda was sitting in the library on the exact dates when he was supposed to be hanging out with Don Juan, it is thus fair to say that these books are neither factual nor allegorical.

If you have bought the book already, I might as well warn you not to waste any time on the Structural Analysis at the end. That was only placed there to make a point for Castaneda. Coming after the gripping narrative of the Teachings, the impossibly dry and intentionally unreadable analysis in pseudo-academic jargon is merely meant to score points for Castaneda’s one-time anthropological field of phenomenology, which is basically scientific reporting of the first-hand, direct experience type. Hopefully no true believers have fallen for Castaneda’s joke and wasted time actually wading through it – I doubt it’ll have done you more spiritual good than throwing yourself off a cliff.

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The Crusades The Authoritative History Of

From a widely known and esteemed historian who writes with “maximum vividness” (The New Yorker) comes the most authoritative, readable single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the holy land

Nine hundred years ago, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the Pope, rampaged through the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by both faiths. Over the two hundred years that followed, Islam and Christianity fought for dominion of the Holy Land, clashing in a succession of chillingly brutal wars: the Crusades. Here for the primary time is the story of that epic struggle told from the perspective of both Christians and Muslims. A bright and fast-paced narrative history, it discloses the full horror, passion, and barbaric grandeur of the Crusading era, revealing how these holy wars reshaped the medieval world and why they proceed to influence events today.

From BooklistAuthor of The First Crusade (2004), British historian Asbridge widens his vista to the entire 1195–1291 duration of the crusading era, giving prominence in the holy-war epic to antagonists evermore famous: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. Each leader’s role as standard-bearer of his cause reflects Asbridge’s substantial special importance and significance on the entanglement of secular politics with the overt religious aspect to the wars amongst Latin Christianity and Islam. Crass considerations of dynastic power were never discerned from the calculations of these champions and their successors, and partly indicate Islam’s desultory pace in expunging the Christian states conventional by the First Crusade. In addition, medieval warfare’s high-risk character—in which a single encounter, such as the 1098 siege of Antioch or the 1187 Battle of Hattin, could completely turn the strategic tables—goes far in Asbridge’s competent hands to informing readers regarding the course of the Crusades. With perceptive commentary regarding spiritual motivatings behind crusading and perspectives from contemporary Islamic sources, Asbridge constructs a comprehensive, sophisticated, and arresting analytical narrative rewarding to any level of historical interest, whether recreational or scholarly. –Gilbert Taylor

Review“Brilliant, authoritative, and accessible, Thomas Asbridge’s THE CRUSADES is a will have to read. Asbridge balances impeccable scholarship with a gifted storyteller’s engaging voice. He vividly portrays the driving forces and personalities, the perspectives of Christians and Muslims, and the bequest of the Crusades in Christian and Muslim history and imagination.” (Professor John L. Esposito, Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, and author of The Future of Islam. )

“A genuinely comprehensive history of holy war in the Holy Land. Emphasizing the dramatic Third Crusade and it is heroic antagonists, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, the narrative reads like an adventure story, even though one that is both factual and instructive.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

About the Author

Thomas Asbridge is Reader in Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of The First Crusade. He lives in England.

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67 of 70 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding Volume
By Nicholas Busby
First and foremost, The Crusades is a great read. From page one, it pulls you in with a narrative that reads more like a great adventure novel than true history. I for one, did not know much about the Crusades prior to this. As i progressed, I found myself investigating more and more details from other sources to further gain insight into the battles and backstory. That is not to say there are not plenty of details in the book as it is. It is very rich. The way Asbridge divided up each piece of the story really worked to make the journey concise, literate and educational. For a fan of history, The Crusades is as good as it gets.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
The best one-volume history of The Crusades I’ve yet read
By Shawn M. Ritchie
A good, readable history of The Crusades has escaped me to this point, for whatever reason. I was very excited when Tynerman’s God’s War was released a few years ago, and quickly became disenchanted when I tried slogging through it and realized what a boringly-written brick it was. Couldn’t finish it. Runciman’s classic volumes, which have been the definitive essential reading for half a century now, are still valid, entertaining reads but have been long since over-taken by newer evidence and much fresher, more-encompassing interpretations. As a read, they’re still great fun. As good history, they’re quite biased and lacking today.

So, when I saw a shiny new tome promising a complete revisiting of long-held assumptions, I couldn’t resist. Asbridge’s chronology is straightforward; starting with a quick survey of Islam’s rise and subsequent takeover of the Christian Holy Land, he moves to Europe to set the scene of the medieval papacy and nascent western kingships that would bring about the concept of Crusading. In a nice touch, he continues to revisit the contemporary meanings, definitions and assumptions behind crusading as it developed from an event without even a name (“crusading” was a later appellation) to the currently-understood form. From these basics, he moves us through each of the main five Crusades, deftly describing the expected peoples, places, and battles. He strikes a good balance between talking about the most important figures and key battles versus the less-glamorous but as-important topics such as trade and societal makeup that, while harder to make exciting, are very important when trying to gain a full understanding of the events.

Very crucially, he spends as much time covering the Arab viewpoint as he does the Christian. He also properly gives notice to the fact that, while western sources are fairly voluminous by the standards of the era, the Crusades just didn’t have a major impact on the Muslim world at the time, and therefore sources from the Muslim POV are much less available. That said, he does an admirable job of situating the reader as best he can in the Muslim frame of mind during each crusade, giving admirable detail on outside pressures that might’ve existed, any internal dynastic or civil events that had bearing on their interactions with the Crusaders… other histories I’ve read of this era often fall flat in this particular regard.

He closes with an excellent overview of how the Crusades have themselves been viewed throughout history, both in the West and in the Muslim World; this may have been my favorite part of the book as it’s not a topic I’ve ever seen covered before, much less so well.

The writing style is nice and lively as well. It reads almost like a strong historical fiction narrative, a testament not only to the author’s skill but to the inherent drama of the period.

BOTTOM LINE: This will be my only answer for anyone asking for a recommendation on the period for probably years to come.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Historical Work
By Kevin Brown
The Crusades is a fine historical work. It lacks some of the detail of the author’s earlier work (The First Crusade) but it also covers a much longer time frame. I really enjoyed the in-depth personal accounts of the historical figures in the earlier book that are somewhat lacking in this work. I also feel that the author doesn’t spend enough time on the importance of the Military Orders (Templars and Hospitallers). However the author does spend a great deal of time examining broader cultural issues which more than make up for a certain lack of insight into individual personalities. The author spends a significant amont of time assessing changing viewpoints over historical periods (i.e. does Richard Lionheart deserve to be considered a hero, was Saladin a true believer in jihad or a political opportunist, etc.) I enjoyed the analysis which is thought provoking and well researched. I highly recommend both works.

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World War I A Brief History

“World War I: A Brief History” presents a comprehensive look at the First World War in a compact format.

This digital compendium serves as a reference to the warï’½s most substantial events and figures, covering key causes, battles and leaders. Engaging and succinct text captures the essence of this unexampled conflict.

Youï’½ll gain valuable clear or deep perception into World War Iï’½s:

• Primary Triggers
• Key Players
• Major Battles
• End and Aftermath

…and more.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
overview
By Mei
This books gives an overview of the First World War. It gives information about the causes of the Great War, major events, the trenches, the war at sea and the aftermath. It takes about half an hour to read and gives you the outlines you really need to know, but it is basic and lacks in depth. I got this book as a freebie and I’m glad I did not pay for it.

(Note: This book has the same editor as the book: ‘World War I 101: The TextVook’ and may have an identical text.)

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Daily Journal Create And Save Your Own

About the Author

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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Make a commitment to creativity
By M. Dersch
When I was earning a BFA, I had a painting professor who forced me to severely limit my color palate. I grumbled about it at the time, but I found that the creation of forced guidelines freed me and taught me the significance of self-imposed rules.

Fast forward some years, and I have just completed day 37 of my year-long project using 365: A Daily Creativity Journal. So far this process has given me, through structure, a similar, freeing experience.

Scalin’s process, as laid out in his book, has made me accountable for daily, completed creative production and has forced me to let go by midnight. I cannot put it off, and I cannot over analyze my work or give up on it.

I have been forced to work quickly and to accept my work for what it is. The creation of a blog and being a member of the 365 online community created by Scalin have reinforced this. The result has been increased productivity, yes, but more importantly, a new set of eyes for my own work.

The book gives examples of diverse daily projects as inspiration and ideas for daily projects, so one never feels stranded without an idea. However, the book is not imposing, and people can use it in different ways: as a journal, as a place to keep notes, as daily inspiration, or as a jolt of inspiration when it is needed.

The book’s suggestions are unconventional and varied. Some are more challenging while some are gentle prods. Nothing requires expensive materials or equipment. Every suggestion is accessible and open-ended, so there are myriad approaches to each one. Scalin approaches projects as puzzles and explorations and not as controlled activities or rigid guidelines.

Does a daily project seem too daunting? Scalin breaks down the process to make it more approachable and gives ideas for other time frames, such as weekly projects. The layout leaves plenty of space to work out ideas or track results, and the good quality, coated paper prevents bleed through, even with a Sharpie. The cover is resilient, so you can carry your book with you, crack the spine, and really use it. It holds up better than most of my notebooks. *cough* Moleskine *cough*

This book is suitable for any age group, from young children to adults, and every skill level. The projects function well for use by an individual or by a group and can take as little or as much time as one can afford.

This book would be a great resource for families, instructors, teachers, home schoolers, classroom aides, senior citizen groups, scouting instructors, Sunday school teachers, VBS instructors, and camp counselors because the book can be applied to nearly any medium or used to inspire activities.

365: A Daily Creativity Journal is a great way to pull yourself, family and friends away from screen time in an inexpensive and productive way while flexing your creative thinking and problem solving. I highly recommend it.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
Well worth the wait
By Chloe’s mommy
I have been waiting for this book to come out for awhile and it was well worth the wait. I’m a creative type and this book is very inspiring. If you need inspiration, and even if you don’t, this makes a wonderful addition to anyone’s library. There are great ideas sprinkled throughout the book and the journal section leaves plenty of room to write ideas and thoughts down. I’m so glad I got this book and I highly recommend it. I normally don’t reviews books I buy but this one definitely deserves a review. Buy it and you won’t regret it.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Liviing a Creative Life
By Irene Ziegler Aston
This book is for the person who may have uttered, “I’m not very creative.” We’re all creative people; perhaps not all of us are producing, or leading creative lives. This journal is not intended to do your creating for you, or even lead you toward Scalin’s idea of the creative life. Instead, like any good teacher, Scalin introduces you to your own creative muscles and shows you how to turn ideas into art, one day at a time. That the process is fun, thoughtful, and often challenging gives this substance beyond other how-to books, which are usually too precious for my liking.

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The Dirty Life A Memoir Of Farming Food

“This book is the story of the two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming—that dirty, concupiscent art—and the other with a perplexed and exasperating farmer.”

Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew not one thing when it comes to growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to begin a new farm with him. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of their firstborn year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest season—complete with their wedding in the loft of the barn.

Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow everything necessitated to feed a community. It was an ambitious idea, a bit romantic, and it worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, a hundred humans travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty dissimilar vegetables—produced by the farm. The work is done by draft horses rather of tractors, and the fertility comes from compost. Kimball’s bright descriptions of landscape, food, cooking—and marriage—are irresistible.

“As much as you transform the land by farming,” she writes, “farming transforms you.” In her old life, Kimball would stay out until four a.m., wear heels, and carry a handbag. Now she wakes up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a pocket knife. At Essex Farm, she discovers the wrenching delights of physical work, learns that good feed is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and ultimately finds the engagement and dedication she craved in the form of a man, a little town, and a finelooking piece of land

From Publishers WeeklyKimball chucked life as a Manhattan journalist to begin a cooperative farm in upstate New York with a self-taught New Paltz farmer she had interviewed for a story and later married. The Harvard-educated author, in her 30s, and Mark, likewise college educated and resolved to “live outside of the river of consumption,” ultimately found an arable 500-acre farm on Lake Champlain, original to lease then to buy. In this poignant, candid chronicle by season, Kimball writes how she and Mark infused new life into Essex Farm, and lost their hearts to it. By dint of hard work and smart planning–using draft horses rather than tractors to plow the five acres of vegetables, and raising dairy cows, and cattle, pigs, and hens for slaughter–they at long last invented a cooperative on the CSA model, in which members were capable to buy a wholly rounded diet. To create a self-sustaining farm was enormously ambitious, and neighbors, while well-meaning, expected them to fail. However, the couple, relying on Mark’s faith in a “magic circle” of good luck, exhausted their savings and set to work. Once June hit, there was the 100-day growing season and an overabundance of vegetables to eat, and no end to the dirty, hard, fiercely satisfying tasks, winningly depicted by Kimball.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a section of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From BooklistJournalist Kimball accepts an assignment to consultation a lanky, determined Pennsylvania farmer who runs a community farm providing subscribers with beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, and grains. He may look a rustic, but he has a college degree and a burning passion for natural living and initiating a barter economy. The consultation very speedily turns into something of a date. His visit to her on the Lower East Side of Manhattan only intensifies these two disparate characters’ mutual attraction, and they soon launch a dream farm in the Adirondacks. She proves an eager, but inept, collaborator who must speedily shed her urban inhibitions and learn to slop pigs and slaughter chickens. Planning a wedding that will satisfy both the couple’s rustic friends as well as her urbane family proves daunting. Kimball has a gift for throwing into high relief contemporary Americans’ disconnect among farm-life realities and city ambitions. –Mark Knoblauch

Review“The Dirty Life is a delightful, tumultuous, and tender story of the author’s love affair with the man who becomes her husband and the farm they work together to restore. With wisdom and humor, Kristin Kimball describes how she abandoned her career in New York City, leaving behind everything she thought was essential for a hard, without doubt or question unglamorous existence that turns out to be the most fulfilling thing she’s ever done.”

–JEANNETTE WALLS, author of Half Broke Horses and The Glass Castle

“The Dirty Life is a wondrous told tale of one of the most interesting farms in the country. If you want to perceive the heart and soul of the new/old motion towards local food, this is the book you need. It’s the voice of what comes next in this land, of the generation unleashed by Wendell Berry to do something in truth grand.” –Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“In her beguiling memoir, Kimball describes the complex truth with regards to the simple life in prose that is observant and lyrical, yet tempered by a farmer’s lack of sentimentality.” –Elle Magazine

“Kimball is a graceful, luminous writer with an eye for detail… How lucky we are to be capable to step into that world with no sweat. I wished for a hundred pages more.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune

“As Kimball chronicles that initial year in supple prose, the farm takes on bright form, with the foilings balancing the satisfactions and the dark complementing the light. Throughout the book, the author ably describes the respective tryouts and tribulations involved… A hearty, chromatic account of a significant accomplishment in farming.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Kimball writes in bright but unsentimental language, equivalent constituents dirt and poetry.” –Burlington Free Press

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124 of 130 people found the following review helpful.
The Dirty Life is a compelling, unsentimental read
By yeqotz
Although I am generally no fan of the memoir, I was deeply moved by The Dirty Life. Author Kristin Kimball first dissects her decision to give up a freelance writing career and a rent-controlled NYC apartment to start a sustainable agricultural venture with her then-fiance in upstate New York. She then smartly breaks the rest of the book up by season, going into just enough detail about the daily operations of the farm and the crises that crop up to draw the reader in and keep him or her invested in the outcome of this sometimes overwhelming undertaking.

Kimball’s voice is refreshingly unsentimental, and even in her darkest hour of the soul, she never resorts to whining. She has her doubts, to be sure, which make for an authentic, compelling read. I recommend this memoir to anyone looking for a well-written story not just about building a farm from the ground up, but also about handling the unexpected turns life sometimes takes.

71 of 74 people found the following review helpful.
This book is truly a love story between man & woman, between farmers, between community & the farm!
By Laura Smith
This book grabs your soul. You don’t want to put it down until you’ve consumed every last morsel. It is truly a love story! A story about the love between a man & a woman, love between farmers & love between a community & a farm. It is a story about a man who so believed in a dream that he made it materialize in spite of being surrounded by skeptics & about a woman who lost her heart to a man and to the land. This is a powerful book that is destined to be an award winning movie. A man, a woman & a community come together to make a dream a reality. It proves that life is about so much more than money. Money can not buy what the Kimballs have built!

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
A must for non-farmers
By gem
While at first glance it seems this memoir is for those who know farm life, it holds more for those who don’t. Kristin Kimball beautifully describes the rawness and romanticism of working hard with someone you love to achieve a dream. It renews your faith in a younger generation that values the way farms used to be – family owned and community supported, both frustrating and fantastic, and eternally dirty. Kimball’s descriptive phrasing will make you long to sip straight from the sap bucket again.

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Read My Hips How I Learned To Love My

Kim Brittingham was struggling for years with her weight and body effigy before she learned how to love her self unconditionally, find her confidence, and entirely get enjoyment from her life.  In this unflinching, humorous, and uplifting memoir, she in an open way explores her complex relationships with feed and dieting, sex and dating, and exercise and health, in the long run inspiring each woman to live life to the sheer fullest, no matter what your jean size.

Review”Brittingham’s memoir has a distinguishable voice. With engaging, well-written prose…Brittingham’s style is lively…her message is powerful.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“An uplifting, fat-tastic voyage to self-love, Read My Hips made me realize that I no longer need to be weighed down by constantly judging my body.  I devoured this book—it’s deliciously inspiring!”
 
—Hillary Carlip, author of Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan
 
“Read My Hips is a spirited call to arms (and bellies and bare legs) to hug ourselves inside and out. Brittingham explores and discloses the ways women are taught to hide our bodies, then boldly and humorously does the opposite. She speaks from the front lines of
standing up (or sitting on the bus) for women of all sizes who are tired of body effigy busybodies. Read her hips and rejoice!”
 
—Rachel Kramer Bussel, Editor, Fast Girls and Gotta Have It
 
“Read My Hips is a candid, funny, now and then scathing chronicle of one woman’s at times bumpy, always unforgettable transition from fearful fat-girl self-loathing to vibrant full-bodied joie de vivre.  If you’ve ever thought wistfully of all the ways your life would be better if only you were thinner, don’t wait another minute to read Kim Brittingham’s book.”
 
—Hanne Blank, author of Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex and Relationships for People of Size and Those Who Love Them
 
“If Kim Brittingham owned a scale, the numbers would be substituted with 300 adjectives like ‘audacious,’ ‘sparkling,’ and ‘big-hearted.’ Packing more selfconfidence and self-respect into one belly roll than most of us do in our entire Pilates-toned bodies, Brittingham doesn’t walk the walk: She struts a sassy strut, and stands poised as a radical game changer in the world of body image.”
 
—Leslie Goldman, author of Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth About Women, Body Image, and Re-imagining the ‘Perfect’ Body
 
“Kim’s voice is refreshing, real, savagely honorable and laugh-out-loud funny.  Her words paint a bright picture that is exclusively relatable.  In my work or in my life, I have never met a woman (of any age, size or shape) who did not experience body effigy issues or a heap of degree of self-loathing.  Kim poses great thought-provoking questions and her message is uplifting…Love yourself as you are – no matter what your size and shape – you are already whole!  A fabulous, fun read!  Thanks, Kim, for your bravery.” 
 
—Laurie Sliva, Founder/Director/Life-Skills Trainer B.R.I.D.G.E.S. Programs for Girls
 
“In Read My Hips, Kim entertainingly advocates a revolutionary way of being:  accepting our here-and-now bodies as we are and with love.  With wit, sensuality and realistic logic, she shares her traveling through time and transformation, baring her complex mental states and discovering antidotes for our society’s fixed and limiting way of seeing our bodies.  Kim’s sensuous love of the world and all it is prickly details makes for a delightful and moving read.”
 
—Debora Iyall
 

About the AuthorKim Brittingham is a writer and blogger whose personal essays have been published on iVillage, Salon and Fresh Yarn. She received widespread national attention, including appearances on the Today Show and NPR, when she produced a mock self-help book jacket with the title, Fat is Contagious: How Sitting Next to a Fat Person Can Make YOU Fat, wrapped it around a real book, and pretended to read it while riding the buses of New York City as an informal social experiment. She divides her time amidst New York City and Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

KimWrites.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.9780307464385|excerpt

Brittingham: READ MY HIPS

part one

ditching dieting

When we lose twenty pounds…we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have!

We may be losing the pounds that integrate our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty.

—Woody Allen

ring dings

I’d dreaded this day. Dread like a belly bruised from the inside, swirling puke green, putrid purple, and horrid yellow, and dripping black droplets like lead. At five years old, I wasn’t sure I knew how to pray, but the night before in the quiet of my mind, I’d given it a whirl and pleaded with God, “Please don’t let us move to Michigan tomorrow. Please.” Maybe God was more powerful when you were sleeping underneath a picture of Jesus, I mused. Jesus tacked to the wallpaper with a neat red pushpin. Jesus in a white tunic with outstretched arms seated on a rock, beckoning to children and snowy lambs drawn with shy, humanlike smiles. Maybe he was most potent when you prayed to him from the bed of your religious grandmother, and prayed with an aching heart.

The night before was our final night in Philadelphia. With our furniture already loaded onto a big green-and-white Bekins truck and motoring toward Detroit, we expended the night at my grandmother’s. I insisted on sleeping with her. I snuggled versus her back and was serenaded softly by the radio playing “church music,” as she called it—a spiritless choir delivering rectify and measured hymns. Its blandness soothed me.

When my mother roused me in the morning, Grandmom was already up and I found myself alone in her bed, wrapped in the worn-soft cotton sheets dotted with tiny blue flowers. It was five o’clock, that eerie time of day when the world seemed painted in watercolor and sound was shrill, as even though delivered through a too-loud television. A teaspoon clattered on a metal stove top, a rustling bag chafed my ear. The air smelled of wet tree bark and coffee.

“Come on, sleepyhead.”

I was in no mood to cooperate. I didn’t want to bestow to anything that would hasten my separation from Grandmom. I adored that chubby, sweet-smelling lady more than any individual in the universe. What I wanted was to stay right here with her, forever, in this ugly rented sand-colored bungalow on Solly Avenue.

She appeared in the doorway behind my mother.

“You better get up, there, kiddo,” she scolded gently, and reluctantly I sat up. As much as I objected to our imminent departure, and would’ve been more than willing to handcuff myself to the radiator had I the resources, I still couldn’t fetch myself to disobey Grandmom. The thought that I might cause her grief in any way shattered me.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, propped up like a rag doll, groggy and limp, when my mother told me to lift my arms. She pulled my cheap, staticky nightgown over my head, the tag that ensured it is inflammability scratching up my side. She slid a turtleneck back over my head. I squinted at myself in the dresser mirror. My grandmother came and settled at my side and smiled at me in the glass, then reached out to pat my knee. I leaned irresistibly into her and she curled an arm around me.

“Sit up straight so you may put your pants on,” my mother commanded.

“I don’t want to go to Michigan!” I cried. “I want to stay here with Grandmom.”

“If you want to come back and see Grandmom again at Christmas, you’ll be a big girl and stop making such a fuss.”

Why not leave me here with Grandmom, and you may come back and visit us both? I wept, my face bunched stiffly up and glowing a bitter pink, my lashes heavy with clinging tears. I wanted to beg her, Please, Mommy. I may go to the school around the corner, where the playground is.

My little heart throbbed inside my chest and my stomach heaved, as even though my organs were squeezing out tears of their own in there. My chin tensed and my bottom lip trembled as I buried my face in my grandmother’s belly.

“Grandmom, oh Grandmom…!” I clung to her.

I could listen my mother sighing impatiently behind me.

“Kim,” she said. I heard my own breath catch in my thickened throat. “Kim!” she repeated, angrier this time. I turned my head, still pressed into my grandmother, and saw my mother from the corner of my eye, keeping two little brown buckled shoes in her hands.

My grandmother’s hand patted my head gently. “You’ve got to get your shoes on, kiddo,” she urged.

Daddy came to the door and wondered out loud, “What’s the situation?”

I hated the way he said that. Sit-chew-WAY-shin. He always wanted to know what the sit-chew-WAY-shin was, always with his big paws set belligerently on his hips.

“Well, are we gettin’ on the road here or what?”

I didn’t like the way things changed after my mother married Daddy. I didn’t see Grandmom as often, and my mother quickly learned that the most effective way to bribe me was with currency of grandmother: “But I’ll take you to see Grandmom on Saturday…” It was the magic word. I’d do anything she asked.

I didn’t like living with a huge mustached dad who came walking in the front door right in the middle of The Jeffersons with his shirt all torn up, stinking of “aftershave” and his knuckles dripping blood. I didn’t like the way Mommy leapt from the sofa and ran to him to nurse his taproom wounds. In my modest kindergartner’s opinion, she was never closely angry sufficient for the sit-chew-WAY-shin. If it was me, I would tell him to get lost.

I in particular didn’t like it when Mommy brought my baby brother home from the hospital, and my parents beamed over him like he was the neatest thing since the disposition cigarette lighter. She kept the squirming bundle out to me, so I could have a look.

Oh, how I wished she would take him back, but I knew darn well that Mommy couldn’t return the baby the same way she’d return a box of weevil-tainted Rice-A-Roni to the corner store. Still, I asked, “Is he staying forever?”

My mother let out a arid laugh. “Of course he’s staying forever. He’s your brother. He’s a part of the family.”

I, for one, didn’t want to be a fellow member of this family. Something when it comes to it just felt…I don’t know. So phony. It was like I’d been enrolled in playing half-hearted house with a bunch of kids I’d never actually liked that much. I wanted to grit my teeth and snarl under the towering shadow of my father, “You don’t belong to me, you big bully, you,” then turn to the baby in his stupid foofy blue bassinet and point a finger into his screwed-up little pink face, “…and you don’t belong to me either, you poopy-smelly baby,” and then spun around to face my mother and shout, “and you don’t belong to me anymore because now you belong to them!”

But I didn’t say anything. I was just a little kid, and almost everything was out of my hands.

I surrendered and stepped into my Buster Browns and let my mother buckle them, all the while keeping one of my little hands tucked inside my grandmother’s. I con-sidered dropping to the floor and begging to stay, but I could imagine my mother’s biting admonishment, Oh for Christ’s sake, do you always have to be so dramatic? Maybe she genuinely wouldn’t fetch me back to see Grandmom at Christmas. Maybe she meant that. Just in case, I kept my mouth shut.

That day we drove for ten hours to a rectangular three-bedroom house on a tree-lined street with cracked sidewalks, with origins breaking through from below. I cried nonstop for the firstborn two hours on the road. That tremendous and terrible sentiment returned to my heart each time I pictured my grandmother’s sweet, smiling eyes tinged with a watery sadness of their own, and my belly turned over and moaned. The sockets of my eyes seemed pumped with poison, the backs of my eyeballs were burning. Weirdly, I detected the fleeting alcoholic whiff of a doctor’s office. I squeezed out a hot spring of tears.

I whispered, “I miss you, Grandmom.”

I let my head hang forward. When I opened my eyes again, a long glassy ribbon of snot was hanging from the tip of my nose, dangling perilously over my lap. I brought my shirt up to my face and blew. As I pulled it down again, wetter now and heavier like a dirty rag, Daddy thumped his fist versus the steering wheel and shouted at my mother, “Jesus, this kid’s been crying since we left Philly! Enough is sufficient already. Can’t you find galore way to shut her the hell up?!”

My mother leaned forward and reached into a paper grocery bag snug amongst her feet. She burrowed her hands inside, then drew them out again. She kept something white. She swiveled around in her seat and offered it to me.

“Here,” she said. I reached forward and took the little package into my hands. It crinkled.

“Ring Dings,” the label read.

I tore open the plastic and that distinguishable aroma of chemical chocolate met my virgin nostrils. I reached in and pulled out a little brown cake, like a sticky hockey puck. I bit into it and a surprise creamy-sweet white center seemed to smile on me. The cake filled my mouth, then slid into my belly, padding it. It packed itself like a plaster versus my seeping wounds. I ingested more cake; my stomach grew fuller and was soothed.

I consumed my very original Ring Ding. The pain subsided. My tears dried, I grew quiet. I thought of Grandmom again after I finished the cake, but only briefly. For there, in the bottom of the package, was a second one.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Definitely Recommend
By EasyReader
This book is what excellent writing is all about: using juicy life experience to inspire and put something good out into the world. Bravo. It was like talking with a good friend who has great stories and knows how to use her self-awareness to get at something profoundly deeper. The author’s particular gift in describing people makes this book so engaging and memorable (I could read an entire book on Uncle Carl alone). She raises fascinating, culturally relevant, thought provoking questions in a humble, straightforward, charming, confident, and just plain inspiring way. Reminded me about being human and I loved it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A Must Read for Every Women and Young Girl
By Alexis C. Bonavitacola
I loved this book!

Kim’s writing is humorous, dark, poignant, confronting, authentic, and connecting. She doesn’t over analyze the back story of her life and you get, without the usual blame game assigned to others in her life, that Kim has figured this out for herself, wrestled with negative assumptions about heavy people and confronted them head on. Often I wanted to stand up and say “bravo, Kim”.

If I had a daughter on the verge of adolescence, this would be at the top of my mother-daughter book club. As a woman in my mid 50′s, there were take aways from this book that continue to help me learn and grow when it comes to defining one’s self through a distorted lens of beauty.

Terrific!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Read My Hips
By Ezzy Languzzi
READ MY HIPS is irreverent, honest, laced with humor and jaw-dropping examples of our society’s cruel treatment of “fat” people. Her writing is that of someone who’s emancipated herself from societal expectations and negative body image. I couldn’t help but ask myself as I read this, “How shallow am I?” READ MY HIPS is a bravely written and thoughtful quick-read that I’ll be recommending to my book club.

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The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration In 3

From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama’s political success and Oprah Winfrey’s financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that [w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have plainly redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been substituted by mass incarceration as a system of social control (More African Americans are underneath correctional control today… than were enslaved in 1850). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating it is transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, refused employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our imaginativeness of injustice: most Americans recognise and don’t know the truth regarding mass incarceration—but her conservatively researched, deeply engaging, and exhaustively readable book must change that. (Feb.)
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275 of 289 people found the following review helpful.
Important, Eye Opening Work
By Middle-aged Professor
Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of inmates in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. In this book, Alexander argues that this system of mass incarceration “operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” The War on Drugs, the book contends, has created “a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society.” Mass incarceration, and the disabilities that come with the label “felon,” serve, metaphorically, as the new Jim Crow.

The book develops this argument with systematic care. The first chapter provides context with a brief history of the rise, fall and interrelation of the first two racial caste systems in the United States, slavery and Jim Crow. Subsequent chapters provide close scrutiny of the system of mass incarceration that has arisen over the past thirty years, examining each stage of the process (e.g., criminalization, investigation, prosecution, sentencing) and the many collateral consequences of a felony conviction (entirely apart from any prison time) and how and why each of these has operated to the detriment of African-Americans. The book also explores how the caste system Alexander identifies is different and not-so-different from Jim Crow, the many political and economic forces now invested in sustaining it, and how it has been rendered virtually immune to challenge through litigation. The book concludes with an argument that while many particular reforms will be needed to change this system, nothing short of a social movement that changes public acceptance of the current system can solve this problem and offers critiques and proposals for the civil rights movement based on this analysis. Everyone who reads this book will come away seeing the War on Drugs and mass incarceration in a new light.

189 of 207 people found the following review helpful.
Can we start talking about race?
By Randall L. Wilson
I’m a white man and I carry with me the cultural legacy of racism. I know I’m not alone but I don’t find many other white people who are willing to venture into this uncomfortable territory and own up to our own racism. And while I’ve had a few conversations about race with black men, I must say I feel like I’m venturing into dangerous territory – how do I transcend the privilege I’ve had as an socio-econonmically advantaged white man to connect to those who rightly see me and my kind as an oppressor?

This was a hard book to read. I said that about “Slavery by Another Name” as well which is the companion book to this one as they both address a white power structure that uses prisons to humiliate, degrade, diminish and control black people. “Slavery by Another Name” addresses this phenomenon during Jim Crow and “The New Jim Crow” addresses how we’ve been doing this for the past thirty years.

To the extent white people and non-black minorities I know talk about race, its about why blacks continue to languish at the bottom of the American barrel. If other ethnic groups that have experienced discrimination manage to overcome it and prosper as Americans, what is wrong with blacks? I’ve always said it was slavery and its legacy, the Jim Crow era and its deprivations but now I realize that the story is even more complex, black men have been disproportionately single out for prison time, causing entire families to suffer the economic loss, the social stigma and family shame that accompanies such imprisonment.

I remember the O.J. trial and how whites were “shocked” that blacks had such a different take on the police and criminal justice. At the time, there was discussion about how black men were singled out for police harassment and arrest but I don’t remember a discussion about why so many black men were imprisoned. In 1995, the impact of the drug wars wasn’t fully appreciated but 15 years later with an even larger prison population, it is. The other thing about the O.J. trial that made it complicated was his role as a rich celebrity. In that regard, he took on the power and privilege of a white man and there was a sense that in his marriage to a white woman and in his lifestyle he had been escaping from his black upringing, betraying blacks. But when he stood trial, blacks hurried to support him against the white power structure.

This goes to the other argument the book makes which is the way black exceptionalism, the O.Js, the Oprahs, the Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods and Obamas allow whites to believe that racism is dead, that blacks are making it, a sign that our color-blind society has triumphed. This exceptionalism hides or excuses the results of a drug war aimed directly at the black underclass and which has snatched so many black men from their families and putting them at even greater disadvantage. After prison they are marked men, making employment very difficult, voting often impossible and public housing unlikely.

Class is not the subject of this book but I do think it is also at play both in terms of preserving the tense wariness poor whites feel towards any sign of “special favors” for blacks and as the lesser evil to that of racism but which has defined American life for so long and made everyone – rich and poor – look to the wealthy as successful and the poor as shameful losers.

149 of 163 people found the following review helpful.
MUST READ: A powerful book!
By Van Jones
Law Professor Michelle Alexander’s long-anticipated debut puts a bright light directly on what is perhaps our greatest national shame: the extraordinary rates of incarceration for people of color in the United States.

Her writing is lucid and gripping; her arguments are clear and concise; her conclusions often are inescapable. She powerfully makes the case that the incarceration industry has become to the 21st Century what Jim Crow segregation was to the 20th: a system that undermines American ideals of justice, while reinforcing social inequality.

In what many hope will be a “post-racial” era, Ms. Alexander’s voice is a courageous one. Even as she rightfully celebrates progress at many levels, she refuses to let our society ignore the fact that a million or more people of color are imprisoned today (out of all proportion to their numbers in the population AND even out of all proportion to their rate of criminal offenses, as documented by the government).

More importantly, she dares to ask (and attempts to answer) the simple question: how can this be happening in our country today?

Impeccably well-argued, “The New Jim Crow” is an inspired work – representing the debut of a bright, new and important voice in American life and letters.

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The Century Handbook Of Writing

This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. Together, the more than one hundred UC Libraries incorporate the greatest university exploration library in the world, with over thirty-five million volumes in their holdings. This book and hundreds of thousands of others may be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library. HP’s patented BookPrep engineering science was used to clean artifacts resulting from use and digitization, bettering your reading experience. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that are portion of the primary book, reflecting the traveling of these collections over a lifetime of use.

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329 of 352 people found the following review helpful.
I compiled the data from all the 5 star reviews, an honest look.
By Eddard S.
EDIT: I want to preface this review saying that Examkrackers is a good resource and may be great for some and not for others. I don’t want to give the idea that it is a bad resource.
________________________________________________________________________
Advantages:
- the materials look great (color)
- it seems to cover all the material necessary
- great marketing

Disadvantages:
- The concepts are very weak, especially in biology. You need to understand WHAT is going on conceptually. You can’t just be thrown facts and material without knowing WHAT is going on. I quote another reviewer, “I have to say, the science is very conceptually weak… they teach you shortcuts, but if you don’t grasp the concepts, the mcats is about tricking you on the weaknesses and you’ll go for all the tricks.”
- Not all of the books are excellent, the physics book is particularly weak.
- SIDE NOTE: Exam Krackers 101 Verbal passages is actually very strong and a quality resource.

I went through nearly all the reviews for this site for 30-40 minutes after I found the series to be less than 5 STAR quality (closer to 3) as so many reviewers were saying. I also noticed that a lot of the 5 star ratings were quick little “this is great, blah blah” short reviews. Please read some of the 3 star honest well written reviews. I did this. I also noticed over half of the 5 star reviews were following a certain pattern. The other thing that raised a flag was that this series had 96 reviews! 96! I tried to find ONE other MCAT comprehensive review that was close. Not one. The Kaplan 2007-2008 had 15 reviews, that was the closest.

So I asked a simple question, “how can I be sure these reviews are real or not?”. One possible answer was, reviewers like to review. So if these were REAL reviews then I would assume there may be at least ONE other review by that reviewer. JUST ONE. So I decided to waste an enormous amount of time (I have a nice quad-core HP computer less than a month old, so it helped me go faster) and open every reviewer to see if they had reviewed any other books, I felt compelled to do this if there was any foul play going on. Here is what I found:

Here are the results as of June 4th, 2009:
There were 58 reviews that gave 5 stars:

—37 of these reviews only reviewed this book (2 anonymous “by “). That is over 63%

—Another 2 were fishy in that they only reviewed this book and another Examkrackers book OR this book and gave a Kaplan book a low score saying in the first sentence, “I would use the Examkrackers books”. In the first sentence made it tough to swallow. Also they were referring to some site called secret-route-dot-com which I looked up on amazon and google and found to be a scam type book with glowing reviews and then people calling it a scam.
All in all I estimate that 67% of the reviews were SINGLE reviews for this book (with only 2 that were this book and another EK book). 2 of every 3!

—33% of the reviewers that gave this book 5 Stars had reviewed some other book by some other publisher. Which looked real.
Crosscheck me on this, it is verifiable and true. Also because the reviews were fake it is likely that Examkrackers will not be able to remedy this situation because when you create a fake email to write a fake review you can’t log in again because you will forget the log in/email.

To be fair I went to check out the Kaplan Premier Program with the highest number of reviews. The 2007-2008 had 15 reviews, I was only interested in the 5 star reviews as on this book (as if someone is to falsify reviews that would likely be 5 or 1 star reviews). There were FIVE 5 star reviews, and of the 5 all 5 had reviewed at least one other book or product from amazon.com.

–100% of the people who highly reviewed the Kaplan product were REPEAT reviewers and had reviewed some other book.

I am not advocating Kaplan’s book as I haven’t used it yet. I am very worried about the fidelity of some of these 5 star reviews. I would estimate that most of them are fake.

_________________________________________________________________________
———I have spaced this out as a poster didn’t think I was being fair to examkrackers (objectively I do give them a 3)——–

Overall I would give the EK books a 3, but I had to give them a 2 because of the high probability of dishonesty.
_________________________________________________________________________

I almost gave them a 1 because I am strongly against cheating and my gut tells me that employees created a lot of those reviews.

No one can be 100% sure, but after reading over the ones that seem fake, I see an eerie resemblance and repetition.
_________________________________________________________________
EDIT:
So all in all, I would say this. If you are really conceptually strong and did amazing in the classes then ExamKrackers is ok because the quick summary fashion in which they present information will be great. If you haven’t taken a class in a few years and are a non traditional student, these may not be for you. The other option is using the Examkrackers as a good base and when you don’t understand the quick overviews to use a textbook or some other more comprehensive source that explains concepts better.

I think this is why you can see some people really enjoying this and some people who don’t think it is that great. A person who HAS a concept down can read this and say, “oh yeah I remember this, I need to know this? ok” while someone else can read it who has the concept down and say, “wow, if I hadn’t learned this really well I would have no clue what this is saying. This is horrible.”

You see, 2 people with the same strength reacting to the same resource differently. And of course those who don’t have a concept down will have a vague understanding based mostly on memory but their ability to think critically in new directions (which is what the MCAT truly tests, not memory) will be tough. They may be able to get a 10 but I think a lot of us studying are setting goals higher than a 10 in each section.

EXAMPLE OF WHAT I’M SAYING: The section on the electron transport chain is 1 long paragraph. When I read it I had NO idea what it was talking about other than all the definitions of all the major constituents involved. If asked a difficult question on proton gradients or what would happen if you inhibited ATP synthase I would have been clueless and unable to get it right. If asked a simple Q I may have been ok.

So, what I did was also buy the TPR hyperlearning books and I read the EK (with a lot of questions and confusion, filling in gaps with wikipedia sometimes) then I read the TPR section on the same topic (2-3 pages instead of 1 paragraph), now I am conceptually stronger, then I will create a small review back with the EK material.

So I am using the EK as my backbone, because it helps me make the review BUT with only the EK I wouldn’t be able to excel (as I took bio years ago). Had I just finished bio and had an excellent prof that covered everything, then I may have been conceptually strong with something like the electron transport chain and the EK short paragraph (as opposed to 2-3 pages in the princeton book) would have been sufficient.

Not ALL the EK sections are this much shorter than the TPR sections BUT you will find more effort to make sure you know everything that is going on and why in a TPR book while EK’s goal is cleary: HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW in the shortest way we can do it. (useful if you already conceptually strong).

GOOD Luck peoples!

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Not the best series
By A. Sun
I bought this set of books this year to study for the mcats and I have to say that I’m deeply disappointed. Given the hype about everything that’s been said online, I figured, so what if the writers aren’t PhD, MD, or science majors, test-taking is different. So I studied with their 10 wk schedule, did most of their practice problems with the 100 problem/passage series, and what I noticed are the following weaknesses:
1.) General concepts are not covered to great enough depth for true conceptual understanding = very important to ace the mcat.
2.) some practice questions are irrelevant.
3.) Biology section–> nervous system, so badly written it is a bit funny, never seen it so badly written, so bad Don’t get me started on thermo in the chemistry review.
4.) physics –> concepts do not follow with actual examples. Physics is really about applications. Can’t apply the concepts, you’ll be sad on the mcat.
5.) verbal – the only awesome thing about EK!
6.) the practice 100/1000 problem series do not give a good reflection of actual mcat where it’s passage based and you need to know how to handle the information presented. The workbooks are all stand-alone questions.
7.) The science is not well presented. As a biology major with a near perfect GPA, I have to say, the science is very conceptually weak. Some explanations are a little funny. They teach you shortcuts, but if you don’t grasp the concepts, the mcats is about tricking you on the weaknesses, and you’ll go for all the tricks.

Maybe the books are meant as a supplement to the actual course, or as references with supplement of great background. I have no idea of why the ratings are so high for this series. Audio-osmosis is SO annoying. I’m really beginning to wonder if people from the company are reviewing the books.

One other thing, the text is colored, but honestly, you’re no longer in gradeschool, so having content over visual entertainment with salty the annoying cracker is better at this point.
If you have to, buy the used as supplemental material to the Princeton review course which i highly recommend. Their texts are amazing!!!!!

Gluck everyone.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Awesome but..
By taylorw187
The Examkrackers series is great to improve your MCAT score for home study. Just make sure to follow the home study guide on their website. The books are colorful, easy to read and…yeah almost fun to study from. The only major downfall is that the typos and errors can be frusturating. I got the 7th edition and it was still littered with typos! The typos and errors are so obvious that they could have been fixed if someone just proofread the final draft ONCE!! Seriously! For example: The front cover says “Includes exercises with OFFCIAL AAAMC material”, you might see 4 answers and they forgot to ask a question. There are parts where they say remember these FOUR things and go on to number THREE things. It’s still the best study guide for the MCAT. All the little typos and messups just get really anoying considering that anyone could have fixed them after one proof read. And after the SEVENTH EDITION?!?! Come on guys. Don’t just pump out a new edition every year to make a quick buck without even fixing the retarded typos. That’s just lame and cheap.

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