The short attention span and corporate management of mainstream media has pushed serious investigative journalists to the fringes, with good ones like Kevin Sites forced to work independently or in unsustainable online operations. The subject of this book is Sites' year-long project for Yahoo! News in which he visited 20 war zones in a single year. The project led to some unexpected results. With so much traveling Sites did not have the time to report from each combat zone with a great amount of in-depth investigation, but on the other hand the project is a sobering illustration of how much senseless violence is taking place in the world at any given time. The rapid schedule also led Sites to dispense with standard action news coverage and to concentrate on the innocent civilians and overworked soldiers who have to take the brunt of bad decisions by politicians and demagogues. In the process, Sites comes up with incredible insights on war and politics that are as compelling as they are low-key, and his skills as an investigative journalist are complemented by a writer's gift for reaching powerful insights in few words.

America is full of pundits who think they can make big statements about wars and humanitarian crises that they have not seen in person and about which they've only heard propaganda. Kevin Sites and other courageous old-school journalists like him have really been on the front lines. Too bad the mass media is too yellow to give them the airtime that they, and their subjects, deserve. [~doomsdayer520~]

The importance of Ronald Reagan is often being debated with books on both his greatness, sort of hagiographies, and those opposing places to much credit in him (Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future). This book attepts to examine Reagan from he standpoint of his 'rebellion' against the consensus on the right and left that the Soviet Union was a fact of life. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and other powerful voices in the Republican and Democratic parties believed the USSR was part of the status quo of the world, something that would always exist.

This book posits that Reagan and those around him imagined a world without the USSR and they sought to bring it about. This 'revolutionary' ideology meant that the State Department's current policies had to be pushed aside and instead of accomidating the USSR the U.S had to push against it, rather thanc containing, it had to be done away with.

Suprisingly Reagan found a sort of soul mate in Michael Gorbachev, who also sought radical reform in the USSR. In a freindship forged in ideological combat they together helped tear down the myth of Soviet invincibility. This book examines such famous incidents as the 'tear down this wall' speech. It shows that Reagan had a very real ideology that he pursued with vigor.

An important work. It doesn't highlight the role of the Afghan war at all and this is a major dificiency, but one filled by such books as Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times. For those interested in the Cold War and Reagan this is an important study from a master writer.

Seth J. Frantzman

This may be destined to become a spiritual classic. I certainly hope so. Anne Rice's story of her Catholic upbringing, her falling away and 38-year sojourn into atheism, and her eventually return to Jesus Christ and his Church made a deep impression on me.

Not everything is seamlessly related, and that may be a good thing: it lends a bedrock authenticity to her account. And though there are passages of great beauty and power, there are also stretches of a more mundane nature. That's OK. Indeed, isn't that how life is? I found the first half of the book where she relates her Catholic childhood and youth occasionally tedious, but also strangely fascinating--and in the end absolutely necessary to give background and insight to her eventually return to the Church.

It is the second half of the book that redeems the whole. The picture that emerges is of a tremendously gifted woman who all her life--even during her nearly 40 years of wandering in the desert--is being drawn into the loving arms of Christ. The description of the process she went through to return to her first Love, to Him Who is Love itself, moved my wife and me to tears as I read the book aloud.

Her brief recounting of how she came to write her vampire novels, what they meant to her as she sought to relate the struggles of lost souls in a world without God--very much in line with her own life experiences at the time--how they touched a nerve with a huge audience of lost, alienated, and marginalized people, how the critics often misread her--all this is fascinating. The background to much of this is a lifelong struggle with and confusion about gender--her own, and its proper place in the world.

Finally, Anne Rice comes across as an extremely honest and even heroic woman. She is that rare person who is completely orthodox in her theology but so captivated by God's love for her (and indeed for the whole world and everyone in it), perhaps best expressed in Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount, that she is committed to living her entire life in obedience to Our Lord's beautiful but challenging message from that passage. Consequently, her life now is one completely dedicated to loving her Lord with all her heart and her neighbor as herself. Amazingly, given her own struggles with Catholic teachings on sex and gender issues, she has found a way to do this in absolute obedience to the Church, even though she longs for changes. I find myself not in agreement with her here, but her firm fidelity to her Church despite her reservations about its teachings is an inspiration and a blessing.

Thank you, Anne Rice, for being willing to share with readers your remarkable story.