Leather Books

The HOLMAN CHRISTIAN STANDARD BIBLE has become our favorite version in teaching and preaching. My wife and I have been doing Bible studies in prison ministry since 2003 and have used many versions of the Word: NIV, ESV, NKJV, and finally settled on the New International Readers Version as one which was easy to understand, clear, and faithful to the text. Then we found the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

This version fulfills everything we are looking for: accuracy of the text, ease of use and understanding (I would say it is written at a high school reading level), and faithfulness to the meaning of the passages. For example, the healing scriptures of Isaiah 53, 1 Peter 2:24, Matthew 8:17 are all present and clear.

Some of the other modern versions seem to lose the power and authority of the Word as they try to be easily understood in plain English, not Holman. Holman does not take liberties with the authority of the Word, richness of the language, nor many of the key doctrines of the Old and New Testament. I found it to be reliable, articulate and a solid reference.

I highly recommend it for personal devotion, sermon preparation and study, and Bible study with a group. The illustrations are clear, colorful, and helpful. All in all, the Holman Standard is an exceptional Bible and available in a wide range of prices and features.

The British Tan leather cover is beautiful. This has become my favorite Bible of all. We have given many of these to our kids and others ad gifts.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur, his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

Chief Rabbi Sacks' subtle differences in translation compared to other and earlier Siddurim (Prayer Books), are like the minute final strokes of the artist that transform the excellent into the extraordinary. He symphonizes innovation with deep tradition and creates an English text that can inspire and uplift in its own rights. His essays and notes are literary, liturgical, spiritual and philosophic masterpieces. In the USA this Siddur is little known, but should be a handbook of prayer to any English speaking Jewish person.

This is not a review as I don't have a Kindle and don't plan on getting one. I like to read books the old fashioned way. I would love to read this and do hope it is put in printed form soon. Why put out a book in just Kindle format? Doesn't give me a choice and I can't be in the minority of non-Kindle users.

Brilliant! By the time you read it cover to cover you'll know more about the history of the A-2 and G-1 Flight Jackets. Lavishly photographed and filled with great information.

This is the first parallel Bible that I have ever used and I really like having 4 different translations at my fingertips to compare. I would recommend this to someone else.

This bible was just like any other bible, but I really appreciated its quality. Each page was beautifully designed. It is the exact type of book to keep your family records in.

Louis L'Amour is best known for his westerns. He has rarely been equaled, and never surpassed in his ability to tell stories of the struggles people had in the old west. What few people know is he wrote other stories also. For example his "Last of the Breed" is a modern day adventure worthy of Tom Clancy. It does have a feel of the old west.
"The Hills of Homicide" is a collection of detective stories from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Each of them is well written. A crime is committed, and our hero figures out who committed the crime. And like his stories of the old west, Louis L'Amour often includes a fight and a girl.

These stories from a different period of our countries history and do have a different feel to them. It is interesting to see how much technology has changed over the last 50 years. At one point a hero is trying to warn a women of danger, and he gets in a car. Now he would just get on his cell phone and call her cell phone.

These are fun, entertaining stories. They are the stories of the triumphant good over evil. Get the book and you'll enjoy several fun hours of reading these well-written stories.

This book has some good quality photos from the past.
You can get this book from the Mercersburg Library for alot less
$.

Titus Livius, (Livy) 59BCE-17ACE, born in Padua he was a popular and much admired writer in his day. His history was a favorite of Caesar Augustus who reigned during the time of the writing of the "History of Early Rome". His facts are not the most accurate, but like Plutarch, he believed that; "if history were not morally instructive, it was nothing." "History of Early Rome" is a valiant effort at recalling and preserving the memory of the noble deeds of the Romans. The history opens with the Trojans wandering into Rome to found a new city around 750BCE. It traces the history of Romulus the founder, the period of Roman kingship and then the Roman Republic era. Livy has a wonderful description of the "rape of the Sabine women" in which Rome's men conduct to increase their population. Wonderful telling of the life and acts of the noble and humble Cinncinatus who many of George Washington's contemporaries believed modeled himself after and held many of the same virtues. It contains an in depth look at Coriolanus, which was the source material for Shakespeare's play "Coriolanus". "Shared danger is the strongest of bonds; it will keep men united in spite of mutual dislike and suspicion."

Machiavelli loved reading Livy's histories and wrote his most important philosophical work from it, "The Discourses", in which he glorifies republican Rome as a model of good government. Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew that there were three books every gentleman had to have familiarity with; Plutarch's "Lives", Livy's "History of Rome" and Virgil's Aeneid. In fact, all the founding fathers of note had read Livy and learned much from his history of Rome.

If you are truly interested in obtaining a classical education, put this book on the top of your reading list! I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in political philosophy, and history.