The time was fascinating enough for Shakespeare to have devoted three plays to it, and several more to its prelude. The various descendants of Edward III were fighting each other for the crown of England (and parts of France) throughout the middle 15th century, in a battle of cousin against cousin (even brother against brother) that later on became known as The Wars of the Roses. In this book Alison Weir gives a blow-by-blow account of the various conflicts in the reign of Henry VI and Edward IV. She has a long prelude wherein she sets the stage with the deposing of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke (who became, then, Henry IV), his subsequent career, and that of Henry V, who died leaving the baby Henry VI king, setting the stage for the power struggles to come.

Weir has clearly mastered her material, but still this story seemed curiously lifeless. There are murders and betrayals aplenty, and even occasional selfless and heroic behavior, but presented rather matter-of-factly. Besides this, there are a couple of problems that I see.

One is perhaps typical of a history: unless the historian has the flair of a storyteller, it just becomes one damn thing after another. I found little that was compelling in a narrative with great possibilities, nor motivation for what seemed to be bizarre behavior on everyone's part.

Another problem here was simply in a lack of supporting material. Maps of territories being contested, and diagrams of battles, would help to place these events in space and give each fight an identity. What is more, a dense chronicle like this one needs to be bristling with dates, perhaps as a running comment in a margin. We are given the day and the month constantly as things go on, but I found myself having forgotten the year, and unable to find it. Rather than constantly wading through detail, a reader should be able to get out and see the wider picture from time to time, too.

It is with some relief that I turn to the Henry VI plays, even though the history is compressed and distorted to serve the drama. In Shakespeare, it all makes sense, somehow.

This book purports to "update" Darwin's Origin of Species. But, as Jones says, "It would be presumptuous to present this essay as more than a shadow of its original, in content or in form." Moreover, "The Origin is...a work of high Victorian seriousness, with no concession to any desire to be entertained. In these more flippant times I yield to the temptation to leaven a scientific narrative with tales from the curious history of evolution and those who study it."

Ok, fair enough. So, what is this book's intended audience? In Darwin's case, he was writing to the educated lay person of his day, which mostly meant Victorian gentlemen of conventional morality and religion, but interested in science, and with minds that could follow an argument and be changed. But he was writing to scientists mainly, and was acutely conscious of the need to be comprehensive, clear, and conservative as regards the evidence, and rigorous in argument.

Jones is not writing to convince his audience that all the variety of life that we see about us arose out of simpler forms (or, even, just one simple type of proto-creature) by descent with modification over eons of time, with the environment doing the selective breeding, as it were. His audience should already believe that. (Those that most vehemently do not are certainly not addressed here.) Rather, he is giving us an informal survey of natural history in its great and entertaining variety, using Darwin's great argument as a "scaffolding" upon which to hang his discussions. Throughout he implicitly assumes that you accept the reality of evolution. What he is doing is guiding you through its implications and outcomes in a great number of ways. Thus, for example, Darwin used the chaotic nature of the geologic strata to argue for various events that could fold rocks or raise ancient seabeds up to the tops of mountains by referring to Lyell's theories, which were still controversial. Jones simply assumes we believe the by-now-well-established facts of geology, and uses these to discuss the spottiness and contrariness of the fossil record.

Thus, Jones has a much easier task than Darwin had, so can have more fun with his material. And he does have fun, and so will you. This book is entertaining and enlightening: if you are familiar with the main arguments for evolution, it will remind you of them, and enrich your feeling for them. Jones talks widely about nature and the issues raised by natural selection. However, if you have never before encountered arguments for natural selection ("descent with modification"), then perhaps you should consult some more diagrammatic and focused work that lays bare the logic behind it. And then read this book.

This is a retelling of Homerï¿s great story by an actor/storyteller, and lasts just over four hours. By way of contrast, Ian McKellenï¿s reading of Faglesï¿s translation of The Odyssey clocks in at 13 hours, 10 minutes. One would think, then, that this version must leave lots out. Well, yes and no. It covers all the main adventures Odysseus has, nor does it hurry over them. (In fact, the Trojan horse sequence, which is just alluded to briefly by Homer, starts the story here and is given an expansive treatment, much of which actually comes from later writers.)

So, Odds Bodkin tells Odysseusï¿s story in full in four hours. Then what does he leave out? He leaves out Homerï¿s expansive way of telling a story by means of repeated heroic epithets and extended dialogs. He leaves out the gods, mostly: their part of the story is brief indeed. All the careful planning that went into the defeat of the suitors is left out as well. It leaves out the adventures of Telemachus. All Odysseusï¿s entertaining fabrications during his travels, these have been excised. And, as this version is intended for children, it leaves out the gruesome scenes at the end where the unfaithful servants are killed.

You might say that it leaves out most of the matter that locates the story in a certain heroic pre-classical culture. Yet some flavor of that culture remains, and the well-known incidents in the story are certainly given their due. Thus we have, in addition to the Trojan Horse, Scylla and Charibdis, the visit to the Underworld, the cattle of Helios, the Sirens, the Isle of the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops, the misadventures on Circeï¿s isle, and the long languishing on Calypsoï¿s isle. And it finishes up with a bang as Odysseus strings his mighty bow and lets fly an arrow through all the aligned ax-heads, then, revealed, turns in wrath upon the suitors who have been besieging his wife.

This is certainly an entertaining version, and an excellent way to learn the story ï¿ for child or grownup. Odds Bodkin is good at voices, so he can differentiate his characters well. This adds to the fun as he mixes accents and verbal mannerisms (Polyphemus reminded me of the Cookie Monster) in an energetic and colorful telling. It also helps that there is a more-or-less continuous musical background. Celtic harp and 12-string guitar are rarely obtrusive, but rather provide push to the narration.

Anyway, to us, The Odyssey is a story, not a guide for living, but it is one of the central stories of our culture. And here we get that story (without undergoing trial by recitation), which is all that most of us want, really.

This book tells the story - long, confusing, but connected - of the English kings of the late Middle Ages, from the downfall and death of Edward II in 1327 and the accession of his son Edward III. His successor Richard II was deposed and killed by the Lancastrian Henry IV. Then followed his son Henry V and a great time for England against France in their ongoing Hundred-Years War. His son Henry VI was so ineffectual he set off the long bizarre dynastic scuffle called the Wars of the Roses, from which the Yorkist Edward IV finally emerged. He had his own middle brother, George, killed, but his youngest brother, the infamous Richard of Gloucester, slaughtered his way to the throne, holding it for a tenuous two years as Richard III, until the resurgent Lancastrians finally got rid of him and the whole bloody Middle Ages, and put Henry VII (the first Tudor) on the throne in 1485 - the first decent ruler poor England had seen in a century and a half.

This was the period that Shakespeare chose for his history plays. To the Elizabethans these events were still reasonably current (as our Civil War is to us), and yet enough removed - and of a different dynasty - to be safe in the playing. (Not quite: Elizabeth's (former) favorite Essex paid for a special performance of Richard II, which concerns the deposing of a legitimate monarch, and soon after he was proclaimed a traitor.) The politically savvy playwright wanted to walk the fine line between telling the ripping good yarn of these brutal yet colorful fellows, while somehow not tarnishing the gloss of the monarchy itself.

But Shakespeare was no historian. He has modified the story to suit political and dramatic exigencies, and often, it appears, by mistake. The dynastic interweavings are confusing, and his sources had gaps and contradictions, so sometimes he misplaces characters and events. More often, though, he has to tell a long story in a short time, and give it some push. Thus the compression and conflation of events, the exaggeration of character.

Ok, so maybe watching the plays is not the best way to learn English history. Certainly, Norwich brings this home. He gently but relentlessly documents Will's departures from the actual history, and they are legion. Every once in a while, in this book, he devotes a chapter to the particular play that "covers" the material he has discussed to that point. Basically, each of these chapters goes through the play at hand - I Henry IV, say - and shows how it deviates from or hews to the truth. After a few of these chapters, I just skipped them: the tale Norwich tells in his history sections is great fun, but the Shakespeare chapters simply drive home the point that the plays are at best approximations to the actual. Fair enough: I'm convinced. I still want to watch the plays: they contain cultural and emotional truth after all, besides being, many of them, great plays.

So, read this book for the history, rather than the Shakespeare criticism. And though the plays are not good history, reading a good popular history is not irrelevant to enjoying them: after all, they were written for a public that already had a better than nodding acquaintance with the events they portray. And so should you.

Each of these six half-hour episodes covers a different era and habitat and set of creatures that lived sometime during the 150-million years of The Age of Dinosaurs. We have watched the series twice now, and I am still impressed by the animation techniques, their realism and attention to detail. They are presented as nature films, and it takes me constantly reminding myself to remember that they are not: these are realistic but not real. It is unlikely that children will care to keep that distinction in mind. Not that it matters; this series has the heft of truth, and should instill a love of nature in children, even if it must use the giant and fantastical past to get them started.

The genre of the nature film is an odd one, anyway. Even expert observers of wildlife seldom see much, so it is normally a bit of gentle deception that we are watching a connected narrative: the story is mostly words; the bits of film - of different animals, on different occasions - lend it immediacy and reality, though they are but flashes and glimpses of hidden and conjectured lives. Here, in the distant past, conjecture has even freer reign. I suspect many of the behaviors we see brought to life here were finally decided upon from a wide range of possibilities, but there is no hesitation or qualification in the presentation: this is the way it was. Thus we see ichthyosaurs acting like dolphins, and herbivorous dinosaurs acting like herbivorous grazing mammals, and so on. This is proper to a project of this sort: imaginary plausible facts are much better than tentative waffling when the purpose is primarily inspirational.

And here, in the fully-domesticated distant past, the creatures are without stage fright, so the visuals are all they need to be to tell a story in leisurely detail. We follow an aging pterosaur hundreds and thousands of weary miles to its traditional breeding grounds for yet another season, and see it to its sad end among its own kind, worn out and defenseless. A tyrannosaurus mother is killed in a freak accident at the end of the Cretaceous, leaving her tiny offspring to their fates. And as she dies, we feel, too, that we are watching the death of a whole world.

Perhaps that is the supreme virtue of this series: that world is dead and gone, but something of the tragedy of its dying has been put across to us, so many millions of years later. Maybe it will help us love our own world better.

"Think society, not economy." Thus Lindblom, our author, urges the reader to think about the market system in a more inclusive context than we ordinarily are wont to do. To what end?

Well, the subtitle of this book is "What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It." As he says early on: "For at least 150 years many societies have been trapped in an ill-tempered debate about market systems. Now we have an opportunity to think about these systems with a new dispassion and clarity. Market ideologues have learned that there is little to fear from communism... For their part, socialist ideologues have realized that aspiring for a better society is not enough. They have to face the complexities of constructing one."

One way of bisecting the population is by distinguishing those who see an imperfect world and want to perfect it from those who see an imperfect world and want to live in it as well as its imperfections allow. Charles Lindblom, a professor of economics and political science, is of the first sort. His viewpoints become clear as the book goes along, and he makes no bones about the imperfections of the various market systems and their supporting political systems. At the same time he is not an ideologue, and does not fall into the trap of yearning for a utopia of the right, or of the left.

Basically, he sees the market system as inducing cooperation and preempting violent interaction over a vast range of social interactions. That these take place mostly with money as intermediary does not remove them from the social sphere: it is, he claims, a false distinction to place economic interactions in some separable sphere from social interactions. The real distinction that the market system makes is quid pro quo: interactions between people involve an exchange - of goods for money, of favor for favor, of dinner at your house for (maybe much later) dinner at my house. But the invention of money and credit has made possible society-wide cooperation (the chain of cooperators to get this computer to my desk runs into the millions, or the hundreds of millions, of cooperating humans). For this the market system gets full credit.

But, as we know from the history of the Industrial Revolution (still going on in speeded-up form in some parts of the world), unfettered capitalism (the unregulated market system, in our terminology) is a harsh sorter-out of its participants into a few big winners (the entrepreneurs), a large number of more-or-less-contented employees, and a large number (although, unless the society is in imminent danger of revolution, not so large as the second group) of "losers" for whom the system offers little but grinding toil and early death.

Excepting such as Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, most people feel the government has a legitimate role in curbing the excesses of the market system and protecting the citizens from each other within it. For it is a particularly transparent sophistry that all participants in the system come to it as roughly equally competent. To consider just one sort of inequality: many participants cannot do the arithmetic (don't even know that there is arithmetic they should be doing!) that would tell them whether they are getting a reasonable value when they buy something on time. Nor, say, do they understand the savage rate of compounding that credit card debt, left unattended, incurs.

The great political schism of our time is not religious, but free-market vs. government intervention. It can take a vast number of forms, and debate can get bogged down in symbolically important issues of little practical consequence while other more important effects are ignored. It is the virtue of this book that it adopts a more neutral terminology ("the market system") and is able to discuss and evaluate a vast range of issues on which sides are taken without demonizing one side or the other.

The weakness of this book is its inconclusiveness. It can't be helped. One can read a book about welfare reform, for example, and come away convinced of the author's prescription, because he has carefully stage-managed his argument to minimize or hide difficulties. Lindblom does not have that luxury: every issue really does have two sides. His general views are not in doubt: the market system is a very good thing; it needs government controls; government can, does, and should use the market system when it can it further the collective goals of the society.

But: how much freedom, of what sort, is enough? Is a command political system that employs market incentives just about as good as democracy? What possible alternatives are there to a market system? What can be done about corporations, these vast engines of production that are increasingly out of the control of the political system?

I enjoyed this book, although I'm not sure what I now know that I didn't already tacitly know. There were a few epiphanies, but they went by so quickly that I suspect I could profit much from a second reading. There are no pictures, charts, or bold-faced claims: the book has no visual aids to highlight its points. The prose is calm, and the arguments for or against a position are spare, with little or no supporting evidence. One reason for this is the high level at which the points are discussed: Lindblom is not making policy, but rather pointing out the wide range of possible answers to many of the vexed questions of the day. One cannot doubt the truth of most of what he says. The question is, what is one to do with it?

If one is a person of the second type, the answer is, nothing. But reformers should be given pause: Perhaps, after reading this book they may be persuaded to make their solutions less sweeping, in keeping with a new appreciation of the subtlety and richness of the problems of organizing a society around a market system that is intertwined with a political system.

This is a sinfully enjoyable book. In the first place, it's about the getting and spending, the hope for wealth and the threat of poverty that occupy so much of our energy and emotion. This is a history of economic thought told through the lives and ideas of the most important innovators in this quintessentially modern branch of knowledge. Secondly, it is written in a style that is clear, colloquial, and intelligent. Our author knows his material so well that he can explain without strain. And finally, the organization is about as pleasing a mixture of learning and gossip as one could want. Starting with Adam Smith, going through such as Marx, Mill, and Keynes, and winding up with Joseph Schumpeter, the text treats us to charming and humorous mini-biographies of these unusual fellows along with non-technical (but not trivial!) discussions of their work.

But the title is not misleading: this is neither technical analysis nor, strictly speaking, science. Most of the men (they are all men!) profiled here were interested in larger issues than utility theory or supply-demand curves. Many lived before economics was separated out from more general speculation about society and morals. But even where they confined themselves to what we would call "economic" motives, they wrote prose - in some cases charming or brilliant prose - instead of equations. Economics occupies that intersection of the possibilities of brute nature and our accommodations with each other in society, so its inherently fuzzy subject matter is probably better captured in words than numbers. And life, too, happens to economists, just as it does to everyone: here we see how one's life and times can influence one's ideas. It's good to get a different take on Marx or Smith or Keynes than comes from the noisy network ideologues who yank their thoughts out of their context.

This book has no prerequisite but interest and an enjoyment of good writing on important matters. After all, as Keynes put it: "Practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

So, are you young enough to be looking at 10 to 30 years ahead of you to cosset your investments into something bigger than a breadbasket? Are you, at the same time, flush enough to have (perhaps after a few years of scrimping) 25 to 50 thousand dollars that YOU DON'T NEED? Are you comfortable with numbers? Can you, or can you learn to, look annual reports and financial statements in the face without flinching (or glazing over)? Does making an average of 15 to 20 percent per year on your portfolio over the long haul (for the ride may be bumpy, with some dives as well as climbs) sound sufficiently enticing? Do you have a day job that you intend to keep? Do you have a life outside of playing the market that you intend to live? Then, and only then, this could be the book for you!

I love these guys. They're a couple of fresh-faced young men, brothers, who treat investing seriously, but that doesn't mean somberly. The first chapter or so of this book was so jokey I thought the ratio of matter to chatter was going to be about 1:1, but they got down to business, as it were, soon enough.

Their basic point is that anybody who is willing to do some work looking at the fundamentals of companies can find some to invest in and, usually, stay with, that will significantly outperform the market. A person can build a portfolio of stocks that will beat the Dow, or the S&P 500, by several percentage points every year. Since the market, overall, is rising at 10 or 11 percent (ok, bad year to convince you of THAT) annually, over the long haul this 15 or 18 percent compounding of one's portfolio can lead to significant gains.

And the lovely thing is, most of these are tax-deferred, since only the dividends of stocks that you hold are taxed, and the plan is to hold your stocks, not to churn them. If you do your homework well you should have stocks that you stay with for years - perhaps even leave to your loved ones, who will therefore treasure your memory.

Yeah, yeah (I can hear you muttering): "willing to do some work"? Well, yes. YOU CAN'T GET AROUND IT! You have to crunch a few numbers, but it's fifth-grade math (some long division is required). You have to get cozy with financial statements. It'd be nice, moreover, if you understood something of what the company you want to own a chunk of does for a living (it might become YOUR living!), and some of the high points of its spectrum of the economic universe.

The brothers will introduce you to some good ideas, and puncture some bad ones. They demonstrate why small caps are so great for the individual investor, for example. They tell you when, with impeccable logic, it is a bad idea to short a stock (even a stock about to plummet). They talk turkey about the real costs of trading - the commissions AND the spread. They quickly demolish the allure of day-trading. They campaign tirelessly for honesty and transparency in investment advice, and point out the problem with almost all mutual funds (except for the index funds, which they like, but just not as much as individual stocks).

Oh, and they run a web site, which no doubt nets them a few bucks, which I certainly don't begrudge them. They are for power to the people, online power to the upwardly-mobile investor-class of people, anyway. (Hey, you have to start somewhere!)

Mostly, this book is inspirational. It's message is that you, the ordinary Joe or Jane, can put away a few bucks and then invest it intelligently. If you're not using the rent money, and if your time horizon is meaningful - 10 to 30 years - you can come out the other end with a real, honest-to-goodness nest egg. This is NOT a book about making quick profits, or getting wealth without work. It DOES say that it doesn't take too much work, and it does take several years, but that if you apply yourself, and hold the course, you will do better in the long run than all the fund managers in the financial industry. But more importantly, you'll do well. Also they start the book with a snippet from one of my favorite poems, so I have to trust them!

This is a pleasant essay - to call it a "history" is to give it more weight than it has - organized around the development of a truly transforming idea: money. And as innovations in money advanced those societies in which they arose, so this book must be a discussion of how money changed, and was changed by, the most "advanced" cultures of their time. Initially just the merchants needed something trans-national, and bars of raw gold and silver fit the bill. But it was the invention of coins, money that could be used by anyone, that started us down the path to the modern world, where all things - from pain and suffering to bushels of wheat - are commensurable in the one metric: money.

Jack Weatherford is an anthropologist, not an economist, so it is not surprising that he lingers over certain details that don't have a lot to do with his ostensible subject. Thus we are treated to the grisly spectacle of an Aztec human sacrifice, and how the Peruvian Indians who mine the silver that enriches others reconcile themselves to their poor and hazardous lives. Yet he does not stray far, and his depiction of the squeezing of the citizens of Rome for more and more taxes by successive emperors (plus their dilution of the currency) that led to the destruction of the free small-holding and business-owning classes, and with them the Empire, is chilling and instructive. The barbarians were kinder: they didn't use money.

The inventions of banking and of merchants' instruments (such as bills of exchange) are discussed, as well as the first national banks, in explaining the advent of paper money, the next great innovation. The pax Britannica is discussed, too, in a way: the British empire was not really as important, probably, as the British pound, backed by gold, and serving as a fixed monetary point, for a long period of world prosperity. For whatever logic inheres, or does not, to the "backing" of a currency by a precious metal, it did have the faith of many for a long time, and held currencies in rock-solid interrelationships for years.

Are things better now that all our currencies are floating, changing values relatively and absolutely every moment? Gold is a superstition, after all, so away with it! This book is at its best discussing the national hyperinflations that followed the Great War, the falling away from the gold standard, and the advent of the newer types of money and near-money. Electronic cash of various sorts, currency markets, and credit-card purchases that create private money are playing havoc with the traditional calculations of national money supply, and undermining the ability of governments to control their currency.

Where will it end? We'll have to surf this tidal wave of new money creation as long as we can without getting swamped: "The current electronic revolution in money promises to increase even more the role of money in our public and private lives, surpassing kinship, religion, occupation, and citizenship as the defining element of social life. We stand now at the dawn of the Age of Money." (p268)

To citizens of these United States, the Civil War was the defining event in our nation. It was a war of battles with evocative names: Bull Run, Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg... Perhaps the war was about slavery, perhaps it was about the clash between an industrial democracy and a planting autocracy. But what was it really like?

Even the best historians fail to make compelling their descriptions of battle. It all starts to sound like business prose. We know there were real issues on the ground, real death and fear and dreadful mistakes. We know, too, that some battles were decisive, and perhaps we are given numbers - numbers dead, and so on. But unless you know how read those numbers and descriptions of troop movements (unless you yourself have toiled in the mud and trenches, or had to make choices that meant death for somebody), it all comes to seem like a company's annual report does to most of us, like figures with no blood in them.

The Killer Angels tells us things about the battle of Gettysburg that a history book cannot. It puts us into the minds of a few key people in the Union and Confederate armies, and it puts us on the ground during those murderous three days. We learn to look from eye level, we get some feel for the constant presence of death. We see devout soldiers, and soldiers who are willing to die without any hope of a heaven. We learn what it was like at Gettysburg, and why failures of character mattered.

Michael Shaara's method was to go back to the original sources - the letters and memoirs and diaries of those who were there - to find a more personal truth about the war. This is a targeted book without the pretensions of a "great" novel. It is focused in intent and rather simple in structure. It shows those days of the battle (and the agonizing nights) through the eyes of a few of the key officers of the Confederacy and a couple of junior officers of the Union. This was an interesting decision but, I think, appropriate: to a great extent, the South lost the fight because of Lee's decisions, and the North held because of those junior officers. But read this book, and draw your own conclusions. You will never think of the Civil War as mere "history" again.