Both a personal memoir and treatise on the Middle Eastern conflict, From Beirut To Jerusalem manages to excel in both areas.

Thomas L. Friedman writes of his years as a reporter in Beirut and Jerusalem (obviously), and the reader walks these streets along with him as he interviews and lives among both leaders and common people. In Beirut, the chaos and lawlessness of daily life is frightening, more scary than any horror novel. In Jerusalem, we see from Friedman's eyes the tension of the Palestinian situation and its effects on both Arabs and Jews.

What struck me the most, and impressed me, was Friedman's evenhandedness in his observations. He was never quick to place blame.

I found this book to be an informative treatise on the situation in the Middle East, the best on the subject I have read.

Theodore Roethke lived a life of inner turmoil and often outward beauty, from growing up on his father's farm to teaching at Bennington College and suffering mental illness, his poems at once recognize the yearning for more than the worldly as well as the beauty and tragedy of the physical beings we are. His children's poems (not only for children) bring an Ogden Nash-esque primitive and humorous view that makes these themes in his other poems more noticeable. All in all, Roethke was one of the great twentieth century American poets, and these poems bear this out.