A happy and harmonious child begets a beginnings of a well-adjusted adult. if we just meet this in the short-term perspective and give in to all their whims, there will also be short-term results and long-term repercussions The book includes footnotes and an index as well as Appendix 1 Socialism at High Tide 1985 listing 18 countries with Communism, 11 countries with Social Democracy and 41 Third World Socialism countries. Appendix 2 lists 62 Third World Socialist countries with the dates of beginning and ending. Only 12 continue in that ideology. He shows over all that socialism attempts to make everyone equal yet in doing so erases individual freedoms and often uses force which ends badly in every case. But beyond that, the book is sound, it is orthodox, it is Biblical—throughout Brooks points the reader to The Book and The One Who inspired it. His aim is to show "that believers may in this life attain unto a well-grounded assurance of their everlasting happiness and blessedness." He then goes on to examine the nature of that assurance, hindrances that keep believers from it, reasons to encourage believers to seek it, and how they can go about it, the difference between true and counterfeit assurance, as well as answering questions about assurance. Examining the doctrine from so many angles, you really feel (and probably do) that you come away from this book having an exhaustive look at the doctrine. Aesthetically, this is fantastic. The language sings -- the book begs to be read aloud (and I frequently did so, interrupting whatever anyone around me was doing). You can feel the passion, the fervor throughout. A few paragraphs from different chapters illustrate this:

A debt crisis]. What was so devastating about all the borrowing […] was that little of the money had been used as capital to boost the kibbutzim's earnings. Instead, it had been spent to raise the standard of living. The impulse to do this did not grow out of hedonism, but in the hopes of stemming the loss of members. By some point in the 1970s the majority of kibbutz-raised children were leaving. The children of the founders, being raised in this irrational pseudo-religion, were expected to be “the best kibbutzniks”. It failed. It just goes against human nature. Decent humans want to be free. Amazing that Christians in the West should be looked down on by this crazy and dangerous God-haters as unscientific and irrational; well look at them! This is an excellent book on socialism. Heaven on Earth is a readable and very detailed history of socialism through recent centuries. Joshua Muravchik was raised in a socialist home and was a “devout” socialist for a time. He recounts the history and life of some of the leaders of the socialist movement and shows the triumphs and failures along the way. There are four chapters on the Beginnings, four chapters on the Triumphs and four chapters on the Collapse of Socialism. At the end of this section is a very interesting chapter on the Kibbutz showing the most humane socialism. The book ends with an excellent Epilogue to bring us up to date. The chapter on Tanzania and the chapter on Tony Blair are examples of this (although the Kibbutz chapter was by far the worst. If he republishes this book he should just delete that entire chapter and write a paragraph in the epilogue that covers the basics). The minutia that the author goes into about each of these characters is completely useless to the overall picture of the history of socialism. This book was very informative. It approaches a discussion of socialism from a unique perspective of focusing on the biographies of influential leaders, such as Robert Owns, Engels, Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Attlee, and Mao, who were involved in promoting socialism. Muravchik traces the two hundred year history of socialism and shows that any leader or society who tried to implement full socialism in the government and economy fell into ruin and starvation.

The book – in part a straight history of the sharia, in part a journey probing its application in our present time – opens in 7th-century Arabia. The year is 610 and a 40-year-old Meccan trader is feeling the first throb of revelation. With the exception of Barnaby Rogerson's Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, I have read few books that give as humane and believable a portrait of the Prophet as this. The picture that emerges is of a man balancing the pressures of divine revelation with the political demands of having become, at the end of his life, king and general of Arabia. As faith adjusts to the needs of the moment, the ground is prepared for one of Kadri's big themes: the tension between text and context.

What perseverance that is, which accompanies salvation. It is such a great chapter, and would make a remarkable little booklet unto itself that I really can't complain too much that it's such a departure from the rest of the book (though it did take me a little bit to get used to the notion). because children do not usually watch while an adult is around, they don’t experience the whole language experience wherein they can converse with another personThrough my research on child development (I'm a high school teacher, but a first-time mom) I have become extremely interested in Waldorf education. I'd never even heard of it until I started reading books like Simplicity Parenting and You Are Your Child's First Teacher. I guess it's not as nationally popular as the better-known Montessori education. And while Heaven on Earth does not explicitly say it is a Waldorf-inspired book, it is; and it is wonderful! This book is about Socialism in action, not ideology, though it obviously gets explained while coursing the lives of those nutty fellows, the wealthy founders of this elitist ideology called Socialism. But it's a 100% history book, delving on the lives of the dudes, on what they preached (and this is not a metaphor) and what they lived, what they said to the crowds, and what they said among themselves. What a bunch of scoundrels, oh my.