This is a series of anecdotes from my misspent youth as I went over to the dark side and got involved with motorcycles. If you are into motorcycles, planes, cars, and things to do with boats, I have a few stories to tell you. It is an interest in colonial Kenya and New Zealand life as seen in the eyes of a guy from long ago and far away. It has stories from my ninety-seven-year-old dad in Seychelles, his WWII service, his deals with his experiences in the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya, and him bringing his family to New Zealand in the sixties. In the seventies and eighties, I served my twenty years in the RNZAF, putting down a lot of my mishaps and adventures in an interesting time domestically and overseas.

China is more than a socialist market economy led by ever more reform-minded leaders. It is a country whose people seek liberty on a daily basis. Their success has been phenomenal, despite the fact that China continues to be governed by a single party. Clear distinctions between the people and the government are emerging, underlining the fact that true liberalization cannot be imposed from above. Although a large percentage of the Chinese people have been part of China's long march to freedom, farmers, entrepreneurs, migrants, Chinese gays, sex pleasure seekers, and black-marketers played a particularly important role in the beginning. Lawyers, scholars, journalists, and rights activists have jumped in more recently to ensure that liberalization continues. Social dissatisfaction with the government is now published in the media, addressed in public forums, and deliberated in courtrooms. Intellectuals devoted to improvement in human rights and continued liberalization are part of the process. This grassroots social revolution has also resulted from the explosion of information available to ordinary people (especially via the Internet) and far-reaching international influences. All have fundamentally altered key elements of the moral and material content of China's party-state regime and society at large. This social revolution is moving China towards a more liberal society despite its government. The Chinese government reacts, rather than leads, in this trans formative process. This book is a landmark - a decade in the making.

This book answers the following question for Judaism: among all the things that happened in antiquity, what are the events that, seen from the perspective of the world that would endure, turn out to shape the long future? How did axiological events identify the focal points of the unfolding religious system, Judaism, in its formulation by the rabbinic sages of ancient times? This is the system that originated, in its own telling, with God’s teaching to Moses at Sinai in the Torah, in written and traditional form. Of all that happened to the Jews in the millennium from the formation of the Pentateuch (“Moses”) to the end of the formative age (“Muhammad”), the particular Judaism that emerged as normative responded to only a select few and did so within a logic all its own. Here we identify those definitive events of danger and opportunity — crisis — and the focal points that they highlighted.

Includes its Report, 1896-19 .