It’s a horrible feeling that you don’t quite match up, that you’re forever falling short, that you’ll never live up to others’ expectations. We’ve all faced it, whether it’s being last-pick for the softball team at school, being overlooked for a promotion at work, or being excluded from a group of friends. Sometimes the rejection runs even deeper. Feelings of loneliness and inadequacy are hard to handle. The good news is there’s a remedy. It’s in Jesus Christ, who faced the ultimate rejection and therefore knows how it feels. In bearing our sins, He was rejected by the Father and by us, His own creation, as well. He knows how it hurts. Because He faced that pain, we no longer need to. He’s planned another life for us, a life of acceptance in His family and freedom from rejection. Let go of the shame and enjoy the Father’s embrace today.

    

    Novels such as this one prompted Congress to pass the Securities and Exchange Acts of 1933 & 1934, which regulated the issue of securities in the primary market, and the trading of securities in the secondary market.In most novels, Jed Rusher might be the `Great American Dream,' but here, he is a tragic figure. Rusher is intelligent, hard-working, and personable - yet he still needs to take liberties with his conscience in order to get some business breaks. He trades on insider secrets he learns as an assistant for Claudius G. Warriner. He builds a nest egg of capital for this trading by anonymously turning in Warriner's daughter as a diamond smuggler, in order to capture the reward. To be fair, that woman was dismissive of Jed, treating him as an inconvenience and not as a person.Everything seems to be a business deal to Jed, even his marriage. Such a cynical view of business was part of Upton Sinclair's makeup. He was an unabashed socialist who viewed the capitalist society of America as unequal and corrupt. We know today that the gross inefficiencies of socialism and planned economies make them untenable. Some of Sinclair's ideas just won't work. He is still fun to read, though, because his entertaining stories illustrate historical problems and issues.It may be naive to believe that competition and the free markets prevents the blackmail scheme of the Mountain City News from occurring today, but what business could stay afloat if it had to pay an `extortion advertisement?" In fact, what news agency could sit on a story in today's competitive news market?Readers of this book today may be confused about the single tax, a policy first suggested by Henry George in `Progress and Poverty.' The idea was to place a special tax on land held for speculative purposes, forcing the owner of the land to either do something with it, or sell it - presumably at a discount. It was considered a way to get cheap land available to the average person, particularly an unemployed city dweller who was willing to work on a subsistence farm. Although the single tax was never instituted, there are ad valorem taxes used by counties to raise revenue for government, schools, and internal improvements. Ad valorem taxes aren't considered much of an impediment to land speculators.A character in one of E.L. Doctorow's novels advised people to read Upton Sinclair's novels to understand the issues of the 1st half of the 20th century. Mountain City is the novel one can read to understand why securities reform was important, as Sinclair presents a market that is unfair and unreliable to the common investor."Taken from Amazon.com, customer review by Scrapple8, Brooklyn, NY. Review posted 10/1/2011