Books by Robert Block

"[A] tightly crafted, very readable book . . . the best in-depth contemporary analysis we are going to get."-Stephen Flynn, The Washington PostWhen Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29, 2005, federal and state officials were not prepared for the devastation it would bring. In this searing indictment of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block take readers inside FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable mismanagement during the crisis-the bad decisions that were made, the facts that were ignored, and the individuals who saw that the system was broken but did nothing to fix it.In this award-winning and critically acclaimed book, Cooper and Block reconstruct the crucial days before and after the storm hit, laying bare the government's inability to respond to the most elemental needs. They also demonstrate how the Bush administration's obsessive focus on terrorist threats fatally undermined the government's ability to respond to natural disasters. The incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call to all Americans, wherever they live, about how distressingly vulnerable we remain.

Over 700 color photos display machine made marbles produced from the early 1900s through the early 1930s by the Ohio-based firms, M. F. Christensen & Son Company and the Christensen Agate Company. Among the examples displayed are bricks, cobras, guineas, opaques, slags, single pontil slags, swirls, and hand-gathered swirls. Early slag marbles known as "transitionals" are also featured. Values for the marbles displayed are found in the captions.