I lived in the Bahamas for 8 years and traveled to Normans Cay several times and explored the island after Carlos Laeder left. After I read the book I went there two more times and looked through the "Ruins" that his group left and could almost relive the book. Although the island paradise that he built at the club has been devestated, the rest of the island has been slowly retaken by new inhabitants. I believe that Mr. Novac told a very true story and I only wish that I hadn't given away my hardback copy of the book. I would like to buy two copies again.

A very good, exciting account of two risk-takers who went to great lengths in the pursuit of their dreams, the people who got caught up in the swirl of their dreams, and how their dreams came to clash on an island in the Bahamas, Norman's Cay. The two principals in this true account, college professor Mr. Novak and the leader of the Medellin drug cartel, Carlos Lehder-Rivas, both seemed to have missed opportunities for personal fulfillment and contribution to humanity: the former by circumstance, the latter by choice. It's sad that Mr. Novak's dream for a Marine Biology research center and his dive shop on Norman's Cay never came to be. It's sad that Carlos Lehder-Rivas misdirected his charisma and tremendous organizational abilities towards trying to establish an island kingdom and trafficking drugs, and not to, say, organizing relief missions for the United Nations. A thrilling ride. Good work, Mr. Novak and son, and Mr. Kirkpatrick!

I grew up cruising on a sailboat in the Bahamas with my dad and remember Norman's key before and after Carlos. I find that it is a real shame that the island is in ruins now when it was once so prosperous. It's too bad that after Carlos was brought down, they couldn't have saved the island's beautiful houses. It's quite a mess now, everything has been picked over and trashed. I find that this book really makes the island come alive. You can walk on the island today after reading the book and picture what it was like back then. It's fascinating and a shame that there were ever drugs involved with such a beautiful island.

The main character's ex-husband is an ex-prisoner and and "60's" rock star who goes insane after everything that happened to him starts to take effect on him mentally. Jessie, the main character's, daughter Kate is kidnapped by her father. Who has multi identities, as Boa Dai and Pat Rodney just to name a couple, then Jessie's best friend Barbara a lawyer is murdered by a hit and run which seem's to be Pat who was driving the car. Jessie goes on through all the police investigations, which lead no where, and decides to find Kate herself. Looking through Pat's home and belonging's leads to a strange message on the kitchen blackboard that is written in French and German. This same message was recorded on Pat's answer machine butgot cut off half way through the message. She goes to Vermont talking to Pat's old friend's from the sixties, and a used-car salesman who tells her he seen her daughter and Pat a week ago. Becoming more anxious and losing hope every minute that goes bye, she finally finds him in a senator's home. The senator happened to be the husband of Pat's mother, who turns out trying to kill him and Kate and whoever gets in way. Jessie and the police scramble to get there before he kills anyone and successfully shot him down after a long gun chase through the snowy woods. In my opinion, this book was partially good, because the kidnapping and the killing were intense, but the traveling around and talking to Pat's old friends was dumb. Jessie should have never allowed Pat to take Kate away for the weekend, he was always a cocaine user before she met him and the drugs and his attitude got worse over the years. The book is all right and really strange mixed uo through the entire story.

Convoluted and evasive right down to the wire, Hard Rain by Peter Abrahams is a bleak yet thrilling study in what happens when a woman marries a man she knows nothing about. With switched identities, retiring FBI agents, politics and a background involving Woodstock, Peter Abrahams has written a cautionary tale with more bangs for the buck than any recent book I've read. Very highly recommended.

It is a good atlas for a trainee. It includes difficult part of body with a precise label. However, it is not easy to find the one that you want since there are plenty of labels. In addition, I think it is much better if there are few sentences to elicit the information concerning the radiological imaging like certain common normal variants that one could see in the radiological imaging

I highly reccomend this for MRI and CT images viewing. The images are very clear and capture the area of interest very well. Medical professionals will sure can rely on this atlas for normal images.

Here we have 3 smart kids (nat, izzie & grace), The twins, Izzie and Grace are stratospherically wealthy. Nat is poor. When Nat's mother loses her job ending Nat's collage edu., the twins come up with a plan to pull a kidnapping on themselves? Yeah right, I don't think so. Given the two wealthy girls prior generous and forward behavior with money and people they would have just gone and paid Nat's (and his mothers!) bills whether he/she liked it or not. So for me the story ended on page 221 with this way-out of character kidnapping scheme.

I did read the rest regardless tho because I sometimes like the way Mr. Abrahams weaves his stories and characters.

But right away comes another glaring out of characterization. Nat, who has fallen in love with Izzie and can tell her apart from her twin sister -easily- suddenly fails in recognizing Grace when the girls switch places at the last minute (Izzie becoming the kidnapped instead of Grace).

I think Mr. Abrahams would of done this story a favor if he'd of toned down Freedy (the bad guy) with his Andro/speed/bodybuilding obsession and gone into and expanded on the Freedy and Professor Uzig connection. Professor Uzig being Freedy's "Father: Unknown".

Also, why would Nat be prosecuted for attempted extortion? The kidnapping wasn't his idea! He came down against it but the twins had acted before he saw them again. Why didn't Izzie come to his defense?

All 'n all this reads like an unfinished draft. I don't see how something like this could of made it past anyone! especially anyone in the business. Too many discrepancies. Too many
avenues left unexplored.

Body>This book is a victim of the author's previous works. Once you've read other offerings, you come to expect dynamic chacterization, a rock-'em-sock-'em pace along with a surprises thrown in. Crying Wolf doesn't quite cut it in all areas. The characterization is there. First we meet Freedy, a swimming pool cleaner who just doesn't get it, an Abrahams' trademark. Freedy thinks he's smarter than he is; he thinks he's sexier than he is and in demand, and he doesn't understanding what the woman's (whose pool he's cleaning) problem is when he tries to have sex with her. On the other end of the spectum is Nat, the mid-west son of a single parent, basketball playing high school kid whose intelligence and essay wins him enough money to go to Inverness. While Freedy momentarily fades from the picture, Nat goes off to college. Because he can't afford to go home for Christmas, he must spend holiday on campus--until he meets the twins, Grace and Izzy. The twins, who are filthy rich, introduce Nat to a seductive new world he could not even begin to imagine. They take a jaunt to the Carribeans on the twins' family jet where Nat meets Leo Uzig, a philosophy professor at Inverness. From there, the plot thickens and the pace, which has faltered up to this point, picks up consideraly. Under the guidance of the professor, the twins and Nat become involved in a "harmless" plot that turns deadly very quickly.

I'd purchased "Crying Wolf" for a friend at work. Because he was out of the office and I'd run out of books, I borrowed this from his stack. I actually went to work half an hour early the day after I started reading it, so that I could finish the book before he came in to claim his prize.

I was looking for the suspense since, on the cover, Stephen King is quoted as having said that Peter Abrahams is his "favorite American suspense novelist." I really didn't find suspense. However, I found a good plot with likeable characters. While this book takes place in college - a boarding school, if you will - I kept thinking that Inverness was NOT Hogwarts...

Nat is a young man who wins a scholarship that takes him from his working-class town to Inverness College. Freedy is a young bodybuilder thug. Their paths parallel but never quite meet until...

Nat happens upon Grace and Izzie, very rich twin sisters who attend Inverness (and very different from Patti, his hometown sweetheart). The three students hatch a kidnapping scheme to try to obtain some much-needed money from the girls' father. However, as we learned as children, if you Cry Wolf often enough, when a crisis emerges no one will believe you.

While seldom actually "suspenseful," "Crying Wolf" was nonetheless a good book and a good purchase. I do recommend it; and I will be looking for more books by Peter Abrahams

This book had a catchy title and I picked it up. It was a great read from the start but was so twisted near the end.

The main character Roy seemed so clueless. The author's constant uses of "What?", "I don't know what you mean", and Roy's constant state of bewilderment was almost laughable. He had no clue of what people were saying around him. In fact, a whole page is dedicated to someone trying to clue him in. For example when Roy was told his whole department was let go he didn't get it. Even though all of the furniture, computers, and cubes were gone Roy was still wondering when he was going to start his new job as the boss of a department that was missing. The conference call with NY was classic, Roy ripping his shirt off because he couldn't breathe... correction Curtis's shirt, because Roy forgot he was wearing a UGA Football T-Shirt. The ending made no sense. I should write a book if they publish this junk.

This book was a great read at first, and very interesting,was hard to put down. but the last part of the book started draging then just ended all of a sudden leaving me to wonder,,what the hell just happened!!

If you love history and understand what the War between the States was really about, then you will love the Last of the Dixie Heroes. Peter Abrahams takes a simple idea and gives us a little mystery in why Southerns had it right. Finally, someone has the ability to put into words the meaning of Dixie and to the people who still hold to the culture of what America could of been. The book reveals the truth that War between the States was not about slavery or even Northern aggression, but about those who fought for a way of life.

In what Peter Abrahams calls an autobiography and meditation, "The Black Experience in the 20th Century" offers the personal account of Abrahams' experience as a black writer who began his career at the peak of the Pan-African movement.

In becoming a part of the liberating movement and associating with major players of the time, Peter Abrahams analyzes and delivers a thorough understanding black intellectualism -- its roots, its resolution, its pioneers, its personalities, and its path.

"So [Marcus] Garvey redefined colour to serve our interests. He wanted his black folk to be equal of al other colours. He wanted all blacks - and for him it included all shades of black - to be as proud of their colour as were the whites of theirs: no intermarriage, no mixing of blood."

The means by which Black freedom fighters have used to liberate their populace has often left the rest of the world questioning their respective methodology. Hence, Abrahams also questions Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement, and the antics of Jomo Kenyatta in waging the Mau Mau war in Kenya. We gain insight through the author's query of these leaders and their lives.

"One of the saddest experiences in my life has been to watch, over time, some fine men being changed over circumstances." Abrahams gives his recollection of Kenyatta and the Mau Mau war.

"On that first journey back to Africa, when she was still in bondage, Kenyatta was an old friend from our London days. We walked the beautiful mountainous land together, met the people, shared out ideas with them, were close to them - which was why so many fought and died for the vision of the freedom and land he promised them. More than 11,000 mainly Kikuyu died in what the British government and the white settlers called the Mau Mau rebellion and the blacks called their freedom struggle. It was both a physical and propaganda war, with the propaganda at times seeming the bigger war. Kenyatta, in particular, and the Kikuyu in general were demonized."

Abrahams was born in South Africa in 1919 and just upon entering his manhood, became a seaman as a means to earn a living, thereby escaping the many evils of apartheid in his homeland. He eventually settles in England and there he begins his political journey as a writer and messenger of the free African word in a not so free world for any type of African.

He lives through World War II, which was not a black war, and at this time, many Africans begin to adopt socialist and communist thought, also finding liberation in Marxism. Today, it is difficult to imagine the rationale behind such actions. In that day however, the support blacks gave to these institutions also opened doors. These doors led to more forums where Africans from the Diaspora were able to meet and develop strategies for African emancipation.

Abrahams gets to meet other black literati including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W.E.B Dubois. These men were his friends, and he goes into detail about their personalities, how their lives shaped their writing, and thus their unique epistle to the world.

Abrahams also discusses the dependence of Africans in the Diaspora on the institutions of the very people that enslaved them. Explaining that vicious cycle, he constantly defines the many levels of racism, from all angles, black or white.

The first half of Abrahams account is extremely lively and filled with the drama of Africanist movement. His discussion of the use of language, especially English as a freedom tool provides a unique slant on the contribution blacks have made to literature and communication in general.

His hypothesis on Black living comes from experience, and is indeed worth reading to gain a new perspective. It would suffice if the book continued on this path, with Abrahams perhaps following through on the lives of some of these leaders.

This book however is an autobiography, and thus half of it is about Abrahams' life in Jamaica. Not to discount Jamaica for any of its beauty, but the reader is led into a literal trap, which seemingly takes a while to recover from. Meaning the reader is led to believe this is a thorough, account on who our African leaders are, how they did it, and perhaps why Africa is in its current state.

Indeed Abrahams provides some of these answers, and brilliantly so, which makes the book hard to put down. But, when Abrahams begins his account of life in Jamaica, one is led to believe he will eventually change the course of the book, and continues to describe African thought. This expectation comes chapter after chapter, and indeed, sadly, it means reading about Jamaican as well as West Indian politics, and Abrahams' role as a journalist there.

The book becomes somewhat of a disappointment, but as reflected in its title "The Black Experience in the 20th Century," the novel is about his experience as a Black man, and "Black" thought, as this account of his life gives a window into the lives of leaders in the African Diaspora, from Africa, to the United States, to Europe and eventually the West Indies.

...

I liked it. I liked the protagonist. I like the fast paced narrative and true dialogue. The only problem that I had with this novel is the ending. The easy answer for ending a complicated mystery is to just kill everyone off. Yet, in order to maintain the integrity of the protagonist, all the bad guys have to kill each other off. This works, if a traditional "Mexican standoff" can be constructed in dramatic fashion, but that is not the case here. Frankly, everything was wrapped up in too neat of a package for me.

As a final year medical student (at Queen's University Belfast) I would strongly recommend against the use of this text. The attempts at humour interfere with the already sketchy descriptions of human anatomy which the diagrams do little to help clarify. This text was universally slated by the students in my year. I cannot overemphasise how deeply I regret wasting my money on it.

I am a Final Year student at Queen's University Belfast and I'd just like to correct the horrific error my colleague has made.

This is a poorly written, hard to understand Anatomy text, which lacks sufficient detail to actually be understandable, and which contains attempts at "humour" which are, at best, weak. The book is an appalling waste of money, and provides no useful grounding in Anatomy. The diagrams are poor, the explanations vague and the whole book simply not useful for the purpose which it is meant to serve. Do not under any circumstances buy this travesty.

This book is excellent, maybe you can't get the jokes if your from Belfast but as a medical student in NY I found the jokes, as well as the clinical insights to be excellent. This is an excellent [supplementary] text for a first year medical student. Way more clinically relevant than Baby Moore's essential clinical anatomy, and way more fun to read.