The Laughing Sutra, although fiction, is the perfect counterpoint to Iron & Silk. Salzman is the main figure in Iron & Silk, showing the cultural differences between the American and Chinese through his viewpoint. In The Laughing Sutra, he is able to turn the tables and present these differences from the viewpoints of a modern Chinese and an ancient Chinese (Salzman's language speciality was classical Chinese, which is to modern Mandarin what Latin is to Italian). The story line may be a quest, but it is a quest under a different sort of rules than American fantasy. Here, the quest is one of duty, one of loyalty. Here, the heroes are brave yet unsure, truly innocents abroad. The immortal Monkey King is the only 'fantastic' thing about the book, but the viewpoints are so much more different than our own that the entire world seems strange, even when they reach San Francisco.

I once recommended Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides and A.A. Attanasio's Wyvern for being two sides of the same coin. In these novels of piracy on the Carribbean, Powers had taken real history and grafted on fantasy elements, while Attanasio had taken fantasy and made it seem real. And so are Barry Hughart and Mark Salzman fellows of a coin too. Hughart takes folklore that is alien to us and explains it to us in terms we can understand, while Salzman (in The Laughing Sutra) has taken a portion of reality, and used it to make our world seem alien.

In science fiction, we make much ado about our aliens, but I think Salzman knows the real story: we are our own best aliens.

I loved this book. As I was reading it, I kept exclaiming to my family about how wonderful it was, and when I finished it I repeatedly told them that somebody ought to read it. My teenage daughter took my advice yesterday, and she polished it off that same day to her delight. She said that she was sad to have finished it. The story starts off a little slowly, setting the scene. The early chapters have resonance and insight, but they don't really hint at the hilarious adventures to come. Hsun-ching is a charming character, quiet and intelligent, but you are likely to be completely enthralled by Colonel Sun. Once this pair is on their way to America in search of the Laughing Sutra you will have a hard time putting the book down until you are done. I have read a couple of Mark Salzman's other books, and each is extremely well written, displaying a fascination with character, a core of spirituality, and moving, insightful situations; I plan to work my way through his other books, because it's been a while since I've found a writer I enjoyed so much. But for sheer fun, compelling characters and emotional involvement, you couldn't do better than The Laughing Sutra.

Over Christmas break I made a return trip to China and brought with me a copy of Mark Salzman's Laughing Sutra.

Salzman's Iron and Silk, though a bit dated, is one of the best books on visiting China. It is a wonderful read, a great teaching tool, and just simply a great book.

I had tried reading the Laughing Sutra a number of times and never got past the first chapter. However, during a 5 hour train ride between Beijing and Chengde China I gave the book another shot.

The first chapter is tough, but once you get past it this book is wonderful. It is funny, intelligent, clever, and a great history of China.

Salzman in brilliant fashion tells the story of Journey to the West, the Monkey King, Three Kingdoms, and the cultural revolution. This book is so creative and so brilliant.

Once past the first chapter I read the book in two days. It was an awesome literary experience.

My one warning is that you have to know a decent amount about China and Chinese history and literature to get the full effect of this book. Anyone who enjoys reading about China will eat this book up.

I cannot say enough goods things about this book.

READ IT!

"The Rock 'n Roll Rebellion" changed my perspective on Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). Not all CCM is good quality, yet paradoxically groups that actually strive to influence through excellence often find themselves preaching to the choir because their CDs have been relegated to dusty Christian bookstores. However, as the CD selection currently available at Tower Records in downtown Tokyo demonstrates, "pop music culture is becoming more...open to songs with strong spiritual messages". It is time for people of faith with musical talent to take advantage of this trend and be heard by a larger audience because of their quality sound and thought-provoking lyrics. Joseph's book presents a challenge that is well-grounded in research and the personal experiences of those who have grappled with this issue; it is a must-read for all who aren't afraid of a changed perspective.

Excellent Book! A must read for all musicians, people in the music industry and Christians. Interesting, riveting and honest perspective about the integration of faith, religion, music ministry and entertainment. Our American culture needs to have a better understanding of how all of our spiritual roots play a part in our musical preferences. Contemporary Christian music is not a separate genre of music. It should never have been thought of as such and marketed as such. Mark Joseph gives clear history and reasoning behind what is and what should be contemporary Christian music. FULL of useful information and insight. Keeps the reader interested so they can't and don't want to put it down!

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is a genre that, unlike other musical genres, is defined solely by its lyrical content, as opposed to musical style. Thus, it has been relegated to the evangelical subculture, which is tantamount to locking it in the basement of the entertainment world. Mark Joseph takes a very opinionated view that the "ghettoizing" of Christian music into the CCM substratum has had a severely detrimental effect on Christianity's influence in the wider marketplace. Some artists have been content to remain in the subculture, relying on the evangelizing efforts of their fans to bring the unchurched to their concerts and to spread the word to the mainstream. Others have longed to break out of CCM straightjacket into the world at large, to bring positive values to pop culture. Some have succeeded at this, with varying degrees of success. And some never were in the "straightjacket" to begin with. This book gives an excellent overview of artists in all these camps.

Joseph never tries to hide his opinion about CCM. He believes that, in its present form, it basically shouldn't exist. He believes that there should be about 20% of these musicians ministering in churches and to youth groups, and about 80% out in the mainstream, and he has some practical solutions to bring Christian music to that point. Will it ever happen? It's doubtful that it will, or that it even should. After all, to me, CCM is valuable as wholesome entertainment to the modern and post-modern generations who would have no interest in, say, Southern gospel. I think 50-50 is a better, more realistic ratio. He does address the problem of Christian musicians going out into the world and "backsliding" by the proposal of creating a "traveling pastor" ministry to go on tour with the musicians. All in all, a very thought-provoking book.

This book should drop the, "No Holds Barred Fighting" from its title as it deals ONLY with submission wrestling - that being said, it's a pretty good little submission wrestling book. The text is very logically presented and all the basics of submission wrestling are covered (grips, stances, gear, takedowns, escapes, drills, etc.). The photos are clear and the descriptions of techniques are top-notch. I counted 27 submissions demonstrated in this book, which isn't a lot; however, there are many books on the market, which deal with just submissions if that's what you're looking for. This book is a good value for the money and contains a load of useful info for persons interested in the sport, as well as for self-defence.

This book describes submission grappling techniques and basics in a very clear format. A compact text with lots of photos it is reasonably priced and well worth the small investment. The book focuses on grappling and is influenced by western submission grappling ("shoot" wrestling). I especially like the early chapters on basic drills (such as shrimping) that lay the basic groundwork for fighting on the ground.

GREAT BOOK! Worth the money. Very few books on the subject of Submission Wrestling have this degree of detailed analysis of the technigues. Supplementing my training with this book has helped me to gain higer levels of preformance. This guide stands strong by it's self, but can be used with Alan Ground's; The Gate and The Gracie's two Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu books for those who seek to cover all areas of groundfighting.

I found "The Story of Spain" to be a highly readable, informative book about a very complex subject. So I was puzzled by another, quite mean-spirited review attacking the book. Spanish history lite? Well, telling the entire exciting story in under 300 pages must have been a challenge, but Williams was up to the task as all other reviewers agree. The John Crow book, "Spain: The Root and the Flower," is also excellent, if a bit more academic in approach, and would make a good follow up for those wanting another perspective. In fact, Williams himself cites it as a source for further reading. Regarding the use of an identical quotation, that must be common in history books. I doubt if Mr. Crow was there to hear the words direct from the saint! (He too copied it from somewhere.) And in fact Williams acknowledges using Crow and many other traditional sources (the usual boring history) to tell "the story" with breathtaking clarity. The scholarship must be sound as well, if so many professors have endorsed it. Indeed, Williams' book has been highly praised by Dr.Paul Smith, who used it for several years in a course he taught for the Spanish department at U.C.L.A. That's the same place where Mr. Crow once taught, I believe. Yet it's "The Story of Spain" that was selected. To me, that says a lot.

The Story of Spain by Mark Williams is an excellent history summary of Spain. In less than 300 (although large) pages, he can portray the history of Spain ("Europe's Most Fascinating Country") interestingly and in-depth. All points of Spanish history are touched on. Williams fully details the stories of the Iberians, the Romans in Iberia, Moorish Spain and Al-Andalus, the Reconquest, the Inquisition, the French Century, and 20th Century Spain. If you are looking to get a good handle on the history of Spain, I would recommend this book.

I got this book to prepare for a tourist trip to Spain. It gives a very good overview of the history of Spain starting from prehistoric times up to about the mid-1990's. The more modern history is understandably rather cursory. The Spanish Civil War was a bit confusing with the multiple political parties and really requires it's own book to understand. The author gives a small biography on each time period for futher reading. The best feature of this book is that after each chapter the author gives tourist sites related to each historic period. For example after the Roman history chapter, he lists sites with Roman ruins and how it relates to what you just read. This makes the book a good reference to bring along on the trip. It you plan a tourist trip to Spain and only have time for one book, this would be the one to pick up.

This book has a lot of Oracle tuning tips and advise about some certain plattforms and technologies. Although there's a lot of considerable information about almost anything related with Oracle tuning (including OPS), it doesn't provide with a concise method or guide.

The book is structured to help you at different stages of your Oracle implementation (design phase, production, proactive and reactive tuning, capacity planning, etc). But that good schema looks very confuse when the author starts to make suggestions or tips that aren't sorted by any kind of category (and they often takes a lot of pages)... Those comments are very good, so it needs a bit of more organization.

I recommend this book for instance and database tuning, but not for SQL tuning (the author has another excellent book on this subject). There aren't too many advices regarding the plattform (unix or nt), so, keep in mind you'll need more support.

This text offers many, many pieces of good advice and many insights into the internals of the Oracle server. It is one of the the top two or three book s on the subject and as such, is easy to recommend. BUT, be very careful of most example scripts. Many have syntax errors (which is strange , given they are clearly 'cut and paste' from a screen dump). If you are an experienced DBA, you will spot them on reading. At worst they will be obvious when they generate an error. However for the less experienced, there could be some frustrating moments. This is very disappointing for the second edition of a book (some of the grammar leaves alot to be desired too!). Also on the downside, the book claims to include updates for Oracle 8, but this is a rather generous claim, Many examples or recommendations are redundant in an Oracle 8 environment but are not identified as such. Overall though, still a worthwhile part of any DBA's toolkit.

This is the best overall book on Oracle Tuning but the editors were sloppy in weeding out the typos--no excuse for a second edition book. The index is one of the worst that I've ever seen in a technical book; sometimes you practically have to look at every page to find what you're looking for because of the way the book is organized.

Understand Unix and want to dig deeper into Solaris Admin? Then this is the book for you. I love this book--it is my new bible and I study it every chance I get. Well written. I had been using Unix for a long time but was weak in Sys Admin. Partly because I didn't have a good reference. Without a knowledge of the boot process, diaganostic tools, I felt I had a major weakness in this area. I looked around for a book that would fill this need and was very happy to find this book. I especially liked the chapter on setting up an Internet site.

I listed the index below, since it's one thing I like to read before purchasing a book. Hope this helps you make your decision.

The Index:

1. Making Smart Decisions About File Systems

2. Planning Backups and Restores

3. Booting and Hardward Diagnotics

4. Configuring Run States

5. Installing and Patching your Solaris System

6. Exloring Jumpstart

7. Setting up Name Services

8. Network Information Services NIS+ and NIS

9. Monitoring your Environment

10. Understanding File Systems--So that's what those are!

11. Automate everything..Well almost!

12. Keeping your Solaris Systems Secure

13. Implementing High Availability: Eliminating Single Points of Failure

14. Maintaining your Sun Hardware

15. Peripheral Vision: Understanding and Configuring Other Hardware

16. The E10000 (Starfire)--Not Just a Big Unix Box

17. Running an Internet Site

18. Coexisiting with the Evil Empire (Windows)

I thoroughly recommend this book! It is perfect for anyone who works with Solaris, Unix, or Sun hardware. There are tidbits for everyone. For me, I found the chapter on the E10K the most interesting. Since I only work with the lower enterprise machines, I was fascinated by the descriptions of what administering and working with 10K's were like. As for technical details, I'd probably look through other books. (Manuals from Sun would work.) This book gives a lot of general guidance on how systems should be run and what administrators should concern themselves with (i.e. security issues- tcp wrappers, tripwire, etc.). They definitely know what they are talking about. As for who should read it... Well, I think most System Admins should read it for learning what path they should take to make life easier. As for other people, it's a good reference on what professional admins should be doing.

I just bought the second edition of this book. I loved the first and learned a lot. This book has a lot of practical information. The second edition covers Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 along with updates on the chapters from the first edition. This is one of my favorite Unix books.

Buy this for the stunning black and white photos generously presented throughout. Many are full-page sized and all are beautifully printed. The text, however, is somewhat disappointing, serving as a rather shallow survey of movies of the early 30's. Historical context is covered well but, for all the pre-code movies that are available on cable these days, this book discusses in depth only the most well known (such as King Kong, It Happened One Night, and Sign of the Cross). Reading this book got me interested in watching pre-code movies, but most of the more interesting films I've seen from that era (Wild Boys of the Road, Safe in Hell, Other Men's Women, Five Star Final) aren't covered here, despite their provocative themes. I'm finding more depth in Thomas Doherty's book Pre-Code Hollywood. But as a coffee-table book of early Hollywood, and perhaps as a mouth-watering introduction to this fascinating era of popular culture, this can't be beat.

The quality & the quantity of photos in this book is terrific! It covers the pre-code (1930-1934) era of Hollywood films. It should be used in conjunction with Mick Lasalle's "Complicated Women" (or less interestingly, with Thomas Doherty's "Pre-Code Hollywood") for best results. You can look at the great pictures in his book while reading the text of the other two (which also include great photos, but not nearly to the extent contained here).

In this exhaustively researched, beautifully illustrated book, author Vieira does an exceptional job. Recently, I have been drawn to the fascinating world of Pre-Code Cinema. There were some really realistically seedy, controversial and revealing films made in the Hollywood of the late twenties and early thirties. Many films which have been previously believed lost or destroyed have been rescued for the public to enjoy once more on either video or TCM. Hot stuff for the depression era! Fascinating films of the era include: THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE which starred the unique Miriam Hopkins. In this one, she plays the title character who is lured into the underworld, gets raped - and finds she likes it (!). Even sweetly saccharine Loretta Young had a dark-side: check out MIDNIGHT MARY. What I find ironic is that to many people, many vintage films are considered too pretty or unrealistic. This book proves otherwise!! A thoroughly fascinating venture into a little-known side of Hollywood which existed a scant half-dozen years: the era of Pre-Code talkies. A very informative and revealing laboured work of art - and a fine resource - for fans of vintage film.

'Ember From the Sun' by Mark Canter has a very interesting plot however the book falls very short in character development. The book reads as if its only purpose is to explain a scientific possibility. The story is very contrived and the characters are cardboard cutouts. I am sorry I wasted my time on this book

Mr. Canter does an excellent job of expressing the feelings of his characters.

This book is about a unique person who was brought to life by a scientist named Yute Nahandeh from an embryo found in a frozen Neanderthal.

Though the Neanderthal had been laying in the ice for a few million or so years, she was not completely frozen. When she was thawed, she decayed like any normal human being.

The child brought to life had a unique skin colour of golden. She had large hands and feet and she had extremely potent physical abilities. She was ambidextrous and was extremely intelligent. She has strange healing powers and has a greatly enhanced sense of smell.

This book is a bit hard to believe and some parts do drag on a bit, but overall, it was well-written. Well done!

For a first Novel, Mark Canter has reached into the depths of the human (and even more miraculously) the female psyche...and created vividly and credibly..a human being born 25,000 years out of time...and made her rich with the gifts of intuition and caring...and subject to all the human emotions. You care deeply about Ember...and the problems related to *not quite fitting in*. Her sense of caring and responsibility make her journey all the more poignant. The love of her family comes through loud and clear and with truth. If you have any question about whether to read this book....I can simply say....READ IT!! Jud

It was just like the book the talking eggs. But I liked it. I liked the part when Myrtle plays the trick on the Prince Harold. I didn't like the way the people took advantage of rosella. she should have taken all her jewels back from prince Harold and given all the jewels to the poor people like she wanted instead of having the palace built. She should have taken charge of the situation! Inspite of how similar the story was to the talking eggs, I found it a fun, enjoyable read. Also, like in the book Ella Enchanted I felt empathy for the main character Rosella or Ella. With Ella you felt sorry for her how she always had to tell the truth, and with Rosella how people were using her for her jewels that came out of her mouth.

I agree with the first review for this book, "A GOOD SHORT READ". It is better than "The Princess Test" because Rosella doesn't get so lucky with her prince like Laurelei (the heroine of "Princess Test"). I don't think Rosella lets people walk all over her. She's just nice, and has a kind heart. And she DOES stand up for herself in the end. If you like funny, twisted fairy tales, when the bad guys REALLY get what they deserve, read this book.

Rosella is a girl that has a twin sister named Myrtle who makes Rosella do all the work. One day while Rosella is getting some water, a fairy spots her and decides to tranform herself into an old woman. When Rosella saw her, she gave the woman some water to drink. When the fairy discovers the kindness of Rosella she decides to cast a spell on her. The spell makes jewels come out of Rosella's mouth when she talks. This spell soon creates a few conflits. I thought this was a great book because there are lots of funny parts and I was really surprised at the end.

Actually, I bought this book with the intention of reading about genetics algorithms although I was pleasantly surprised with the out come of the book.

The book is about how our large world is small and what seems chaotic is actually an organized small network.

The author starts with how networks in nature relate to networks in technology. A very strong case for "6 degrees of separation" for our society and "19 degrees of (link) separation" for the Internet. The rest of the book explains with historical examples how scientists were able to prove the networking concepts through human decision and thought process.

I gave this book 4 star because I did not think that the conclusion had the continuity of the other chapters. I would recommend this book to all individuals who would be interested in reading and understanding the connections and influences of nature in our "connected" world.

Have fun understanding that you closer then you think to the person next door.

Buchanan really does as promised by the jacket - discusses networks and their similarities in areas such as social, neural, financial, disease, and information. He focuses mainly on the "small-world" principal that we're all familiar with, (i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and shows how other successful network type application use the same model, from worm neurons to taxes.
The book is extremely non-technical, and you don't need any prerequisite learning to enjoy it.

I wasn't sure I would like this book when my brother bought it for me -- but I did! It covers a truly wide range of material. Extremely impressive. Amazingly, as the book shows, strong mathematical links seem to connect the workings of biological cells with the Internet, social networks and many other complex networks, even neural networks and the human brain. The writing is extremely clear and there is little chance of misunderstanding. This is one of those areas of "hyped" research that really lives up to the hype.

From a personal point of view, I especially enjoyed the final chapters on economics and social capital. Something really seems to be emerging here -- a deep link between social patterns and natural patterns in the physical world