As the author himself pointed out, Wicca is a religion, and far too often the focus is more toward the occult practices of the faith, not the gods and goddesses themselves.

The meditations in this book are wonderful ways to gain some focus, especially for people who might have a bit of trouble with meditation, or writing/scripting their own prayers or rituals. The inspiration in this book practically hums.

What's more important, in my mind at least, however, is the constant focus of the book towards the gods and goddesses, providing substance to a large gap in most pagan/wiccan literature. Case in point: none of my previous Pagan or Wiccan books had anything to say on the subject of the death of a loved one in the form of prayer or ritual, or, if they did, they mentioned it in passing as a "personal moment" and brought forth no advice nor gentle inspiration on the matter of coping, prayer, or ritual. You'd think this occurrance would merit more attention.

When a good friend of mine died recently, there was a perfect prayer waiting for me in this book. If for no other reason than that, I salute Mr. Ventimiglia for his work.

Blessed be.

For such a compact book, small enough to easily be a portable companion wherever you go, an incredible number of Wiccan prayers and invocations have been compiled within its 156 pages. For example, prayers include: "for the Protection of Pets"; "to End Racism"; "in Times of Stress and Confusion"; "Full Moon Chant for Strength"; "A Teen's Prayer for Guidance"; "for Deceased Pets", "for Each Day of the Week" and many others very diverse in their subject matter.

The masculine and feminine principles are addressed in a variety of ways, i.e. "Lord and Lady", "Father and Mother", "Eternal God and Goddess",and the like. The author encourages the substitution of whatever forms of address the reader wishes to use for invocations and rituals, so there is an expectation of flexibility in terms of adapting the book to one's own Wiccan practice.

While retaining Caitlin Matthews' "Celtic Devotional" as my primary daily and seasonal prayer book, I find "The Wiccan Prayer Book" to be a meaningful companion book which fits easily into my purse so I can read it whenever Spirit moves me to do so.

Mr. Ventimiglia's book is the best addition to the Occult marketplace in years! This is a no non-sense book dealing with worship of our God and Goddess. You will not find the "how to make a million dollars by manipulating the gods" in this book. What you will find are moving words and heart warming prayers for every possible occasion. While Wicca, witchcraft, and even paganism in general doesn't go in for reciting things parrot fashion, there are times when one's mind is a jumble of emotions and outside help in finding the right words are a blessing. There is even a section on how to craft your own personal prayers. In my humble opinion every pagan should have a copy of this book because it is written with unbias to all pagan tradidions (the title being somewhat misleading) in the true spirit of "perfect love and perfect trust."

Mark of Voodoo should be read by all who are interested in gaining more insight into following their spiritual path. In this book Dr. Caulder is not trying to be an authority on the subject of Vodou. She makes no such claim!

Dr. Caulder shares with the reader her journey of listening to and following her drum beats guidance to her "African Spiritual Heritage". This book is powerful and inspiring. Dr. Caulder gives you an account of her Vodou path experience, which gave her more insight into how to absorb and integrate what she was taught, into her current spiritual practices and growth.

This book is an amazing journey of one woman's quest to find out the truth about her heritage. As Dr. Caulder is drawn into the world of voodoo, the reader is allowed a first-hand read of her experiences. In turn, you too will be able to truly understand the ancient art of voodoo and its fascinating rituals. The beautiful love story intertwined throughout the book is powerful and engaging. Dr. Caulder supplies never-before read information on voodoo that could change your outlook on life forever. This book is a tool to open your mind and heart to a misunderstood yet so relevant culture.

Dr. Caulder brings you a one of a kind insight into the spiritual realms and human evolution. This is a collector's book, filled with rare experience, wisdom, beautiful and rare photos, and an engaging story!

In her book we are given a very rare look at human spiritual evolution amidst a journey into a religion that has been commonly wrapped in mystery and perhaps trepidation. The author's journey keeps you flipping the pages in anticipation of what's to come.
Dr. Caulder has adroitly woven spiritual wisdom, healing, caution, and safeguards that she has gathered in her lengthy spiritual and educational journey.

The reader is given a rare tribal chiefs insight into the very private world of the indigenous African religion of Voodoo. Remarkably, these insights are contrasted and blended with the dangers and shortcomings of new age spiritual paths. The reader is given profound insight into knowledge of the health, growth, and evolution of their true self, their spirit.

Dr. Caulder brings us a unique view into the personal intimate life and work of the supreme chief of Voodoo, his own personal evolution, and the spiritual lives and beliefs and traditions of his people.

We are given a rare and detailed look into the ancient relationship between the spiritual world and community leadership. Great insights are given into the realm of what is going on in indigenous ceremony, initiation, sacrifice, and the realm of deity, and communal wisdom. Fascinating explanations of what goes on in the spiritual realms during sex are also included.

This novel is based on a real life journey; and is not about black magic or primitives peoples but about the knowledge learned by a people and a spiritual warrior in their quest for the evolution of their human spirits.

This is one of a kind, rare book, written in a compelling style. I highly recommend it!

Marvel created the "Ultimate" line of books to try to entice new readers by scrapping decades of complex continuity in favor of a fresh start. Supposedly, no prior knowledge of the books or their characters are necessary for you to get a good read that won't leave you scratching your head in bewilderment. So....does it work?

I guess....I've been reading comics since I was 3, so I really can't say how a "newbie" would fare.

I CAN tell you that I loved this book!! I wish that the makers of the atrocious X-Men flick had filmed this for the mutant's initial big-screen outing.

Mark Millar and the Kubert Bros. story does a great job of getting you up to speed fast: People born with strange, potentially deadly, powers exist among us, and pose a very real threat to life as we know it. Two men, Professor Charles Xavier (Leader of The X-Men), and Magneto (Leader of The Brotherhood of Mutants), fight an idealogical battle to win the hearts and loyalty of their fellow Mutants. Xavier wants to help Mutantkind make peace with Humanity, while Magneto sees Humanity as an annoyance that must be disposed of, so Mutants can ascend to their rightful place. This take-no-prisoners approach doesn't sit well with president Dubya; he unleashes the giant robotic Sentinels on a search-and-destroy mission to annihilate all Mutants. The story follows the recruiting of The X-Men (Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm, The Beast, Iceman, Colossus, & Wolverine), and their first confrontation with Magneto. (And what a confrontation it is!)

Magneto has never been better written; he comes across as both charismatic and chilling...a super-powered cross between Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter. He also does something VERY original with The Sentinals...very clever, Mr. Millar! Xavier is more cold-blooded than he is in the "real" Marvel continuity; I don't totally trust him.(Did he tamper with Scott's mind to make him defect....? Hmmmmm.)

If I loved it so much, why just a Four? I didn't care for the portrayal of Colossus: When we meet him, he's a soldier for the Russian Mafia, selling a stolen Nuclear weapon to an underling of Magneto. This troubling "Character flaw" is never mentioned again. That just bothered me a lot...I guess I hold my heroes up to high standards. I was also kinda weirded out by the way Jean just lept into bed with Wolverine, and the strong language peppered throughout the book. I'm no prude, but X-Men is an all-ages type of book, and the language just seemed unnecessary.

Overall, a great read- I'm gonna stick around for more.

Okay, I am definitely not a young adult anymore, but I do appreciate quality regardless of the age level it's aimed at, and I find graphic novels such as this one to be intelligent fiction with interesting themes.

Much of today's world is considering the possibility of mutants. There are such changes in our environment and also in the elements affecting new-borns through their parents that mutations don't seem impossible anymore.

Oh, certainly, the X--MEN are wildly exaggerated and beyond credibility as good comic book heroes should be, but there is nevertheless an underlying general theme.

As an older guy interested in the two X-MEN movies, this graphic novel helps give me an introduction. And for the younger adults not yet acquainted, this is an equally great introduction.

There are some people who will have problem with the way the X-men are portrayed, but it is interesting. I wish the movies were more like this book. This book presents the opportunity to take the team in an entirly unexspected direction.

I first came across Mark Leyner by way of his most recent composition, The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Having devoured it faster than any book I have ever read I craved more. I picked up Et Tu, Babe and had high expectations. Expectations that were mostly rewarded but where Tetherballs flys this one just drives really fast. I found myself getting a little bored with Et Tu in parts. It was relentlessly manic in a way that made it become tiring in parts. Don't get me wrong, this was a very funny book, it's just that while Tetherballs repeatedly extracted convulsive fits somewhere beyond laughter out of my body, Et Tu only made me laugh out loud. I recommend reading this one before Tetherballs for this reason. I plan to read My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist next. (By the way, while it is not very similar in style or content the last most hilarious book I read was Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I highly recommend it for those with a taste for the eccentric and a love of dark humour a la Leyner or Hunter S. Thompson)

Okay, so one day I was mulling over the question "If you were trapped on a desert island and could have only one movie, one album and one book, what would they be?" Without much thought I declared, "Movie: 'Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.' Album 'The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to The Ketchup and Mustard Man' by the Billy Nayer Show. Book: 'Et Tu Babe' by Mark Leyner. Then I'd spend the rest of my life chuckling maniacally and eating coconuts." It took me about 8 years to find this book. Sometime back in my adolescence, I ran across the "Visceral tattooing" portion of "Et Tu Babe" excerpted in "Harpers." Thinking it was pretty funny, I clipped it out and thought I should buy the book. Being the spacy teen that I was, I lost the clipping and promptly forgot the name of the book and the author. Fast forward eight years and someone sends me Leyner's "Tooth Imprints on a Corndog." My immediate reaction was to jump up onto my sofa and shout "This is the guy! THE GUY!!!" I promptly bought everything he ever wrote. Words cannot express the love. After the first time I read "Et Tu Babe," I couldn't stop going back and rereading portions of it. I was pulling it back off my shelf every day. People would call me on the phone and I'd say "Wait a sec...let me read you something." and then I'd become unintelligable with laughter attempting to read them some excerpt. Finally I lent my copy to a friend and found myself lost--tortured!--without it. So I bought another copy. I lent that one out. Then I bought another copy... I now have a STACK of copies of "Et Tu Babe" so that I can do my part to "seed the world with Team Leyner thought." Sure, Leyners verbose, tangential absurdism is not for everyone (all you Chris Moore fans can just run back home to Mommy, alright?) but if you want GENUINELY laugh-out-loud comedy that doesn't pull any punches, run (don't walk!) and buy this book.

"Et Tu, Babe" is, in essence, a sequel to a book (Leyner's brilliantly bizarre "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist") which wasn't actually a coherant novel. Critics embraced the former, but what was Leyner going to do for an encore.... Whoo boy.

What he did was write a 1000 mph masterpiece about a megalomaniac author named Mark Leyner who wrote a masterpiece called "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist", steals Lincoln's Morning Breath, performs his own internal organ surgeries, gets a set of bodygaurds who fulfill his every paranoic whim, and is sentenced to having one item permanently removed from his household every month by the FBI. Of course, there's more, but no review could possibly get to it. A little more accessible than "Gastroenterologist", but no less insane. Hysterically perfect.

Mark Wunderlich has written an astonishing collection that explores, among other things, loneliness, deprivation, and desire--of the body and of the spirit. The poems are informed by a sad, wise voice like nothing I've heard before. Maybe that's because Mr Wunderlich seems to recognize that poetry can take language to new levels without leaving the reader behind. In every poem he builds a connection between speaker and reader, between the one and the many. This connection, for me, is most pronounced in the prose poems, particularly "This Heat, These Human Forms" and "Chapel of the Miraculous Medal." While revealing a heart and mind unlike my own, these poems clarify my sense of what it means to be a human being--part spirit, part body--living for a short time in the world. American contemporary poetry would be diminished without this collection. We can all thank Mr Wunderlich for creating something so wise and original, so necessary.

I heard so much talk about this book, I didn't know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to find these poems speaking to me in simple but yet intellectual tones. They are easy to read but yet so deep in feeling; depressing at times, but so true to life. Especially "Fourteen Things" which was a deeply personal poem to me. I never expected to read about a personal friend of mine (Ron)in this book by this author. It brought back many wonderful memories of the friendship we shared so many years ago. If you want to read "Poems" that speak to the heart be sure and read this book. Hopefully, we will hear from Mark Wunderlich a lot more in the near future. Looking forward to it.

It is fascinating to me to see the number of reviews of this book--obviously Mark Wunderlich has struck a nerve among readers of contemporary poetry. It's also interesting to note how politicized this discussion has become. What hasn't been said here is that these are finely crafted poems that use intense, beautiful language in a new and interesting way, and that give shape to a voice that is fully-formed and authoritative while not retreating from difficult subjects. The writer of these poems has made himself vulnerable, and that is to his credit. This reader will look forward to seeing what Wunderlich does next.

I work in several Microsoft languages and have needed to explore VB.NET just like all the others. Ever since PDC I have been programming in C# as much as I can and have explored VB.NET so make sure that anything non-specific to C# can be accomplished in VB.NET. I also read books for recomendation to others. This book is not one that I will recommend. Not because VB.NET is less of a programming language, but because this book does not cover the amount or topics needed, IMO. A super sound knowledge of OOP is needed because it's maditory in VB.NET. You can not get away from this and you need to understand this first. This book covers these topics so minimally that you don't really have any real-world application and looks sort of like someone explaining the Impliments keyword in VB6. My recommendation is to NOT get this book. And if you are determined to go to VB.NET then please get a book dedicated to OOD (Object Orientated Design) and/or OOP (Object Orientated Programming). The last few chapters are interesting but so high level that it's difficult to get full understanding of how to really use the material. I rated this book a 2 instead of a 3 because of the lack of meat on OOD and OOP. The syntax is there, but the knowledge is just not expressed to where you know why or when.

This book was not meant to teach VB.NET. It gives a very nice overview of the new VB.NET. You have to be a very experience VB developer to rip the benefits out of this book. Chapter 5 explained OOP and how it works in VB.NET. I expect when Wrox writes VB.NET OOP or VB.NET Professional, it will delve deeper in the concepts of OOP. So far this is the only book I’ve read that explains VB.NET and how it works with the .NET Framework.

Overall, this book is for experience VB developer who is not looking for VB training but the changes and how to deal with them. Good Book.

I was very skeptical of this book, as WROX has dropped the ball before, with their "intermediate" type books.

Fortunately, this book did a nice job of presenting the new concepts, that we all have to look forward to, and backing them up with concrete examples of how we will have to change our current "code thought" to make them work.

I was a bit disappointed with the lack of discussion about some of the larger issues that may present themselves in .NET, like late-binding not being supported; however, all in all, the book covered most other "rumors" that I had heard, and questioned.

One other plus, was the coverage of Object Oriented Programming with VB.NET. Having never programmed C, I was glad to see a good deal of attention given to explaining concepts like "encapsulation" and "inheritance", which I, for the most part was unfamiliar.

I'm very pleased with this book, and have recommended it to several co-workers, who also purchased it and were happy with it. It's a good buy, and it's good preparation material, for what's to come.

This book is considered one of Mark Twain's "Mississippi" writings. The setting is Dawson's Landing, Missouri in the 1850s. There is a melodramatic surface plot that seems rather trite by modern standards. The story revolves around switched identities and solving a murder by the fledgling science of fingerprinting. Mark Twain's celebrated acerbic wit is in evidence, but mainly in the chapter heading quotes from Pudd' nHead Wilson's calendar of daily observations and homespun philosophy rather than in the novel itself. In addition, the book portrays 19th century American slavery. The slave woman Roxy, speaking in a heavy dialect, is the catalyst that sets the critical events in motion. The injustice of racism is the underlying theme of the book. Twain refrains from preaching a social justice sermon, but the inferences are there. Pudd'nHead Wilson is a country lawyer with no clients. To pass time, he dabbles in one experiment or another, and enjoys fingerprinting the local citizens. Wilson resembles a 19th century version of Jimmy Stewart's "everyman" in films. Although a minor work, the novel is interesting as an example of Mark Twain's other writing beyond "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn."

The Dover Thrift Editions are an inexpensive alternative to accessing major works of world literature. The no-frills packaging presents the unabridged text and a brief biographical note on Mark Twain. ;-)

Pudd'nhead Wilson
By Mark Twain

To keep her son from being "sold down the river," Roxy, a woman 1/16 black, devises a way for her son to grow up with all the privileges of 1830s white society. But questions as to underlying nature of the boy, born Valet de Chambres and now called Tom, soon arise.

David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson is a well-educated man who found a place in Dawson's Landing, Missouri, not as a small town attorney, but as the local curiosity. He earned his nickname due to his strange and frivols hobby of fingerprinting his friends and neighbors, keeping the glass slides carefully labeled and filed.

The melding of Pudd'nhead with the plot of the story comes late, and to modern readers, the way in which a murder is solved comes not as a surprise. It is, however, an interesting enough piece of history, recorded with care and style by Twain. The most amusing and enduring portions of the book are the random quotes taken from Pudd'nhead's calendar. They include nuggets of wisdom such as "keep all your eggs in one basket... and watch that basket!"

This book takes thought to read. As slim a volume as it is, each chapter takes quite a time to work its way into your brain. And Roxy's speech, written in Twain's famous dialect spelling, can make you set aside a whole afternoon just to grope your way through. But if you find your lips moving don't worry. Each word is important, and there is little in each short chapter that is not necessary and interesting.

I found Roxy to be the most compelling character. Her life in and out of slavery is one of a mother trying to do right, a woman trying to live her life, and an unfortunate pawn in the manipulative world that judges her only by her lineage.

This book was a great one. Mark Twain takes simple plots and mangaes to turn them into classics. The simple changing of children at birth leads to so much more in this novel. I especially liked Twain's use of foreshadowing and always trying to keep the reader in suspense. While it is no doubt predictable that Tom is going to commit a crime of some sort, I could never identify what he was going to do. The way it came about no doubt surprised me and I liked how Twain did it. Twain's style is another thing I love. He uses the vernacular so effectively and it helped to paint a picture of the characters in my mind. I can easily get images of all the characters because I can either relate the characters to someone I have come across or by the excellent description he has given. Pudd'nhead Wilson is an excellent book and Twain once again delivered a classic novel about the old West where slavery still dictated life, and as always, the Mississippi River played a role in the story.

This book assumes that you have a good understanding of LDAP and Directory Services, The intro chapters do not cover many basic concepts, many terms are not explained until used several dozen times, and there is no glossary. If you don't know what 'dn: uid=joeb, ou=People, o=foo.com' means, you will get easily confused and frustrated by this book.

That said, this is an excellent reference book, contains many useful examples, and goes into great detail about LDAP and directory services.

Though I have only read the first 3 chapters so far, I find this book better at explaining the concepts behind LDAP than Mark Wilcox's "Implementing LDAP". I wanted to understand more about this LDAP thing as a system designer (with a strong RDBMS background). Quite early on, the book explains the differences between directories, databases, file systems, FTP servers, DNS servers and Web servers.

I found the first 3 chapters well explained, and conceptual enough for my purposes. I do intend to go back and read "Part II: Designing your directory service", though I probably skip the rest, which is more useful to implementors. (The rest of the book covers deployment, maintenance, using LDAP with applications, and case studies).

I found the book easy to read, and would recommend the book as a general overview of LDAP that covers many angles.

This book gives a good architect's or project manager's understanding of LDAP and of the difficulties inherent in deploying any complex mission critical software system. The book covers schema and name space design, security considerations, legacy integration, capacity planning, systems management and procurement. All of these issues are discussed in a vendor neutral tone, though the references are a bit heavy on Netscape publications.

This is not a programming book and this is not a product manual. For architects, this is a concept book rather than a reference book: After reading this book you will still need to spend hours pouring over your vendor's manuals figuring out how to implement your design. For a project manager, this book may deserve the "bible" moniker, with the checklists something that can be used to guide the deployment of many new systems. While there is one, quite good, chapter on application design, application design is not the focus. Tim and Mark's earlier book covers that topic in much more detail.

The book, at 850 pages, is long, but it should be easy going for a database professional. The book itself looks like it was laid out with an HTML browser's "Print" command.

If you are considering an LDAP deployment, using any LDAP server, you will find this book invaluable during the evaluation, planning and deployment process.

Burke's companion volume to the Connections-2 TV series mimics the failings of that series, while failing to live up to his standard set in his two previous ones.

The great insight that Burke supposedly brings to this book is that technological, scientific, and cultural development are all intertwined, and that individual achievements are only made possible by many previous advances brought together unexpectedly.

But readers of "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" already know this. So Burke adds hypertext to the book with indices in the margins. It's a cute idea, and well-executed, but actually following these links would destroy any cohesion in the stories Burke is trying to tell.

If there were cohesion, that is. "Connections" told stories often stretching over centuries, and if you couldn't guess how you were getting there (part of the fun, of course), you at least knew where you were going. "Day" used essentially the same insight, but each chapter had a unifying theme: a particular revolutionary insight that changed our world view.

"Pinball" has neither. Perhaps because Burke only had 30 minutes rather than an hour as in the previous shows, he rushed through the same amount of material twice as fast, barely pausing for breath. He doesn't stop to review where we've been, and in the first chapter, each leap takes us backwards, rather than forwards. The chop-chop style might work for MTV, but left me feeling that "Pinball" was not "Connections", but even less of the same.

Although, I'm not even finished yet, I know I'll be re-reading this at some time to take advantage of the inspired gateways scattered throughout the text. I remember watching the original 'Connections' series on PBS years ago, and his work fascinated me even then. This work is easily readable, and makes itself readily available to young and old, the scientifically minded and those just looking for a good read. 'Pinball' is a fun excursion through science, technology, and history! If you don't realize just how connected life is, this book will certainly open your eyes to the web of a world in which we live.

This latest edition of Mr. Burke's unique perspective of history is aptly named. Unlike his previous, best known works, "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed", James Burke does not examine the events bearing on a specific topic indepth. This volume, of 20 chapters, contains a plethora of persons and events in each. It has an exhaustive index of 18 pages and 447 points of reference in the margins. Taking a different literary approach from his previous works, Burke makes his point of the connections between seemingly disjointed and unforeseen events in history remarkably well. Aptly titled "The Pinball Effect" James Burke coherently outlines events leading from one point of reference to a completely unforseen outcome. He does not examine the advent of a specific discovery or human insight exhaustively. In prose style, it is a true outline, giving very brief summaries of the interactions of events and persons. This gives a whirl wind, fast paced tone to the work. Additionally, adding to the the pinball pace of the book, Burke has added to the margins of each page "gateways", cites to other pages in the book, where the event is mentioned. Based on the premise that history can be recorded as timelines, and these timelines invariably cross innumerably, these "gateways," as Burke terms them, show how preceived unrelated events are indeed related. The major premise of this work is that these relationships are impossible to determine contemporaneously and it is only with the benefit of hindsight can the implications be devined. Since knowlege expands exponentially, each new insight building upon the former, and chaotically, with each individual mind developing it's own thought patterns, the possbilities are exhausting. These inexhaustive combinations and the tangentery implications that may be drawn therefrom is the "Pinball Effect." Thus, this departure from Burke's previous approach is well suited to his premise. This work is not a companion book to the television series "Connections 2", although many chapters cover topics of these episodes. In an interview to the Boston Phoenix newspaper, on debute of the "Connections 2" series in 1994, Burke stated that the indepth examination given in the hour long episodes of "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" were not accessible to today's television audience, accustom to soundbite TV. Therefore, "Connections 2" consisted of facer pased, half hour shows. Whether or not this premise is true, "The Pinball Effect" is not a dumbing down of knowleged for the masses by it's outline technique. It is fascinating, fast paced reading as such, but is is also an excellant reference book. Every bookshelf should contain a copy for this reason alone. Almost the whole of Western scientific history and it's impact on society is in this book. The excellant index and bibliography enables one to look up characters and events divergent as: Josiah Wedgwood, Luigi Galvani, Immanual Kant; immigration quota laws, phosphates, and block and tackle systems and thereby guage their time, place and implications. This is not a book to gain indepth knowledge of any particular subject by. It is an excellant overview of the complexity of modern Western history, from the view of a scientific historian, for both the neophyte and the proficient. True to it's name, "The Pinball Effect" takes the reader on a fast and furious ride through the major events of our history, events which are all too often taken for granted. It is highly recommended. Reviewer's note: I've tried to include indentation and line spacing between paragraphs, but they do not seem to show on the screen. If these do not appear, please excuse the inconvenience.

As a fellow graduate of USAFA, I can relate closely with many of the sub-plots in Victor Padrini. Perhaps that is because almost none of the stories Mr. Pizzimenti tells are fiction. Be that as it may, the author appears to express these events accurately. His criticisms of a system rife with contradictions and unfairness are right on the money.

However, anyone looking for a complete survey of the Academy will not find it here. I cannot speak for the author, but, despite many negative memories, I also benefited from the academy experience. At the academy, I learned how to leader, developed the ability to think and act under pressure, honed my time management skills, and established many life-long friendships. I also witnessed a desire of many Academy officials to make real reforms.

USAFA was certainly a flawed institution when I attended, and I wouldn't be surprised if graduates of other universities feel the same way about their alma maters. Mr. Pizzimenti's book should indeed be read by anyone considering attending one of the service academies, but they should also try to discover some of the benefits of an academy education before making a decision. The more a candidate understands the school before signing up, the less likely he or she will be to suffer from the same dilemmas of Victor Padrini.

This book is about Mark Pizzimenti's senior year at the Air Force Academy. The book is labeled as fiction, but it is only fiction in so much as the names have been changed--and in some cases the names are very similar.

It is impossible to fully appreciate this book unless you too have attended a service academy. I first read the book as a junior at the academy. I'm now a senior and the similarities between his experience and mine are striking. It is for this reason that this book should be considered non-fiction. I can find nothing in this book that doesn't happen here still, eight years later.

If one wants to find out what USAFA is all about, read the propaganda, the admissions literature, and all the rest--but definitely read this book.

Reading this book was difficult because it brought back all that which I managed to subdue but never forget. Mark saw everything that was wrong with the Academy and pulls no punches in telling the tale. Graduates, if you have the honesty to admit that almost every aspect of your Academy experience was useless, then you can relate to Mark Pizzimenti. If you cannot admit this, perhaps you would be better off reminiscing on "knowledge bowls" and "training sessions". Everybody knows 'what they were' at the Hill. If you were 'one of them', Victor Padrini is not a book you would understand. However, I would still recommend that you read it because it may just open your eyes. As for the rest, for those who valued loyalty to your fellow man more than loyalty to the institution, Padrini is right up your alley.