Mark strand, one of the better living poets in America delivers with a great, longer work set around growing older. It is accessable and interesting, which is about all you can ask for out of a modern volume of poetry. More then a few of these poems will rattle around in your head, long after you have put the book down.

I had the fortune of being able to swing both of the DH games, and Notice of Termination is by far the more immediately accessible (for one, it doesn't have pewter minis so while you don't get the coolness of minis, if you're like me you don't have to have anything painted in order to play). With NOT, you scan the rules, set up the boards (so clever, BTW, that they make my head hurt) and start to rack up the kills. All in all, great fun!

A great novel in which two brothers are pitted against each other by the dark forces determined to take both their thrones. Lleu, heir to the throne, is bullied by his brother for being weak, yet finds the courage to escape from prison when he is wrongfully incarcerated, and go in search of the last Crystal Knight. Along the way he is befriended by a rogue who just may have stepped into the past from our own world. The dynamics between Lleu and his bullying younger brother reveal two men who both have their kingdom's best interests at heart, yet cannot see eye-to-eye on how best to run it. Meanwhile, conniving forces are at work to steal the throne from both of them. This is a great alternate-history world, with all the right elements for a grand, High-Fantasy epic. And wait until you meet the ice giants! Big-budget movies couldn't do better than the words of the authors in creating some truly remarkable creatures.

A Perfect approach to teaching data structures concepts. I found this book usefull enough to keep

Although this is not my type of genre, the book was recommended ; I must say this author is very creative. Once you get started, it's hard to put down. The book has some very amazing twists and turns!! If you are a Stephen King or Dean Koontz fan, you'll enjoy this book.

I read this book in one sitting. It is the first and only time that I have ever done this. I have read better books in my lifetime (Many), but few have kept me so interested that I was unable to close it until I found out the conclusion. I HIGHLY reccomend this book to just about anyone, and I look forward to hopefully read more from Miano.

It doesn't tell you how to contact the dead yourself, but I still enjoyed reading the experiences of others.

If ever there was a case of stories in a collection getting better as they go along, this is it.

Ten stories, seven Doctors, one enigma. But it's all pretty formulaic, and kind of goofy, until 'The Book of Shadows' by Jim Mortimore, featuring the First Doctor, Barbara and Ian (barely Ian; accent on Barbara). This story is a bit of a re-working of the TV tale called The Aztecs--once again Barbara is mistaken for greatness and is bowed down to alot--but there are some nifty temporal oopsa-daisies going on here, and some powerful emotional content. Then, it's a fairly successful uphill ride as the stories stay fun and imaginative in the back half, the sole exception being a Fifth Doctor-and-Peri story called 'Fascination' that seems too magical, and sexual, for the Who universe. The highlight of the collection is the next entry, 'The Golden Door', which involves the Sixth and First Doctor untangling a bizarre and dangerous mystery from opposite ends (but will they meet??). I also liked the hard-hitting 'Prisoners of the Sun', plus 'Lackaday Express', which is successful even though it revisits some of the themes already dealt with in 'The Book of Shadows'; I'd rather have two interesting stories that are thematically similar than what is presented in the first few tales: zippy, forgettable ideas that may offer variety, but nothing of much consequence.

The final part of the book is the resolution of the framing story called 'Playback' which involves the Seventh Doctor visiting a private-eye, in 1947 LA, to get his memory back. This, in fact, is the ploy used to thrust us into the various short stories, once a medium is consulted to help the Doctor remember all his past lives. 'Playback', also the name of a Raymond Chandler novel, wraps up with a nice twist. It's also unexpectedly great at pulp detective-story mood--feels like a left-out portion of Hammett's Red Harvest, with the Doctor involved. Four stars for about half the contents of this book.

For the record, the First and Third Doctors shine best.

Mu'tazilism was a school of Islamic theological discourse (kalam) that enjoyed the patronage of many Muslim rulers during the Abbasid Age (800-1050 CE). Mu'tazali intellectuals forwarded a rationalist conception of Islamic theology and offered specific opinions about divine unity, the historical context of revelation, and ethical answerability to God. The first principle of Mu'tazilism was that all humans must exercise speculative reason in order to know God. Further, the Mu'tazila believed that humans had the power (qudra) to act independently and were responsible to God for those actions. Later Muslim orthodoxy (i.e. Ash'ariya) strongly opposed this doctrine and favored the doctrine of divine predestination.

The authors argue that modernist Muslim intellectuals have dipped into the well of Islamic history and drawn heavily from Mu'tazalism. In addition to the belief in human efficacy, modernist Muslims seem particular interested in the Mu'tazlite assertion that the Qur'an was revealed in a particular historical context and therefore Muslims must use reason to interpret it when living in new contexts. The Mu'tazilite doctrine that asserts that associating attributes to God is tantamount to shirk (polytheism) seems to be of little interest to most modernist Muslims.

Although very few of these contemporary intellectuals self-identify as neo-mu'tazalite they admire the Mu'tazalite commitment to reason. However, one Indonesian intellectual, Harun Nasution, has boldly declared himself to be a modern day Mu'tazalite.

The authors translate and explicate two Mu'tazalite texts. The first was written in the tenth century CE by Qadi 'Abd al-Jabbar, considered by some to be the last major Mu'tazalite scholar. The second was written by the contemporary Indonesian Islamic scholar, Harun Nasution. The authors compare these texts both in term of their theological (kalam) arguments as well as in terms of the context in which they were written. In this way, it is a exquisite examination of continuity and change within a religious tradition.

This is not a book for the casual reader, despite the fact that it is distributed through popular booksellers in the United States. It twists and turns through the history of theological debates in Islam. Some of the debates might seem arcane to the first time student of Islam and others confusing as to the real difference between the opposing views.

For the advanced scholar of Islam, this is a marvelous book. It reflects a collaborative effort of a kind that should be encouraged and repeated in the study of Islam. Martin is an historian of Islam and a philologist. Woodward is an anthropologist well-known for his work on Indonesian Islam. Both are detached scholars; neither is Muslim. Atmaja, on the other hand, is a young Indonesian Islamic intellectual conversant in historical texts and, like many of his contemporaries, trying to come to terms with modernity and postmodernity. In fact, as the preface of the book openly admits, this book was inspired by Atmaja's desire to examine Mu'tazilism as a source for thinking about the relationship between rationality and faith.

Ron Lukens-Bull, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Anthropology University of North Florida Jacksonville, FL 32224-2650 (904) 620-2850 rlukens@unf.edu