This 96 page soft cover book gives an overview of this famous British WWII fighter and the aces who flew it.

Separate chapters cover development, modification and operational use in North-West Europe, Malta, North Africa and other areas including Australia. There is a chapter on aerial warfare tactics which gives a facinating insight into the practical problems and solutions employed by an ace in Malta. The problem of overclaiming by pilots the number of enemy aircraft shot down is illustrated in the chapter dealing primarily with operations in Northern Australia. The last chapter gives an operational biography of the top 12 Spitfire Mk V aces.

The text is well illustrated with colour paintings, scale drawings and a large number of rarely seen b/w photos. The 12 pages of colour paintings depicts individual aces aircraft in profile and ace pilots in flying gear.

I was disappointed by the lack of an index and bibliography/reference.

I recommend this book to readers who have an interest in aviation and/or WWII in general.

I liked this book because the characters talk like it was real life people. It's a fast paced book. The setting is at alot of different places; the story moves around. This book explaines special terms so that you would enjoy it even though it's about baseball. I would reccommend that you read it!

This book was an ambitious attempt to describe both a vision of what personal computing could be and to provide a much needed technical overview of Squeak. Although largely successful, the buyer should be warned that some chapters in this book refer to online software that has yet to be written or is not currently available online. In particular, Alan Kay provides an unintended joke with his forward to the book. He states that Squeak is a "dynamic medium for creative thought" and that the foreward to the book should be an online active essay in Squeak. Unfortunately, the essay, "It Should Be Active, But Where (and When) Will It Be?" does not yet exist!

As Squeak continues to evolve rapidly, this book may become obsolete in a few years, but it currently provides some of the best technical overviews of Squeak's Morphic UI, networking, 3D animation, and other fun topics.

This is an excellent starter book for stargazers, and fits into your pocket.

Mark Littleton has written several books in the Zondervan Sports Heroes series. Each book follows a similar format: brief, standard biographies of the sports career of 6 or 7 athletes with an added touch ala Commentator Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story."

The added touch is how each individual athlete found that his/her faith in God made him/her a more complete human being, if not a more perfect competitor.

Sadly, many of the books are out of print, but may be available in libraries or through special services of Amazon or other booksellers.

I recommend these books for both parents and their preteens and teens to read. The torn social framework created by over-competitive parents living vicariously through their athlete-children cries out for repair with a strong dose of the faith found by each of Mr. Littleton's subjects.

The moral is "You can be a pretty good athlete or even a star WITHOUT being a jerk!"

This book shows how to live on your own as a minor with some good advice, (as well as some legal advice--grrrr--the dreaded guilt by association) on worst-case scenarios and necessities to bring along..Obviously, it is hard to be on your own as someone under 18 but it should be mentioned that it is 10 times harder than that if you are under 16!! There is a section that mentions that you can get a passport if you're under 18, but it doesn't mention that you must be atleast 16, without a parent or legal guardian. It seems small but little things like that can blow your cover. There are also some typos that are minor, but can make certain parts harder to read. However, the book seems self-produced, which is admirable. The author has good information from many people who have lived on their own while under 18, but having no personal experience in this sort of thing can make for a lack of personal advice from personal experiences. --There are so many snags to be wary of when you are on your own as a minor which may be overlooked on the surface, with all of the state laws and standards...Overall, the book has a LOT of crucial information, so if you plan to go out on your own, then you should read it. It might make you think twice about going away, but if it doesn't, it can atleast offer some much needed advice.

This is a good book and all... if you are playing Mage instead of Dungeons and Dragons by accident. Whose idea was it to add the Bladesinger to the White-Wolf universe?

Beside the fact that this book as all about the rouge-magician, it's still a Mage book, which, for some, is good enough. It definately adds a different touch, and a different feel, to the oracle and philosopher feel that all too many Mage: SC games have.

All in all, no too bad a buy. Just remember to seperate your WW and D&D.

Talking Zen is not a book written by Alan Watts. It is a book which was pieced together out of lectures and talks Watts gave at various times in his life ranging from the age of eighteen to the age of fifty-six, a span of thirty-eight years. Therefore, dear prospective reader, do not expect it to be as disciplined and tightly woven as his written pieces.

As a writer, Watts can be devastatingly perceptive and magical. He can dazzle a reader out of his usual ruts of thinking and suggest a previously unimagined through virtually inspired way to look at a mundane fact of life. When he is writing at his best, he is writing with a passion - or as much passion as a transplanted Englishman can - and a fervor to communicate an insight he has discovered. And he writes in such a way as to attempt to communicate the same feeling of epiphany he had when he first realized the insight he's writing about. So that the reader can experience, in his own time, the same feeling of joyous discovery as Watts first did.

All this is by way of saying that if you are expecting the present book to dazzle you, you may be in for a big surprise. This is not to say that Talking Zen is without its moments. There some brilliant moments in it. But you have to be prepared to search them out and to wade through a lot of dross before finding them.

Talking Zen is not the same as writing Zen, and therein lies the difference. Because the medium of speech is different from the medium of the written word the element of discipline is sometimes discarded in favor of flowing with the moment. This is to say that in writing one can more fully focus on developing an idea to its fullest potential, whereas in speaking one is "playing to the crowd," and some of the development can be left by the wayside.

Of the nine pieces on display in the present book, the ones which come off the best in written form are the ones which were prepared ahead of time and were given as structured lectures rather than as extemporaneous talks. Of these there are three, which comprise the first three chapters of the book.

The first of these, entitled "Picture Without a Frame," was crafted by an eighteen year old Watts. When one reads it, it is difficult to imagine its author was only eighteen when it was composed because it reads like the composition of a much older, and wiser, person. Without going into too much detail, "Picture..." can be summed up by the following sentence: "To know the universe in terms of nothing but frames is almost exactly what Indian philosophy means by maya, the idea that all such knowledge is in some sense an illusion." There is more to be culled from this piece than just this sentence, and those who are interested will be certain to dig deeper in order to uncover the other nuggets of value which make up this essay.

The second piece, entitled "The Psychology of Acceptance: The Reconciliation of the Opposites in Eastern Thought and in Analytical Psychology," was composed in 1939 by a slightly more mature twenty-four year old Alan Watts, and was delivered before the Analytical Psychology Club in New York. Quite a daunting undertaking for a 24 year old, but Watts was up for the challenge. The piece is about creating a state of mind or attitude of acceptance regarding the darker side of reality, or rather those events which cause us psychological pain, and a method for conquering such pain in our lives. It is extremely insightful and, as with the previous piece, it also is a joy and a revelation to read.

The third piece, with the improbably title "Mythological Motifs in Modern Science," is another lecture text probably given in the early 1940s. In it Watts examines how science is "Western man's attempt to liberate himself from myth, from the so-called 'pathetic fallacy' of constructing the world in his own unconscious image." He spends the rest of the piece suggesting "that this attempt [at liberation from myth] is impossible and absurd." And ends up by demonstrating that "Western [scientists'] concern for the control of nature is slipping over into Eastern man's concern for controlling the mind. We are now beginning to attack maya in both directions, and for this reason books on the philosophy of science become more and more reminiscent of Indian metaphysics." There is more, but you'll just have to read it, and enjoy it, for yourselves.

For the reader who is discovering Watts for the first time I cannot recommend this book. You would be better served by picking up The Wisdom of Insecurity or The Way of Zen or Psychotherapy East & West or even The Meaning of Happiness. These are works which were composed and thought out as books in the first instance, and therefore are more fully explanatory of their subject matter as well as a better introduction to Watts' unique description of the indescribable.

On the other hand, if you, as a reader, have been around the block once or twice before with Watts and are familiar with his main thematical interests, Talking Zen may contain some additional insights not touched on in some of his more familiar published works. But be prepared to do some slogging through the muck - through his extamporaneous meanderings, expecially in the latter two thirds of the book - to get at these newly offered gems.

This book was required reading for a usability class I attended. I didn't really like the book myself. It was quite verbose and apparently written by and for academics. The book asks the questions what is technophobia, and who are technophobic. It relates to dozens of previous studies conducted by the author and other researchers. It looks into things like Cognitive Development Theory, Social Learning Theory, etc. in order to define technophobia and to find out how best to deal with it.

This book is for two kinds of people: 1) researchers and students who are interested in technophobia in an academical sense 2) people who are in charge of designing the use of computers in public places like schools, libraries, educational and other public services.

I as a student of Usability and User Interface design got very little of this text. The basic stuff was sometimes interesting to me, but the academical form of the text was a downer. There were occasions where a sentence was cut of by references and continues after four (4!) lines of ref. listing. I had to reread the beginning of the sentence just to remember what was being discussed. The text uses the references as part of text constantly, in a very annoying way. Instead of saying "A is B (Doe 1995)." it says "According to (Doe 1995) A is B." and that lessens the readability when it is present in every paragraph.

I had trouble deciding wether to give 2 or 3 stars. I gave 3 because I think that academic people will get more out of this text. If you are not one of them, beware!

PS. Every chapter ended with a very good summary. I found this very helpful when preparing for the exam of the class.

Although Romania's contribution to World War II, both on the Axis and Allied sides, was much greater than Italy's, it has received very little attention in the West. This is mainly because almost all Romanian action was on the Eastern Front, save for air actions against Western Allied planes raiding over Romanian oil-refining plants, and therefore got little attention from West-oriented historians. Axworthy has remedied this situation with this dry, thorough, careful overview of the Romanian experience in World War II. This is a valuable reference tool, but not for pleasure reading...hopefully, the change in circumstances in Eastern Europe will eventually bring out livelier memoirs of Romanian veterans before they all pass away.