I picked up this book hoping to learn a little about the way production is designed, rigged and run for major touring operations. To that end I guess I was satisfied with this book.

However, for those without specific technological know how, I suspect this book will be fairly heavy going.

It is interesting for the gee whiz factor, but I'll be surprised if the average musician can make head nor tail of most of the facts in this book.

While somewhat useful as a general guide to London restaurants and prices, this directory would serve the visitor better with some subjective ratings of the usual one to five star variety. Most tourists want to know where the good grub is at a good price. Aside from a couple of references, this book doesn't really tell you.

While this book might do alright for a bedtime story, I found it written in a confusing way and the information was in no specific order. Contrary to what the title suggests, there were only snippets of Louisa's diaries, and those snippets were chock full of the author's puntuation and added words. The rest of the book was the author's narration of Louisa's life. I will give it credit for the nice pictures and the work that must have been put into it, but if you want to read to your young child about Louisa May Alcott's amazing life, I suggest finding another book.

Another book of pretty pictures from MLB, complete with a sanitized text that mistakes acheivements for moments and re-writes history to sell more t-shirts and other authorized garbage. The recent spate of MLB books have been particularly embarrassing and this is no better. If you buy this book you are encouraging MLB to produce more books that seek to re-write the facts of history into a marketble form and that don't respect the intelligence of the audience. Buy a real book, written by real writers, about a real topic, rather than something sponsored by a credit card company.

I always enjoy the books of Allen Drury because I enjoy politics in general and I'm a Republican. Drury, of course, wrote exclusively about the men and women of Washington and was unapologetically conservative. There aren't many conservative novelists out there so Drury's books always served as a nice relief but unfortunately, outside of his Advise and Consent series, few of his novels live up to their promise. After winning his pulitzer prize for Advice and Consent, Drury seemed to spend the rest of his career essentially rewriting that book. Mark Coffin, USS is a good example. The novel, from the '70s by which time American politics had changed considerably since Drury wrote his first classic book, deals with California's junior Senator -- the idealistic and niave liberal Mark Coffin. Only thirty years old, Coffin enters the Senate as something of a celebrity and immediately finds himself thrust into a battle over the President's choice for Attorney General. Unfortunately, all of this brings up memories of Advise and Consent's battle over the President's choice for Secretary of State and the comparisons are not favorable. Whereas Advice and Consent was blessed with some very complex characters, Mark Coffin and his fellow Senators all seem to be faded carbon copies of the characters from that earlier book. None of them capture the imagination and most of them are flatly written. Mark Coffin, especially, seems to be compiled of every other young, idealistic politician that has appeared in countless other political novels over the years. As a character, he can't surprise us and as such, his lessons and conflicts simply do not hold the reader's interest. As well, most of the dialouge and scenes seem rather corny at best as if Drury, the '50s political insider, had spent the last twenty years forgetting everything he knew. In the end, Drury seems to be trying to write a novel about the Washington he knew set in the very different, post-Watergate political climate and, as such, comes across as being, for lack of a better term, lost. Still, bizarrely enough, this book is also a rare Drury book that contains a few really sterling and lyrical prose passages as opposed to the somewhat rough, awkwardly constructed sentences he became infamous for in most of his other books. Sadly, one gets the feeling that Drury was making a real effort to craft an important statement with this book (certainly, America needed one at that time). Unfortunately, the times had just passed him by.

Tis book has a good base however I strongly recomend that the authors need to actually read this book over, and correct the multitude of mistakes that have been made in this publication.

For such highly regarded filmmaker it's a bit of a head scratcher that there is only one book out there dedicated to his career.... and a pretty [bad] one at that.

If you're looking for a basic, blow-by-blow account of his films, then this 96-page quickie is okay. However, more devoted fans will be disappointed by the lack of in-depth analysis or factual detail (most of it taken from various interviews and articles that are easily found for free on the Internet and that aren't even credited!).

Mr. Steensland's writing style is all over the map. At times it's almost academic and then switches suddenly to a more conversational tone. It has a jarring effect on the reader that is very distracting.

Now, I understand that the purpose of this series of books is to provide quick and easy-to-find information on a given filmmaker and their films. That's fine but a filmmaker of Mann's calibre deserves more than this. When's a more detailed book on his career going to come out?

Bottom line: unless you are a die hard Mann fan don't waste your time or money on this book.

This book is obviously written by someone who has absolutely no practical experience with robotics. His photos of constructed circuits are phony, as are his mechanical systems. I give it 2 stars only because some of his schematics contained some useful information. He had some interesting ideas for vision systems, however, I am sure they are untested.

I was entertained by this book and the quips and cartoons were fun. However, I was hoping to find something more educational and was disappointed. I'll keep looking.

This is a detailed report of a project recommending a specific format for markup languages. Unfortunately, one of the possible formats which they rejected before choosing ODA (Office Document Architecture) was SGML, thus the particulars of the work have been largely outdated by subsequent events. The report does offer some valuable critiques of SGML and its lack of document organization semantics.