In the realm of demon-baiting, this book is a solid helping of mashed potatoes to the Twinkies and Jell-o served up by critters like Bob Larson. On the one hand, if you really want to understand what basis people who actually believe this stuff are going on, this can be nourishing. If you're merely reading for recreation, however - and let's face it, in the end that's the only practical reason for filling your head with this material - you're likely to find it somewhat lumpy and bland.

Sadly, the author strings events in Corman's life in such a way that you are left not finding any interest in his life, which is sad as Corman has led such an interesting life. His own semi-autobiography was much more intersting and fun to read. The one good point of this book is the rundown of his movies, including intersting facts in the making of them as well as the listing of the major players in Corman's films. Not worth [the $]though.

If you've been living under a rock for the last 10+ years, then this book might be useful to you. The book targets console programmers (as in scrolling text, not games!) who are making the big leap to graphical user interface style programs. If you've used a computer in the last ten years, you probably know everything this book mentions. That said, from a historical perspective it _was_ worth the hour of time to read the book.

I've recently been researching the links between 14th century Scotland, the Templar order, and Henry Sinclair's possible visit to the New World around 1400 -- not to "prove" that Oak Island contains a vast treasure protected by a secret society, but because of my interest in Henry's ties to Orkney and Norway. That said, I realize that most people will be reading the book for very different reasons. Anyway, I thought this book might be a useful read, but it is quite simple, full of the author's highly personalized thoughts (not facts) about the area, Henry's motivations and the nature of the Oak Island constructions, and it doesn't really get into the details of anything. It's a good first book to read about the subject, which has been addressed in several other recent books as well, and it's obvious the author is very interested in the subject, but it's not a comprehensive exploration of the exciting and complicated subject matter. Read this, and then buy "The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar:Solving the Oak Island Mystery," by Steven Sora.

This book was a requirment for my honors World History class and neither I, my class, nor my teacher enjoyed reading it. This book does have several positive factors though. It is full of information, dates, and facts. It also features very useful timelines, and excerps from important documents of whatever period is in question. But while these things are good...the bad outnumber them.

It is said that chronology is a historian's secret weapon. The biggest problem in this book is the lack of chronology. The various sections in this book (or what use to be different volumes) are all categorized by civilization and not by time. Since primarily used in a World History class, though, it is hard and downright confusing sometimes to create a mental timeline while reading. Instead there are overlapping dates and the text will hop around chronologically. While when I used this book it was mandatory, if anyone is simply looking for a reference for something, I reccomend you find another book.

ST ANTHONY'S FIRE is another one that I read shortly after its release, but which I later remembered virtually nothing about. Thinking back on this story years later, the most that I could recall was something about a guy torturing a cat, and that there were some sort of gigantic spaceships involved. So imagine my surprise when I began to reread this story recently, I found myself quite enjoying the beginning. Unfortunately, this euphoria was not to last. As the inoffensively entertaining opening began to wear off, I saw less and less to be thrilled by. By the time I reached the end, I was actively willing the story to end, so that I could move onto something else. I fully expect that five years from now, if pressed to recall something from this story, the only thing I will be able to add to my list of two vague items above is that there is an absolutely ridiculous religious satire in the novel that I had thankfully wiped from my mind on my initial perusal.

The book does begin relatively strong. There's a war-torn planet in a distant star-system engaged in a genocidal war to the death between two sets of virtually identical aliens. So far, so good -- not exactly groundbreaking stuff here, but it's told enthusiastically enough to bring my interest along for the ride. The battle sequences are told with a good bit of flair and revolve around giant reptiles reenacting the trench scenes from PATHS OF GLORY. But this does bring us to the first place where the book starts to fall apart. Gatiss goes to a lot of trouble to describe how physically alien these creatures are, and the descriptions of these reptilian people go a long way towards redeeming the book. But the visual aspects to their alienness are as far as the book develops them, as the way these creatures talk and act make them human for all intents and purposes. They even use human figures of speech in their everyday conversation. It almost feels as though Gatiss had finished writing the novel with humans in the lead role, but then went back and made a few cursory changes to the narrative in order to make the monsters seem otherworldly. There is just too little effort shown though; these aliens just aren't alien.

Anyway, as one could guess, the Doctor and Benny (Ace has been left to vacation on another planet) soon arrive and become entangled in the local politics. Not to get into spoiler territory, but the arrival of what the back-cover blurb describes as "an unknown force" seems to render inconsequential a lot of the earlier running around. It's this unknown force that brings the bulk of the unfortunate religious aspect to the story, which drives ST ANTHONY'S FIRE down from being merely an uninspired, unoriginal runaround to the depths of serious Deep Hurting.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a good bit of satire, but unfortunately the religious/fundamentalist theme to this story is the least subtle thing this side of that master of understatement, THE GREEN DEATH. It's as subtle as a bright pink poodle. As subtle as being hit by a bus. As subtle as Jim Carrey dressed as a bishop and preaching out of his bottom. In short, subtlety is not this book's strong point. The religious persons shown here are all varying shades of evil; some are evil in greedy ways, others are evil in self-preservationist ways, while still others are sadistic purely for the reasons of being sadistic. The only religious characters who aren't actively evil are just stupid. I'm would not consider myself a deeply religious person, but this sort of boneheaded sledgehammer moralizing just strikes me as being vapid and lazy. It's trying to say something profound, but because of its shallow nature, it ends up saying absolutely nothing at all.

The conclusion to the story is simply unsatisfying on almost all levels. Instead of having the religious satire taken to its logical conclusion of fundamentalism being rejected in favor of some good old-fashioned peace and understanding (or at least something that at least seems aware of the themes that were running through the novel), we get an ending where the forces of the evil religion are defeated by a load of technobabble and people pushing buttons and pulling levels. The story itself relies on too many information dumps where huge portions of the plot are spelled out by people making long speeches. It's a pity because there are elements of the plot that were quite interesting, and would have been more effective if introduced in a more engaging way.

To be fair, I did like several of the (non-satiric) characters in the novel, and what Gatiss does with Ace I found to be genuinely shocking and disturbing, in a good way. The Ace subplot is probably something I should have guessed in advance of its revelation, but the author had me completely fooled. Still, these positives can't save a story that simply doesn't seem to be fully thought through. The only nice thing left to say about this book is that the cover is quite a good painting, even if the Doctor looks more like a Cardassian than a Time Lord. Definitely not a memorable or engaging book here.

The Pacific War is a subject which has not led to many new revelations in the last fifty or so years. As Japan was occupied it was possible to obtain access to their side of the conflict. This can be compared to the European Conflict that has been the subject of a large number of revelations. The Soviet Union kept a lot of its secrets close to its chest and with its collapse we now have a greater understanding of its role in the war which has balanced our previous understanding which has been based on German sources. ...This book ...deals with the Japanese development of a naval air force. ...Although the book is clearly written and structured in a logical way it does not say much more than one would get on a Pacific War Internet site. It traces how Japan developed naval aircraft which in 1942 were able to outperform allied aircraft but which became quickly obsolete and were shot out of the skies with ease from 1943 onwards. It also describes the failure of Japan to coordinate its army and naval aviation programs and the failure to train enough pilots to deal with losses suffered during the initial campaigns....

When I ordered this text, I wasn't looking closely enough at when it was published: 1992, well before the EMT-B curriculum update. It's not that the information is not valid or valuable, but as a primary tool for instructors of the current curriculum, it is simply out of date.

The sentence up their describes it all. To many people try to play them bad when they are actually the weakest technos..

Telford's treatment of the theology of Mark's gospel follows an expected pattern - introduction, theology, place in canon, relevance for today - but seems to entirely miss the point of the series of books of which this one is a part.

Telford's style and format are excellent. He constantly moves in linear progression from one thought to the next, building his arugments and then summarizing where he has just taken the reader before tranisitioning to the next topic. By far he has done a much better job of maintaining focus and coherency than many other writings in this series. And for this reason he gets two stars and not one.

Professor Telford seems to exemplify what Kierkergaard wrote concerning the biblical scholars of his day - that most scholarship is an attempt not to know and understand the NT more intimately but instead to put more and more padding between it and oneself. Telford seems to make all the right arugments concerning Mark's composition, theology and place in the canon and yet seems so far from the message that Mark has to give. It is as if Telford were constructing an enormous jigsaw puzzle but, when completed, didn't care for the picture it created.

Telford's overriding thurst is that Mark's gospel was written to combat what the author saw as errant christologies by replacing it with a Son of God Christology. The use of the secret motif, the debate with the Jewish opponents, and the disciples inability are all supposed to point to this supreme center.

However, I find Telford's construction tedious at best. Assuming that literary criticism and redactional methods (among other tools) enable historical truth, he makes assumptions that I find hard to maintain. The confidence he places in viewing so much of Mark through his christological lens, for example, is found wanting when he makes virtually no effort to explain his preponderance for assuming not only the existence of Q - the hypothetical source that he admits is hypothetical - but also its exact content to the extent that it can be compared with Mark's final product. Furthermore, his insistence on "the historical Jesus" over and against the evangelist's presentation comes across as veiled smugness that anyone would believe such mythic nonsense.

In reality, it is not hard to see why Telford has so little interest is Jesus - historical or otherwise. His specialty is in Christian Origins and he treats the whole of this book as though he were writing the history of the early church. It is utterly apparent that Telford has a strong inclination toward seeing not only a competing Jewish/Gentile Christianity (no doubt reminsicent of Bauer's theory) but to a clash of nearly every early Christian movement with another. His treatment on Mark in the canon is no less than a thorough look at every book in the NT (with little real interest in comparing it with Mark) and how they all compete with one another. Telford is doing Christian Origins in this book!

Finally, his treatment on Mark's relevance for today is laughable. On staff with a church I find his input completely useless. In fact, he hardly refers to the church at all, maintaining that since Mark was written in such an alien environment it has little bearing on today's world. Moving on to the secular world he does little more than ask questions and provide no answer. Does Mark promote or denigrate women? Well, we don't know. Does Mark promote anti-Semitism? Well, who's to say? Does Mark promote non-violent resistance? Too hard to tell. It is clear that Telford has no interest in Mark's message at all apart from what it can tell him about the schematization of early Christianity.

In the end it is clear that the academy's insights to church documents provide little in the way of help to the church itself when the academy is indifferent (or hostile) to the message of the church. As should be clear, I would not suggest this book and will only keep it to have a complete collection of the New Testament Theology series which as otherwise proved very good overall so far.