This is the kind of book you can offer to any delicate person (such as your mother in law). Be sure she will say nice things about you after this. The book is the archetype for coffee table book. It will inspire you to go and visit Vatican palace and churches. You will appreciate so much to "read" (mainly pictures) it if you visited the place itself. Buy this book if you plan to visit Roma; don't bring the book with you (HEAVY). Read it in bed when you come back and try to recover from jet lag.

The paintings in this book are incredible. The collection ranges from the years 1000 to the mid 1800s and includes words from Daddi to Michelangelo and Raphael to Crosato. Oils, Frescos and incredible color! I have enjoyed reading this as much as looking at the beautiful artwork.

This book could have earned a 4.5 stars in my rating system. Overall, it is a practical guideline for beginning/intermediate painters who may have just started to paint out-of-doors. My review targets these groups of readers and their presumed interests in purchasing/reading this book.

Pros:

1) The book has VERY PRACTICAL sections on material, tools, gears, etc... to get you "out of the house" to go painting. The information is available for both watercolorists and "oilists" ("oil-ists", OK, so I made up this word!) I myself find these sections particularly clear and helpful, especially for those who have already invested quite a bit in the facility to paint in-doors, as spending more money in extra tools for painting out-of-doors might become a burden. The accurate information provided in the book is certainly a big help to readers.

2) The book is well-organized and easy to read. The author covers discussion on colors, composition, then moves on to demonstrating painting plein-air in watercolors and oils. Each demo is shown step-by-step with somewhat in-depth discussion on color choices and art maneuver in each step.

3) The book also covers other issues, such as the use of multiple photos to create a painting, conversion of oil to water colors and vice versa, the recreation of paintings in the studio based on small paintings done on location, painting from memory, etc.

4) As I mentioned above, the STRONGEST point of the book, in my opinion, is that it covers the very practical aspects of this genre, in order to prepare the readers to "get out and paint" and perhaps achieve certain progresses as starters. I also appreciate the efforts of the author in sharing with the readers some of his valuable tips in painting out-of-doors. For instance, to avoid distraction when painting during the winter, one thing to do is to keep your feet warm. The author provides some very simple and useful solution (no, it is not just wearing warm boots), which must have come from his years of painting out-of-doors. "What solution", you ask? Well, it is for me to know (since I read it), and for you to find out! (It is all in there.)

Cons:

These are not really "cons", but rather my opinions of things that may have made this book a "better" one (perhaps).

1) I myself find the demos are a bit wordy in explaining color choices in each step. I did find myself skipping pages when reading the book due to boredom. However, considering the fact that this is NOT the first art book I read, nor am I brand-new to oil painting, it could be a very personal thing. On the other hand, other intermediate/advanced oil painters may feel the same way I did.

2) I do not agree with other comments putting down other authors of plein-air painting in praising this book. Although I agree the author of this book has succeeded in making this book simple and easy to read, I do find some other titles did a rather good job in explaining concepts, principles, theories, and techniques in painting out-of-doors. As a matter of fact, I find in them (other books) certain depths which may be very valuable to advanced plein-air painters. To back my opinion, the author of this book himself recommends "you" (the readers) to resort to those books as well (in the cited references).

Frank LaLumia has succeeded where many authors fail - providing excellent instruction in a concise manner. His own works are inspiring and his command of the various media is impressive, but his greatest strength is that he explains in a page or two concepts that other books mumble on about for entire chapters. I was delighted and inspired by this artist's stunning first book. Keep on writing, Mr. LaLumia!

This is a book that was loosely based on the life of John Wren. In the book Wren is known as West and other names and locations are rather superficially disguised. For instance most of the action takes place in a suburb of Melbourne called Collingwood, which is rendered as Carrinbush in the novel. Wren had a colourful life becoming wealthy by running an illegal gaming operation around the turn of the century. He gained immense wealth and later moved into more legitimate business. He became close to senior church figures in the Catholic Church and the Australian Labour Party.

Hardy the author of this book was a long term member of the Australian Communist Party. His book is a strange mixture of story telling plus an attempt to paint the political affairs of Australia as corrupted by influence and money. Despite his somewhat doctrinal and schematic approach the richness of the material on which the novel is based makes it a fascinating read. It is strongest when Wren was a younger man portraying his rise to power and the sort of society that Australia was around the turn of the century. One senses a strong sympathy for the younger Wren as a working class boy who defied his background and society to claim his place in the sun.

The book is not only interesting as a novel but was part of Australia's history. After it was published Wren's wife took a famous libel action against Hardy which failed. As a result the book achieved folk law status and was made into a mini series.

This is one of the most powerful novels to have come out of Australia. With very little attempt at disguise, it tells the story of an Australian mobster who ruled a network of criminal activity for several decades before the Second World War. It is a brutal story and one that somehow touches on an aspect of Australian history which is hardly ever expressed in print. European Australia has always been a hard land. With communities originally based on convict labour, it seems as though a certain amount of violence came to be taken almost for granted. In a country that long had an oversupply of men, it is perhaps not so surprising that they spent much of their time trying to dominate both the land, its original inhabitants and each other. A sometimes brutal Army Corps looked after convicts for the first fifty years or so. Later, law enforcement was taken over by a police force which has often had to face charges of similar brutality and deep-rooted corruption, up to the present day. Aussie politics has always had a particularly nasty underbelly, and it seems as though social conditions were ripe in the 1920s for the rise of just such a personage as is depicted here.

Frank Hardy had to fight (the mob) hard to get this novel published and once he had succeeded, he had to go to court to defend it against a defamation order. The book's main character, even though he tried hard in later life to attain a position of legitimacy, always found himself caught up in the web of underworld intrigue that he had created. Even so, it is probably true to say that most ordinary people didn't want to know about the activities imputed to a man who was, superficially, a pillar of the community. So Hardy was right to expose the ruthless nature of the beast underlying the ostensibly honest sports promoter and family man. And perhaps all Australia, or those who remember this particular episode (and its ongoing media life through film and television) did well to note what sort of man lay behind the mask.

Australia has taken a long time to come out of this period of its history, when personal might could be displayed almost with impunity, even in public affairs. This book, perhaps neglected today, serves to remind us of the imposing structure of organised crime that Australia has had to grow up with. In addition, it is a fine literary achievement and worthy of being read on that basis alone.

This book has some of the most practical advice I've ever seen for people that have no clue about how to build a home! A very good guide and reference - highly recommended!

"Practical Housebuilding for Practically Anybody" describes the steps needed to build your own home: from the decision to self-buld, the design, permits, construction skills, and understanding the systems (floors, walls, roof, windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical) that make up a house. It contains detail and encouragement for the first-timer and a humorous and enlighting account of the author's own house building for the more experienced. I'm looking in Amazon to replace my worn-out copy.

Overall Vol 5 - Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes & Songs of Songs is an excellent, authoratative and in-depth commentary written in 1991. The text quoted is the New International Version which was translated in 1984. A lot of progress has been made in Biblical archaelogy and scholarship in the last 16 years since the NIV and in the last 9 years since this commentary was compiled. For an in-depth and more current commentary on Proverbs get THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE BOOK OF PROVERBS by Cody Jones (1999). It includes 6 translations of Proverbs in parallel including more recent versions: New Living Translation (1996), New Century (1991) and New Revised Standard (1990). There are many historical drawings and photos to give you a sense of the culture of the time. Also many of the mysteries and riddles of Proverbs are explored with surprising new answers.

This commentary is a must for any Biblical Theologian! Insightful and easy to understand!!!

This book presents most aspects of Quality Engineering in an easy to understand format. Includes many Quality Engineering examples. Highly informative, a must for the CQE exam.

20 years before anyone in the US heard of ISO 9000, Juran proposed the same ideas. He described comprehensive, documented quality management systems that were backed up by performance metrics and quality audits. Juran also pioneered quality circles and teams long before these ideas became cliche.

I find Juran immensely useful in my quality practice. This book remains one the standard works that I keep going back to. Juran's concepts are much more "applied" than "theoretical". Deming's works seem so distant, and esoteric. Juran has been there, done that. And, his methods work!

Young Brandenburg did what few thought to do, and what would have been impossible only a few years later - to interview influential nazis still alive in the late 70's early 80's. The book provides an eye-opening look into the mentality and sensibility that fostered naziism, but the show was not without cost, and the author is almost drawn into the maelstrom of the self-serving dogma of fanaticism, and the insensitivity to the suffering that it produces. In the end, I found myself wondering if it was worth it - to speak firsthand with the leaders of this demented movement provided valuable historical insights - and yet, by pretending to go along with the nazi mentality in order to gain their trust, the author both allows them another venue to promote their caustic dogma, and finds himself befriending some of the most reprehensible emenies of human brotherhood, peace, and dignity - all the while claiming to abhor their agenda while admiring their "courage". The author manifested great personal courage also, if courage means to risk personal danger in the commitment to a cause. But what of moral courage? Brandenburg's quest for truth is rooted in moral courage, and might parallel the courage it truth for many americans to question the warren commission, and look long and hard at the facts supporting a high-level govenment conspiracy and coup. Yet, somehow the moral issues got derailed along the way, although the final act, of actually publishing the book, seems to be in defiance to the tangent, a final-ditch effort at absolution for compromises along the way. The book raises some deep and disturbing issues, while itself being content to deal with the more superficial aspects of the nazi regime. Definitely worth reading, if for nothing other than the human touch of gritty reality that it lends to an almost abstract historical era.

(The numerical rating above is a default setting within Amazon's format. This reviewer does not employ numerical ratings.)

Young Brandenburg, deeply disturbed by the film "Holocaust" on West German TV, set out to learn the truth by interviewing as many former Third Reich officials as he could find. He succeeded to a remarkable degree, gaining the confidence of a number of former Nazi insiders and eliciting their often unregenerate recollections and opinions.

In the course of these fascinating interviews many sensational allegations emerge, involving famous Americans, high Vatican officials, Nazi loot, and secret Nazi organizations, but as little further substantiation is provided beyond the memories of these old Nazis, their self-serving accounts of events must be viewed with some skepticism.

Photos, no sources, no bibliography, index.

Excellent for beginners, but I suggest a more detailed SAS book as a supplement for the more in-depth details.

The simple stuff that is difficult to find in the SAS manuals is right there with a quick example. I almost always try to find my answers here first, and I have pretty good luck. The SAS institute should look over books like this befor releasing their next round of manuals.

This volume is bursting at the seams with Chandler's writings and it is an astonishing value even at the retail price. It even comes wrapped in plastic!!! Alas I do have one complaint, you can buy Double Indemnity on it's own in a seperate volume that is very much in print. The editors at LOA must be aware of this. If so, they must also be aware that "The Blue Dahlia" is no longer in print and has not been since 1976. Wouldn't it have made more since to eliminate "Double Indemnity" since it is readily available in another volume and replace it with "Blue Dahlia"? Couldn't an argument be made that in addition to it's scarcity "The Blue Dahlia" is also a better representation of Chandler's screenwriting talent because it his only produced solo effort and the fact that it garnered him an Oscar nomination?

Bottom line: LOA has redeemed itself for it's blatant lies on the Dust Jacket of "Stories and Early Novels" (see my review "Incomplete and Misleading")By the way, no one has ever explained why they neglected to include Chandler's last complete Marlowe story, "The Pencil".
I will be writing other reviews of Chandler collections undwe the clever title of "The Simple Art of Editing" and let me assure you that they do not hold up as well as this LOA masterpiece.

Contained in this volume are the last four (of seven) Marlowe novels, the Double Indemnity script co-written with Billy Wilder (including lines that were cut), his famous essay on "The Simple Art of Murder", one on "Writers in Hollywood", another titled "Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story", and finally "Notes (very brief, please) on English and American Style". Couple these with thoroughly entertaining and sometimes revealing letters to friends and fans, and you can't miss.

In one of these letters he even discusses fellow hardboiled writer Ross Macdonald's (here called John, as he hadn't changed his name yet) The Moving Target, which cribbed some ideas from The Big Sleep and Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man.

The novels themselves? Classic Chandler - enough said. If you'd like to know why you should expect the best in hardboiled detective fiction, well, read 'em all, or at least one. (If you're planning on that course of action, try the first in the series, The Big Sleep, included in a similar volume called Stories and Early Novels: Pulp Stories/The Big Sleep/Farewell, My Lovely/The High Window.)

Bottom line, this is required reading for anyone who won't read just anything but at the same time doesn't limit themself to Anna Karenina.

In this book, Frank E. Manuel attempts to give the reader an unbiased, historical account of Marx as he really was. We, as a group, were left with the impression of Marx as a self-loathing man on a self-prescribed "heavenly" quest. His rejection of his Jewish heritage colored his dealings with the rest of the world. He spent his life fighting for the liberation of a people that he neither knew nor liked on a personal level. The cost of this quest was his financial freedom, family life and physical health.

Manuel's biography of Marx provides the reader with a gripping account of one of the most fasciniting characters of the 19th century. An overall captivating depiction of his life, work and death. It is well written and we recommend it to anyone studying Marx or his theories.

This is a wonderful reading about Marx the man and his particular brand of "scientific" socialism. It reveals Marx's insecurities, self-loathing, bigotry, and financial failures, as well as his life as essentially an attempt to burry all that in a heavenly vision of a new society, which Marx constantly nurtured through intense intellectual persuites.

This is a portrait of Marx, a humanistic intellectual, as he is revealed in his correspondence with Engels and his actions in a Victorian/Dickensian London. This is a man whose idealism and a feeling of being discriminated against led him eventually to adopt the attitude of suspicion and contempt for almost all human beings, this is Marx-Halevy trying to escape his own roots and ending up planting seeds of communist revolutions in backward, agrarian societies for which he had so much contempt.