This might have been two fairly good books. However the two halves do not fit together well.

The first section consists of simple drawings, each with a breif explanation of a key aspect of ADHD. This seems pitched at a younger child. The second section is mostly words--it has some fairly useful strategies that studen with AD/HD might use to help cope with inattention and impulsive tendencies.

A student old enough to understand the second section might find the first part too childish. A child who liked the pictures in the first part might not have be ble to implement the self-monitoring strategies in the second half.

Carol E. Watkins, M.D.

Most technothrillers seem like throwback to the cold war in their portrayal of stalwart American servicemen (without a hint of any dissent) and their problem-free hardware up against the fractured - almost medeival - horde of the Warsaw pact military. "The Gold Crew" in which the crew of an American ballistic missile submarine comes apart and brings the world to the brink of nuclear war, is a different anachronism - when we thought we were losing the cold war and our pretensions of freedom were being undermined by a dissent that argued against the costs of our hostility to the Russians.

The title "The Gold Crew" refers to the navy's system of having rotating crews on-board missile subs - the subs can endure prolonged duty better than the men who run it; to ensure that a submarine remains ready for sea (and for launching its missiles) for the longest period, missile subs return for patrol only to switch crews - blue crew for gold and vica versa. The gold crew gets the lucky (or unlucky) assignment of participating in an extended wargame involving a few missiles with unarmed warheads. The need for constant readiness requires that some of the missiles remained tipped with armed warheads, but the gold crew is the best and nobody imagines that the crew is particularly vulnerable to stress. In this case, it comes down to bad paint - fumes that put the men off their axes and sufficiently diminish their ability to tell reality from wargame inspired fantasy.

I read "The Gold crew" about the same time that "Red Storm Rising" appeared - and "Gold" seemed prefigured to destroy the myth of seamless, push-button techno-warfare that Tom Clancy's books created, almost as soon as they were really created. Unfortunately, it takes more than bad technology to make good charachters, and none in "Gold" really stand out. Author Scortia realized that the whole charachters of other books were too unbeleivable, but failed to realize that even dissassembled chartachters don't a compelling novel make. Once bad paint fumes cause the crew to become undone, and the captain has begun to convince them that war has actually begun , the crew doesn't try to put itslef together. There's something frightening in the way that Scortia's crew moves with the listless way of men who have actually seen WWIII, but he doesn't capitalize on it enough.

Still a worthy effort - and better than the by-the-numbers TV movie based on it (With Robert Conrad, David Soul and Sam Waterston)

I think this was a pretty good book, plain and simple.

This book contains numerous wonderful craft ideas for gift giving -- with colored pictures of many. I, myself, found the directions somewhat sketchy for someone who had not previously tried the respective crafts. However, they would still spark the imagination and fill one with ideas of things to make-- whether for gift giving or for oneself.

The excellent figures and concise text make this book very easy to learn from. Best used to gain a general overview of human anatomy, as many detailed strucutures are not examined thouroughly. Prepares the reader for further study of subjects presented.

This second edition is just as full of typos as the first, an average of 1/page, from misuse of "it's" to alternation of the spelling of Monod (Monad), to slipping the superscript so 10^5 becomes 105. The illustrations are fine and clear, and subject to the same mispelling.
The author is with the USGeological Survey, which at least used to be a paragon of critical editing, and one had hoped for better proofing in this expansion of the widely used and acclaimed text. A book at this price that stands to be a long-lived authority should have received better.
The expansion is welcome, since geomicrobiology is advancing so fast that the first edition was already out of date. Much of the expansion is given to petroleum hydrocarbons (with a couple of pages on MTBE) and chlorinated solvents, some of which has again become dated since the second edition, already, some of which appears catering to school classes.
Some of the more mysterious questions of geomicrobiology are still avoided (e.g. how do microbes get into clayey deposits where pores are smaller than average bugs and pore throats are much smaller? did individuals get buried with the sediment and adapt to survive millions of years in virtual dormancy?). And Chapelle cannot quite bring himself to adopt the new divisions of Archaea and Bacteria, using the term bacteria to refer to both, in the old style, although he acknowledges the newer thinking.
Unfortunately, in such a small specialty, the existence of an authoritative edition discourages challengers, and we will no doubt wait another or ten years for another geomicrobiology text.
If you are thinking about this book as a reference, rather than a required text, you might look instead at the American Society for Microbiology's Manual of Environmental Microbiology, ed. Hurst, 1997, ASM Press. This is a collection of articles by 90 or so microbiologists that you can probably get used, is 900 p with considerably more breadth and depth than Chapelle, and is a bibliophile's delight. Chapelle has a section in Envir Microbio, which seems to be typo-free.
Envir Microbio also contains, for instance in a section on landfill processes, relatively extensive material on fermentation, which gets about a paragraph in Chapelle's book. Fermentation is very important in groundwater bioremediation, but typically gets short shrift because it is complicated and inefficient, and hard to track because it does not consume electron acceptors, and many of its products (typically acids) do not show up in traditional chemical analyses. Landfill engineers know a lot more about fermentation than geomicrobiologists.
Chapelle is also disappointing in not having stretched this edition to cover the budding discipline of isotopic fractionation in documenting microbial attenuation processes. To be sure, most of the published work using GC IRMS to separate and measure isotope ratios of individual organic compounds post-dates this second edition, but he must have been aware of these developments. He mentions some traditional isotopes to evidence evolution of some systems.

Chapelle's index is also skimpy. No page reference, for instance, for iron reducing bacteria, although he discusses them at some length, mentioning Geobacter chapelleii, named, deservedly, after himself.
But no scientific book goes as far as we would like down our special interests. Science literature is a work in progress, not a bible, and it is silly to expect The Book of Geomicrobiology & Geochemistry. I am not sending my Chapelle back.

This book is a good history of what has happened in emerging markets financing until 1995. It deals in depth with the Brady bonds and their origins and valuation. It also gives an introduction to the methodology that was subsequently used in the Brady bond retirements. From this perspective, it is very useful.

However, there is very little in the sense of a concrete future of the financial environment around the world. It precedes the 1997 and 1998 crises, which makes the warnings in the book interesting if not useful. I wish the authors would update it to include more recent developments, which would make it much more readable and interesting. As it is, it is more history than finance.

Project 64 is an all around good book if you're interested in learning just about everything you ever wanted to know about the MP5. However, it does have its downsides. For example, the author, at points, severely over dramatizes, read "[The MP5] vanquishes evil from the dark beyond." This, coupled give with the fact that the author also gives us a physics lesson (he explains how guns work, which later becomes relevant, but still it could've been avoided) kept the book from getting a 5 star rating, but I deducted another point because my taste and his writing style disagree, being a writer myself, I view his style as juvenile, it does a great job of informing, but still, I've seen better from 8th graders (just too many lists of things rhetoric, at best and he keeps referring to himself as "the author" it probably is appropriate, but it bugs the heck out of me). Once again an all-around good book, albeit a few bad points. It is however the best that is available in my opinion, if you want to learn about the Heckler & Kock MP5, read this book.

18 different dinosaurs from land, sea and air are depicted on 1and 2 page spreads in this book. Short info-bytes keep up one'sinterest in the marvelous creatures. The drawing instructions, however, are lacking in detail. Each dino has 2 or 3 step instructions consisting mostly of ovals and other basic shapes. How to reach the finished product they show at the bottome of the page is left rather mysterious. More instruction on each dino's peculiarities, and on drawing techniques such as shading and texture would have made this book more complete. It can be, however, a pleasant introduction to dinos. The older and more artistic child, may be able to reproduce the final drawings without extra instruction.

"I HATE CAMPING" BY P.J. PETERSEN IS A VERY FUNNY BOOK ABOUT A BOY NAMED DAN THAT IS FORCED TO GO CAMPING WITH HIS MOMS BOYFRIEND AND HIS TWO KIDS, RAYMOND AND KIM. THIS IS A VERY FUNNY BOOK BECAUSE THE CHARACTERS ARE FUNNY AND ALWAYS DOING SOMETHING STUPID LIKE WHEN RAYMOND AND DAN ARE TRYING TO SET UP THIER TENT BUT THEY CAN'T DO IT AND FINALLY RAYMOND GETS SO FRUSTRATED HE JUST WALKS OFF. OR WHEN DAN GOT MAD AT RAYMOND SO HE TIPS THE CANOE OVER SO RAYMOND FALLS IN THE FREEZING LAKE. ANOTHER THING IS WHEN RAYMOND IS GETTING CHASED BY A DOG BUT HE THINKS IT IS A MONSTER, SO HE'S SCREAMING HIS HEAD OFF AND EVERYONE WAKES UP WONDERING WHAT'S GOING ON. IT IS A VERY FUNNY BOOK BECAUSE THE CHARACTERS ARE SO DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER, SO THEY ARE ALWAYS FIGHTING. THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT A GOOD BOOK.