For a long time, Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" was considered by and large to be the best mass-market speculative fiction about World War III. Then in 1994, Eric Harry wrote his magnificent "Arc Light," which I went on CNN.com to call the best Cold War novel ever, about accidental war between the U. S. and Russia. What these two authors had in common, though, was not necessarily Russo-phobia. Rather, they were limited to envisioning World War III between the U. S. and another nuclear power capable of destroying the world.

It did not occur to them that the U. S. and Europe might fight World War III against a bunch of little countries united by religion, language, and simple, implacable revulsion towards the modern world. It occured instead to Patricia Anthony. And to think that when I first read this book (before the first paperback edition had been printed), I telephoned Ms. Anthony to chide her for making U. S. tanks too easy to kill in her book.

Even if the factor unifying the Arabs in her book is food insecurity (as a result of global warming making their already arid homelands more or less uninhabitable), she did come up with what wound up being the most accurate prediction of World War III. And by saying that, of course, I do stick my neck out a ways. All right, I admit that AS OF THIS WRITING, we aren't fighting all the Arab countries. The key words in that statement are capitalized.

And I also admit that aliens may never have visited here, or even if they have, may think our predicament so hopeless or our problem-solving abilities so pathetic that they would consider us not worth the effort of saving. Having the good ol' world restored by Mr. Blue for the price of two permanently abducted service members is just a bit intellectually dishonest, and the scene where SACEUR is taken in by a human "psychic" is ludicrous. For her part, Anthony attempts to restore the Victorian consensus that God (wearing the guise of a mysterious alien probe/organism) is clearly interested in human progress. Her thinking about how technology would transform war, however, is visionary even if not capable of being fully realized in a scant eight years. Never fear - the war will last longer than that, though perhaps not quite long enough for everybody's croplands to dry up on their own.

What I like most about Anthony's futuristic (ie. take place at some time in the future) novels is how natural they play. Cold Allies, Cradle Of Splendour and Conscience of the Beagle have a view of the future that is very convincing and this makes the backdrop of each of the stories more interesting and palatable. This in contrast to say.... Dan Simmon's Hyperion where people owned houses that had each room in a different galaxy all joined together by some cosmic work hole. Yeah... interesting.... but the operative word in SF would be Fiction.

In Cold Allies, climatic change has lead to North Africa and the Middle East to completely dry up and all the Islamic countries have banded together and invaded Europe so as to avoid starving to death. The United States is a willing if slightly ineffecvtive ally to the Europeans, having had its economy and population devastated by the same climatic changes which have also put much of the USA under water.

The story revolves around the involvement (or lack of) in this war of a mysterious alien presence. The presence manifests itself as a blue globe and it invariably shows up at the sites of major battles in the European theatre.

The blue globe seems to have a strange attraction to a remotely controlled battle robot (think Mech-Warrior) whose satellite connected controller is so psychically connected to the robot that his persona appears to be felt by the globe through the inanimate workings of the machine.

The story line is part future history, part war drama and part alien mystery. The future history is interesting, the war drama is compelling with rich, complex characters, and the alien mystery is ultimately, well.... mysterious. Chris Carter, producer of the XFiles once said that what made episodes of that show frightening was that they never showed too much detail of the "monster". It was always shrouded in darkness. Anthony treats her aliens in a similar way, never anthropomorphizing them. This is achieved perfectly in her book God's Fires and it possibly a little overdone in Cold Allies, but I enjoyed it a lot none the less.

This is the second Patricia Anthony novel I've read, the first being "Brother Termite". Both novels delve into the UFO arena, with "Cold Allies" touching a upon abductions and mutilations.

"Cold Allies" takes place in the not too distant future and shows us a world at war over the Earth's dwindling recources, but fighting it with conventional weaponry (sometimes using technologically advanced weapons, sometimes using World War I mentality). Throughout this conflict, the enigmatic aliens often appear over the battle fields, their purpose unknown.

Like the unfathonable cattle mutilations and human abductions that are replete in UFOlogy, along with the "Foo-fighter" lore of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Anthony uses these phenomena to draw in the reader, and true to the UFO mystery itself, she gives no answers as to why, nor to what purpose the aliens may have in abducting and/or mutilating the human victims. The reader is left wondering (as was intended), are the aliens allies or are they dispassionate creatures putting us under their microscope?

"Cold Allies" is a fast read (I found it hard to put down), and like "Brother Termite", is a well thought out character-driven novel. If you think UFO's are all hogwash or have not looked into this phenomenon, then I doubt that this novel is for you. However, if you have more than just a passing interest in UFOlogy, you should really enjoy this novel. Between 1 and 10, "Cold Allies" gets a solid 8.

I needed a book to guide me in forming an Illinois LLC after I had done research to determine the pros and cons of the structure. In other words, I needed a good rundown of the potential options for an operating agreement, and I needed clear instruction on the application/filing process.

This book was too generic on operations, and the actual formation of an LLC in Illinois requires one form and a check, but the book's description of the filing process for Illinois was not clear.

I noticed another book which goes through an operating agreement almost clause by clause - it was cheaper, too, but I have forgotten which book that one is. I wish I had bought that one.

This book has a good explanation of the ins and outs of forming an LLC. However, in most cases, you create an LLC by filling the blanks in a state form, and then optionally create an Operating Agreement by filling in the blanks in a sample version included in the book.

The value of this book is in the state-by-state reference and in the sample Operating Agreement (and accompanying explanations). It doesn't tell you much of anything about what else you need to do to start a business or run it, referring you to other books written by the author.

Given the relatively light content, I wouldn't have expected it to be on the high end price range of Nolo's offerings. The book's real value for me was filling in some gaps in Nolo's excellent "Small Business Start-Up Kit for California" by Peri Pakroo.

An excellent intro to LLC's, in a generic sort of way. However, the sample operating agreements leave much to be desired...there are more thorough versions out there. In addition, the differences between the various state laws on LLC's make it necessary that you consult an attorney just to be on the safe side. Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who is thinking about getting into business.

The book is both fascinating and infuriating. I have a few other of Mr. Slide's books, and they are full of useful information, just like this one.

This book has great profiles on a lot of lesser known, but still interesting actors and actresses. Some of the profiles are several pages and are in-depth. Others are a very short page or two. Mr. Slide met more than half of the people profiled in the book. For those people, he greatly comments on how these people treated him. The book also documents their talkie careers, their career decline and their lives before their death.

The book does dish dirt on many prominent silent film people. While some of it is certainly true and deserves to be public record, sometimes he speculates on things like sexual relationships that seem unlikely (Ralph Graves and Mack Sennett!). Mr. Slide apparently finds it hard to believe that older women who live together can do so as friends not have a sexual relationship.

I don't know Mr. Slide, but he really lets his personality show through in this book. For one thing, he does not have a sense of humor. Of the comedians, he only wrote admiringly of Harold Lloyd and Alice Howell. He has very poor opinions of Mabel Normand and John Bunny. He says Bunny's comedy "contains
nothing creative" and "one wonders if audiences ever did laugh at his work." Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, and Raymond Griffith are barely mentioned. Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase are ignored. He talks of Arbuckle as if Roscoe really did rape and murder Virginia Rappe.

Mr Slide seems to remember everyone that made an anti-semetic remark to him. Surely people of this era were just as bigoted toward blacks and other ethnic groups. Yet D.W. Griffith is the only person (remembered by Blanche Sweet) remembered as making a racist remark, and that was before BOAN and INTOLERANCE. (At least he did say in the preface that he decided not to profile Patsy Ruth Miller because of her racist views and he usage of the n-word.

Mr. Slide seems obsessed with determining everyone's sexual orientation, and who had affairs with whom. By the end of the book, you are almost disappointed if a person profiled just married once and didn't sleep with anybody else. In the case of William Haines, J. Warren Kerrigan, Ramon Novarro (only mentioned in the book) and a few others, their sexuality certainly was an important part of their story and certainly affected their careers. After "outing" so many people, I was actually surprised when he said that he had determined that George O'Brien is NOT bisexual.

Surely, just like the general population, silent actors got crotchety in their old age. The best chapters are actually the ones where Slide spent a lot of time with the person, like Jetta Goudal (!) and Blanche Sweet.

Mr. Slide also calls anybody who does not agree with his political views "right-wing". In an otherwise glowing profile on Lloyd, he calls THE CAT'S PAW (1934) "unfortunately right-wing". I'm not a conservative, yet his judgements of
the subjects' political views are unusually harsh.

The most shocking line in the book to me was, "Nowhere is the tragedy of Clarine Seymour's death more pointed than here; if only she might have lived and [Carol] Dempster died, how much better would Griffith have fared in the coming decade." While I agree that Dempster wasn't a very good actress, this is really some bizarre wish.

So anyway, it is a fun, fascinating read. Having said that, Kevin Brownlow's books have better interviews with their subjects, and Eve Golden's GOLDEN IMAGES book has better profiles of obscure silent film stars.

I have gotten quite a bit of flack for my glowing review of Anthony Slide's "Silent Players." Yes, I am a longtime personal friend of the author and, yes, I am mentioned in the acknowledgments. But I would love this book regardless. It is, in my opinion, about time that someone wrote a more personal account of this bygone era. It is, of course, also a dangerous thing to do, as some of the scathing comments below seem to suggest. One especially virulent writer -- who, quite cowardly, chooses to remain anonymous although any insider will immediately recognize the style; the writer is actually mentioned, twice, in Slide's text, albeit obliquely -- questions the author's slighting of such icons as Greta Garbo in favor of forgotten ingenues like Mary Brian, Ruth Clifford and Priscilla Bonner, all of whom were his dear friends. But that is exactly the point of the book: a personal journey through silent films. Several reviewers also take Mr. Slide to task for dismissing the comedic prowess of John Bunny. A negative review of the very, VERY, late Mr. Bunny is controversial in 2003? Yes, "Silent Players" is quite dishy in places but isn't that its charm? Do we need another ponderous and dry Who's Who serving up the same old platitudes? I, for one, do not. And by the way, anonymous Reader from L.A., like most other contributors, Tony Slide was never compensated for his many years as a book reviewer for CLASSIC IMAGES, a magazine much poorer since his withdrawal.

We have always been the first to say that silents is golden. And now there's proof. Anthony Slide's "Silent Players" is an biographical and autobiographical study of 100 silent film actors and actresses. Here, in this chunky compendium with its glorious cover, Slide pays homage to little-known actors and actresses with personal remembrances straight from the giants of yesteryear; quotes have been culled from conversations and previously published sources. Some of the names will be familiar, if only because of legend or a brief transition to talkies . Swanson, Garbo, Keaton, Gish, Fairbanks and Pickford. Then there are those only die-hard film freaks will recognize: Robert Harron, John Bunny, Babe London, Dorothy Mackaill, Lowell Sherman, Jetta Goudal ...names whose faces were introduced to us at 16 frames per second. Slide renounces the reputation of some while restoring fame to others. The profiles are concise and compelling, reminding us that real lives can often be sadder than any Hollywood scenario. The vintage photos remind us that they had faces then. And so we will be silent no longer: "Silent Players" slides into our list one of best reference books around.

Mr. Anthony has went from a good first book in a downhill slide.Ending with the second book and throughout this book the main "heroes" mostly seem to be boy gets boy scenario instead of the usual.Though this may appeal to some,the majority of readers would be more likely to relate to a hero who's after the princess instead of the knight.

This book took me a while to get into. It had been a while since I read the other two books in the series, so I had to re-figure out all the characters. I like the variety of characters in the book. Each new character adds something to the mix. However, some characters are ignored after the first section, which is odd--because they could figure into the rest of the book.

Some of the very enjoyable characters in this book are Marji, Mitchell & Davis (the cowboys), Ellie (the chimp), Glinda, and the fairy. The usual characters are still interesting, but I felt like the whole "who does he really love" thing was getting old after a while.

All the characters come to face their greatest fears. Grace finds out who her parents really are (now THAT'S a plot twist I didn't see coming). Travis still has to figure out where he belongs, but at least he is not as wimpy in this book as in others. Aryn has many things to figure out in this book, and it isn't quite known if she does figure them out.

This book is about defeating evil, in its many forms. Duratek and the Seekers play prominently in this book. Some interesting clues are given throughout the book to lead readers to other things. I call this book a placeholder because while it does advance the series, it still seems that there is something larger on the horizon, and this is just a prelude.

I would recommend this book.

I guess I'm one of the few people who is enjoying this series more with each book. I liked this book just as much as the first two. I like the fact that the author is able to juggle a number of subplots and keep them all interesting, whether they're occurring on Earth involving the Seekers and Duratek, or on the alternate world named Eldh involving gods, myths and magic.

I have no problem with the increasing number of characters in the book, in fact I think it adds to the story since each character brings something unique into the mix. Mr. Anthony has managed to give us some essential scenes with each of the characters, revealing some of their motivations and secrets, making them that much more real. All are essential to the plot. It's interesting to see how the friendships are growing and the romantic interests are weaving together. In each book, the characters have been evolving and deepening. Some reviewers seem to have a problem with the way some of the relationships appear to be developing, but to me, the characters have become so familiar and so real that their yearnings and growing awareness are all the more poignant. How can you not wish them well?

In this third book of the series, Travis and Grace return to Earth to seek medical care for the gravely wounded knight, Beltan. However, while there, the evil Duratek Corporation (who are planning to rape the ecological resources of the world Eldh) have managed to locate them due to the betrayal of a friend, have captured Beltan, and plan to conduct medical experiments on him. Travis and Grace are forced to turn to the Seekers for assistance. Meanwhile, back on Eldh, Melia, Falken and the others travel to the fabled city of Tarras to find out who is killing the New Gods. Grace and Travis are finally forced to come to terms with the shadows of their pasts that have haunted them all of their lives. This, of course, is a great simplification of the plot, which has many more twists and turns, trials and tribulations. It is a fast-moving, interesting, and enjoyable story, and I for one am looking forward to Book Four.

The Harrison family move into their new house and James wants the attic turned into his bedroom but whilst they are cleaning out the attic they find a bottle with a message in and they accidentally smash it and what they don't know is that a spirit is released.After this there is lots of messages being left around.No one believed james and no one ever did until things got too bad and they all wish they had believed him. It is written by Penelope Lively who is a very affective author.

The ghost of Thomas Kempe is a spooky story written by penelope lively. The Harrison family have strange things going on in their new house. Messages are being left in places in werid writting and odd things have been happening. James Harrison is sure there's a ghost haunting the house but no-one will beive him until things start to get too out of hands........ This book makes a good read and is suitable for anyone who is willing to sit down and get engrossed into solving the mystery of the Harrisons house.

The Ghost of Thomas Kempe is a very good story of which the Harrison family move from their old house to a new Countryside Cottage but they dont knpw that a 300 year old bloke is trying to haunt them. The family recieved letters and messages as if the GHOST was trying to haunt them.The atmospheric detail and Archaic language used,was to a good effect. The book was quite good but the ending was not very well thought out!

I agree with the other reviewers, but they never really read the title of the book if they are so upset with the book. It is a beginners book. Nothing more, nothing less. What I find handy about this book that you need not search every where for information. Just grab this book and find out what you need to know of the basics. It shows you with great graphic detail how to do it and what the results are.
I am one of those people who just love to get everything handed to them through one simple portal, that's what this book does.
If you want more in depth information look at one of the other books.
Looking on the internet or technet or what ever else, costs lots of time for simple things and just does not

The book does an excellent job of what it was intended to do - give an introduction and provide solid foundation of knowledge about Microsoft SharePoint Server. Yes, it is true that if you have a computer on your hip 24x7, you can probably find a lot of this same info by digging through help files, white papers and various web sites. That does not help someone who wants it in book format and likes the porability of a book, or for someone who actually likes to read a printed version. Anyway, I liked the book, and it gave me what I needed at the time. I've bought more advanced books which are also good, but they skip a lot of the introductory stuff which is nice for beginners to have available.

This is a basic, introductory book, but it does a better job explaining the basics and how to install the software than most of the other books, including Que's Using Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server. It was the only book that explained how to use the proxy configuration utility to make Sharepoint available over the net (the Que book didn't cover this detail).

It's quite obvious that the authors are out to make a fast buck. To write a trivia quiz book, they merely copied trivia factoids from various personal Web sites without doing any research to determine if they were actually true. As a result, over 100 of the questions were either disqualified from the contest or required hints from the authors on the publisher's Web site. The photo quizzes contained small, grainy, black & white photos that they obviously ... from various Web sites without permission. Also, I'm willing to bet that the authors weren't given permission to publish a photo from the James Bond movie "From Russia With Love." This is probably true for all of the other TV and movie photos as well. As someone who has collected trivia for many years and has amassed a collection of hundreds of trivia books, I have grown an appreciation for reputable authors who research their data before publishing it. Ronald Smolin and Anthony Notaro do not fall into that category. If you are considering buying this book, DON'T! If you have already bought it, please do what I did -- THROW IT IN THE TRASH CAN!

Since there are so many questions, naturally many of them are uninteresting. On the other hand, the book "Quizzing" which has less questions was a much better read.

Simply put- this book is the best. I bought it for myself, and have not yet put it down. I bring it to work, or leave it around the house- and someone will pick it up. Its trivia on a wide range of knowledge- general, science, sports, arts, and alot more. Usually- since I am an insomniac- I am online late trying to look up some answers. Even though some people tell me I am a trivia addict- its not a bad thing. If you are one- get this book!

This book is mildly amusing with its odd cast of characters and plot mixtures. Among other things it contains humans, human/plant hybrids, ant people, good wizards, bad wizards, spaceships, magic castles, time warps, romance, etc. Spring (the human heroine) is a strong protagonist, but Herb is a bit wimpy as the half-human, half-plant hero. Read it just for fun, but don't expect too much. For a really intense read about green people, I recommend MISTWALKER by Denise Lopes Heald.

An interesting and sometimes humorous novel. Herb Moss and Spring go through a series of adventures as they try to elude an evil magician. The story tends to sidetrack into various fairy tales, and wanders a bit getting to the climax. A kidnapped maiden, dragons, and various ETs all add to the plot. The story becomes a bit corny at points, and gives a plant's eye view of life - those flowers you pick may be someone's children. Overall, it is good light fiction.

If you're making up a best ten list this year, you'll need only nine more.

Want to know why the US and other countries have had such up-and-down economic problems for the last several decades? You can thank Paul Samuelson and other incompetent buffoons like him (I don't mind buffoons that much, but incompetent ones are just too much). Samuelson and his ilk operated on the false assumption that mathematics actually describes economic activity. Once you believe this, the next logical step (in Wacky World, at least) is to have math-oriented "economists" (most of whom are failed wannabe mathematicians, anyway) plan and run the economy.
Fortunately, free markets are stable; they only destabilize when the government intervenes. No neo-classical "economist" understands this, and mathematicians certainly don't (see review
below). The only economic school that describes the real world
is the Austrian school; they are of course are taught in very, very few colleges. Government interference has never worked, and it
never will. And Samuelson got a Nobel Prize? You might as well give me one, too.

When I was required to take econ as undergrad physics student and used this text, the professor made a big deal of econ students not understanding 'curves', by which assertion he implicitly meant the plotting of y=f(x) when f is smooth and invertible. Well the professor didn't understand 'curves' at a higher level: he failed to note that nearly all the 'curves' presented in the text were only 'cartoons', mere mental constructions not based on real data, and agreeing with no real data (excepting corn flakes sales in British supermarkets, if Paul Ormerod is correct). The idea of 'utility' is a useless fabrication that has no basis in empirical data. Those mental constructions represent instead the expectations of neo-classical economic theory, the religion of the IMF, World Bank, and a host of other neo-classically-educated economists. To be specific, the price-demand, price-supply 'curves' touted in the text do not exist in reality and also not in theory: e.g., see Osborne's book Finance and the Stock Market from a Physicist's Perspective for the explanation why. See also the economists' own proof that aggregate price-supply demand-suppy curves 'can be anything' even if individual supply-demand curves would behave as they expect! Furthermore, no real market is approximately in equilibrium, all real markets are examples of far from equilibrium systems. Unregulated free markets are unstable. None of this is hinted at in the text, where equilibrium and stability are implicitly and unfairly assumed without warning the unsuspecting reader. Worse, in the introductory chapter Samuelson uses a hokey, irrelevant pictorial argument to try to convince both himself and the reader that physics is as unscientific as neo-classical econ theory. For good information about econ theory, see the following books: Ormerod's The Death of Economics, Mirowski's More Heat than light, and Osborne's book. For those with enough intellectual stamina, there is also Giovanni Dosi's Innovation, Organization, and Economic Dynamics, a collection of essays that also points out that the emperor wears no clothes and tries to find a reliable ruler to replace His Uselessness. Instead of propagating misleading mythology it's now time for economists to face the facts and explain why, after convincing governments to follow their advice and deregulate, we face one big financial instability after the other: LTCM, Argentina, Enron, .... .

As text or as literature, this book is terribly written. Unsystematic, like a hodgepodge of review articles. Samuelson has noted that economists (like Galbraith) who write too well may be suspect by other economists, but this is an unfortunate viewpoint. The best writing is done by the clearest thinkers: Einstein (in both German and English), Feynman, V.I. Arnol'd, and Fischer Black are examples. Bad writing, in contrast, often reflects sloppy thinking. In short, this text could have been cut to half it's size, to the benefit of the reader who wants to understand what Samuelson has to say.

For the story of how neo-classical econ won out academically, see Mirowski's 'Machine Dreams'.

This book is very famed in China.
The reader of the book is not college student but postgraduate.
The publisher in China have translated and published the textbook for above 4 times, The lasted one in 16th edition.

i am a editor.
who can help me that i want to know the top 10 or 20 business textbook in the world? it's including Economics?

liuhui@wise-link.com

This book is a typical example of what one of its subjects (Gurdjieff) would have described as armchair philosophy, i.e. someone with no practical experience of what they're writing about dreams up an idea in the comfort of their own home, creates an extremely shallow thesis and finds "victims" to fit into it, be they they Jesus Christ, Gurdjieff or Jim Jones.
The chapter on Gurdjieff in particular is utterly awful, using the cheap journalistic trick of taking things so wildly out of context that Storr presents a case for Gurdjieff being almost the opposite of what he was. An in-depth study of the wide range of literature about Gurdjieff would not only counter Storr's rather feeble arguments, but utterly decimate them. Storr simply does not understand Gurdjieff. This is not an opinion based on reading, but on practical experience of Gurdjieff's methods as taught by some of Gurdjieff's former pupils, now extremely elderly and still displaying a perspicacity, intelligence and understanding which, in no small part, has been developed as a result of their contact with Gurdjieff when young.

Anthony Storr examines the lives of an odd assortment of nine "gurus" (with reference to others along the way): Jones, Koresh, Gurdjieff, Rajneesh, Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Freud, Loyola, and Jesus. He argues that gurus tends to share a number of characteristics, he argues: isolation as children, mental distress followed by "revelation," intolerance of criticism, elitism, hatred of rules, love of speaking and travel, charisma, narcisism, and a delusional worldview. Other religious leaders who fit this pattern -- Buddha, Krishnamurti, Mohammed, Hong Xiuquan -- do come to mind. But Storr does not clearly list all these characteristics in one place or clarify which are necessary. This makes his argument fuzzy around the edges.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the account of the lives of individual gurus. Gurdjieff believed the moon controlled human action: he was literally a "lunatic." Jung and Freud didn't entirely fit Storr's profile, but his take on them was fair enough, I think.

Storr's discussion of my guru, Jesus, seemed contrived. He did not seem too familiar with primary sources, but appeared to filter perception through modern skeptics, respected (Sanders) and dubious (A.N. Wilson). (Nothing from good opposing opinions like N.T. Wright.) Neglect of primary documents may be what Storr calls "science" (a word of which he is fond), but is not good historical method. Thus, he quoted a couple Gospel passages (one very misleadingly) to argue that Jesus was hostile to families. But the Gospels show Jesus was obedient to his parents as a child, had frequent contact with mother and siblings during his ministry (even helping Mom at a wedding) and took thought for her during his death. And Jesus' disciples married. Storr ignores all that: he has a theory to prove. It is plausible, (though not, in my view, reasonable) to dismiss the Gospels as unreliable. But to conjecture about Jesus' psychological state based on second-hand "facts" that are explicitly denied by the primary documents -- that's not scholarship, it's witch-doctory.

Storr takes a similarly tunnel-visioned approach to other aspects of the Jesus question. He lamely ascribes the power of the Gospels to their position in the Western tradition. If that were so, why do many non-Westerners seem to agree with Lin Yutang, the Chinese scholar who anthologized Chinese and Indian literature, and concluded at the end of his life that "no one has ever taught as Jesus?" Storr misses what is most obvious about the Gospels, whether because of over-familiarity, or a pandering, patronizing scientism, I'm not sure. Storr is like a 3rd Grade grammar teacher who corrects the errors of his third graders, William Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky, all with the same confident frown on her face.

Belief in a transcendent calling is delusional, hence a sign of psychic disturbance, only if one is wrong. Confucius believed he had a call from God to preserve the best in Chinese culture and teach China kindness, and that God would preserve his life in the meanwhile. Was he wrong? I would be seriously delusional to see myself as the greatest painter who ever lived. Would Rembrandt? Storr claims to be an agnostic, but he dismisses all evidence for the supernatural without even considering it. He assumes, without argument, that anyone who thinks he has a revelation from God must be deluded, and that miracles are impossible. Then he bases a large part of his diagnosis of the most influential man in history on that assumption. It seems to me for a person claiming to be an agnostic such questions should not be considered settled apart from some mention of the evidence.

The book ends on two more odd notes. First, Storr repeats one of his themes: "morally superior individuals influence others by their private behavior rather than haranguing crowds." Yet the book itself is more a harangue than private behavior. That's all right, were Storr being consistent. Good people have in fact often changed the world for the better by preaching. Secondly, Storr reminds us that "the wish to help is not confined to believers." Of course not. But then, bizarrely, he ends by quoting Nietzche, who despised kind deeds, to support his point.

In the end, this is a difficult book to evaluate. Storr is bright, though not as bright as he obviously thinks, often sympathetic, and appears well-read in psychological literature. I found some of his ideas helpful. But somehow it seems rather tinny. Storr's level of insight is not nearly as deep as C.S.Lewis, (Four Loves and Trasposition are especially relevent), Rene Girard, or Lin Yutang. I suspect the Gnostic science vs. pre-science view from which he works is holding him back. He seems to view people from the outside, as a "scientist," rather than from the inside, as a human being.

Other readers may also find Vishal Mangalwadi's The World of the Gurus interesting.

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man

I do not agree with the other reviewer's comments; I think Starr does quite a thorough analysis of the 'gurus', whom he has chosen from a large scope of times and nations. I agree that it is not very scholarly; and furthermore it has a 'conversating' atmosphere to it. But I personally like it that way. It's clear and intelligible. Why make it seem profound, for the sake of looking more important?

The book has eleven chapters. Anthony Starr describes a couple of gurus, whom he identifies as people who declare themselves the experts of life. Gurddjieff, Rajneeh, Rudolf Steiner, and the two leading psychologists Jung and Freud are among these. It becomes interesting when there's seemingly different people.

Starr has a degree in psychiatry, and he's been a professor at Oxford, a distinguished psychiatrist in the English society, as well as honor members of the Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of Psychiatrists. To deny his achievements and knowledge, would simply be not right.

His writing is flowing. The whole book is like a long story, but definitely not a long and boring story. His writing consists of his presentation of the gurus with references from other writers and his personal comments in between, which I find quite logical.

The book changed my view over prophets and beliefs. Now I know the reasons why we have major religions, and why some are the only figures in religion. I now recognise the other gurus.

It was also interesting to know about the secrets of Jung's psychological sickness at his late age, in addition to how Freud was driven to become the Freud we know of him.

This book is worth reading every single page. It's a good analysis, and a good story.