Hmmm. I was looking for a worthwhile book offering tips, jigs, and general routing knowledge. Not here. First, the book is British. Not a bad thing if you're British, but I was hoping to read about American products and practices. Second, what's here is just flat out weak. I'm being generous by giving it 2 stars.

This book has an obsessive fixation on armor. It is actually very annoying, not to mention quite strange. What is the deal with all of Anthony Briant's book and this fixation on armor? Jeeez! It goes into way too much detail about the armor (every name for every little strap and hook) and is just way more than the layperson needs to know when trying to understand the samurai. I can't even read through it because it's so mundane. There is so much more that one needs to understand about the samurai besides their armor, and this book does little to remedy that. What little discussion there is of the other apsects of the samurai's lives and training is useful, but it is only a small part of the book. The title of this book should be changed to "Armor of the Samurai".

I would definitely recommend passing on this one. The book's 6 degrees are not well defined and leave you guessing what the point is. There is an over use of metaphors, that fail to make any impact, and are quirky at times. If you are looking for corporate secrets of success look somewhere else. It provides little more than a motivational pep talk.

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.

I used this book to go througth the game sucessfully, but it wasn't entirely accurrate, especially on the part where Booster and his buddies open the cutains- there's no specific one- it's totally random! Also it claims that "ALL SECRETS" are revealled, but I discovered several items that weren't listed at all. Because it was unauthorized, there was no way of checking whether all secrets really were revealled. Well they weren't. There was a VERY useful badge that I found that wasn't listed at all in the book. The purpose of a guide is defeated if it ignores certain info. I'd recommend an offical guide so there are guareneed to be no mistakes.

I love Christopher Marlowe, and I am happy that this play did not discourage me from reading his "Dido Queen of Carthage," "Faustus," "Edward II," or "Massacre At Paris." In my opinion, "1 Tamburlaine" and "2 Tamburlaine" are interesting studies at best. I feel that too much of Marlowe's genious takes a back seat to bad humour. Furthermore, Tamburlaine himself lacks the malignant charm of Faustus. He also does not play on our sympathy like Edward II. Nor does he have chilling passages like Guise. The only possible reason I would give for reading this is that it was Marlowe's first effort. Also, the bad humour allows us to see the mentally disturbed side of Marlowe. My best advice to anyone who reads this is don't let this discourage you from reading his great works like "Dido Queen of Carthage," "Faustus," "Massacre At Paris," or "Edwatd II."

It is very disappointing that the only publication available on the 'Zanzibari Revolution' is inaccurate and extremely bias. I belive i am accurate to say that the author's insights and intepretation mocks the many who lived and experienced the revolution in 1964.

A glance through the text would reveal the need for further research. The author made repeated mistakes on the presidents year of assasination. It is common knowledge that Sheik Abeid Amani Karume was assassinated in 1972 and not 1971.

i await a publication which is non bias and insightful to the Zanzibari Revolution.

If these are Cthulhu's heirs I contest the will. This was summarilly the worst expression of Lovecratf's weird fantast genre. The imbecilic overtones and dishwater plots reflect more the 1980's "Nightmare on Elm street" style of teenie slasher films far closer than any resemblance of the erudite and late Mr. Lovecraft.

It is a sheer marvel that these works could be published under the aegis of the continuation of Lovecraft's deeply intricate world and mythology. The book is an insult, it demeans use even as liner for a parakeet cage.

This is volume 4 from Chaosium's series of Cthulhu Mythos fiction. The Cthulhu Mythos was created by H.P. Lovecraft in a series of short stories published in the 1920's and 30's. In this mythology, the earth was previously inhabited by alien, "godlike" entities who will return "when the stars are right". Many writers have added to the underlying mythology since Lovecraft's death including Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley. This book contains little that is of the quality you'd find from those authors. This volume contains 16 new works of fiction & 2 stories from the 60's, one by Hugh B. Cave and one by Ramsey Campbell. These two older stories were the only ones I enjoyed very much. Many of the rest were extremely amateur. You can find on the WWW short stories of equal quality that will cost you nothing. Overall, not a book I would recomend.

I bought this book expecting the definitive guide to sausages. Not. This is a survey of sausages the world around - what they are made of, casings and who makes them. I confess I didn't need to hear about the guy in Thailand making sausages on his little farm.

Also included is a host of sausage food recipes which I just scanned. They looked light weight (like the rest of the book) and nothing caught my eye.

What's not in this book? Any useful information on making or cooking sausages. "Spice to taste". Never a useful hint on the typical ratio of spices for various sausages. What good is a sausage recipe without at least guidance on spicing?

This book is only useful for answering questions like "What's in blood sausage?" and nothing in the way of "how do you ....".

Basically it's not a cookbook - it's a coffee table book without pictures.

It's presumptuous for this book to call itself the "only complete guide" to sausage. True, it has encyclopedic descriptions of every ethnic sausage known to man, BUT doesn't give all the recipes. I also found the book to be slanted towards the British Isles in content and terminology. And the last straw, it contains no American sources for sausage-making supplies. Had I viewed it in a bookstore, I would never have purchased it. Rytek Kutas' book is the best!

What a tremendous disappointment.
This book is generally held to be the classic eye anatomy text. Yet it is riddled with mistake after mistake. I remain unconvinced that there was any attempt in editing this text.

Wolff's draws heavily on Hogan and Alverado for its histology, indeed it is more or less a paraphrase. Yet in certain places eg the chapter on the Lens, a diagram taken from Hogan's is referenced as taken from "The HISTORY of the eye"!!!

While the headings provide a good outline of the chapter, the text itself is written in poor English, riddled with mistakes and generally unsuitable for gaining a good understanding of the anatomy of the eye.

I sure there must be other alternatives available for those interested in understanding the anatomy of the eye.

This book is widely regarded as the best text for studying ocular anatomy. However many students of this text find it terribly flawed.

The book is poorly written with many contradictions within itself, a prime example being the structure of iridial blood vessels.

The english is poor leading to ambiguity in many sections. The material is presented in a disjointed fashion with emphasis on presenting different and controversial research views while missing the key point at times.

The sections on microscopic anatomy are basically summarised from the text "Histology of the Human Eye" by Hogan, Alvarado and Weddel which remains a MUCH better written book. To gain a good understanding, Hogan must be read along with Wolff. Wolff manages to completely contradict Hogan in places...while this may be because Hogan is old (written in 1971) one cannot help but question whether Wolff is correct, seeing mistakes in it are so common. A large proportion of Wolff's pictures are from Hogan. It is a real shame that Hogan is out of print.

To gain an understanding of each topic it is advisable to first read the section in a smaller book such as the one by Snell and Lemp, rather than wading blindly through Wolff.

References to diagrams are often misreferenced ie they point to the wrong diagram which is extremely frustrating. A lot of space is wasted with references to authors - numbers in superscript would have shrunk the book considerably.

On the whole this reader gets the impression that the book has been written by several authors, none of whom have come to a general consensus about the material, and all of whom seem to be absent-minded professors revelling in the ambiguity they have masterfully created.