Patricia Anthony is underrated in general, but this is her most overlooked book. Too bad, because it's THAT GOOD. Although the premise is a simple twist on an old ghost town of sorts, it is sci-fi/specu-fic at its best.

I just discovered Patricia Anthony and boy am I glad! Great characterization and dialogue. Great style that keeps you turning the pages. I hated time away from this book! Then hated that I finished it. The alien Torkus are so deliciously creepy and philosphical. I am so glad I found Happy Policeman. I looked foward to reading Brother Termite and Cold Allies.

It's a locked-room mystery, folks, with all the action taking place inside "the line." Who killed the pink lady? Pastor Jimmy? Foster, the dope-smoking banker? Billy, Loretta's estranged husband? Or maybe she was murdered by the aliens in the UPS truck. The Happy Policeman is the story of police chief DeWitt Dawson's struggle with duty and rebellion, responsibility and truth. Oh yeah . . . and adultry.

One of Anthony's best.

I have just spent the last month revising for my medical exams and have found Bray et al an indespensible component of my study regime.The book presents complex topics in a simple understandable format. I would not hesitate to recommend it to any of my fellow students.It gets a double thumbs up from me!!

Bray et.al is the best physiology text avaliable today. This text clearly presents a range of physiological topics and is well written by the learned staff of the Otago University Physiology Dept. Prof. Bray is to be commended for his concise and accurate editorial style. I found the figures particularly understandable and loved thier minimalistic style. A MUST for every med student and those interested in how the body functions. I look forward to the next edition.

From The Annals of Internal Medicine, January 5, 1999

Audience: Health care providers, including physicians, nurses, and social workers; health care administrators; and health care educators.

Purpose: To improve the quality of partnership processes within the health care system.

Content: This book is divided into five sections. The first section contains conceptual material that is generic to partnerships at all levels. Each of the four subsequent sections deals with partnerships at various levels in the health care system: clinician-patient partnerships, partnerships in health care teams, community health care system partnerships, and educational partnerships. The chapters contain a mix of theoretical discussions and practical examples. The authors come from diverse professional disciplines, geographic centers, and personal backgrounds.

Highlights: Four aspects of the book stand out. First, although many practitioners have expertise in promoting partnerships in a specific area, few have knowledge in all four areas discussed. Second, through the discussions partnerships at different levels, one recognizes the importance of the editors' conceptual framework. Third, the book discusses important topics that are often neglected in similar books. For example, the chapters on spirituality, friends as patients and patients as friends, and guidelines for primary care physician-consultant relationships helped me better understand common but often ignored topics.

Finally, the book includes several innovative programs that a clinician, administrator, or educator could modify for his or her own purpose. The chapters on family systems case consultation and development of an educational consultative service for physicians about whom patients have repeatedly lodged complaints are especially useful.

Limitations: The book has some flaws endemic to an edited volume. Much of the background material on partnerships, their advantages, and the attitude needed to promote them is repetitive. Moreover, because the book is written for a somewhat general audience, some chapters are too basic for readers who are familiar with the field. The chapters on real-world experiences would benefit from more details on the obstacles that innovators faced and overcame. Related reading: Although numerous other books cover specific topics, I know of no other book that surveys partnerships so broadly.

Reviewed by: Robert M. Arnold, MD

This book is a terrific mix of basic pharmacology and lesser known information important for competent prescribing and care. An appendix with basic physiology review is included, which is also helpful. It would be useful to the practicing physician and would be an excellent review source for board exams in pharmacology. Want to learn something? Get this book.

After reading "Flanders" by Patricia Anthony, and loving it, I decided to read another of her books, and "God's Fires" was the one I found at the bookstore. The decision to purchase it is one that I will not regret, for it is a wonderful, and well-written, work of fiction. The year is 1662, and a feeble-minded but good-natured teenager reigns in Portugal, but the Inquisition actually rules. In a remote village strange sights appear, and an "acorn" crashes to earth, leaving two live, and one dead, "creatures". But what exactly are these beings, and what about the other signs and wonders appearing in the area? The Holy Office of the Church will get to the bottom of the mystery, or people will burn. This book shows the fine line between faith and fanaticism, courage and foolishness, and love and lust. The language is all that I had expected from the author of "Flanders", and the pure emotion of this book practically leaps off of the page at you. The Church, and certain clergymen, do not fare well in their portrayal, but then, the Church has much to apologise for concerning the Inquisition. As I said when I reviewed "Flanders", read this book!

A "star" falls from the sky near Quintas in Portugal during the days of the Inquisition and the town is shaken by rumours of miracles and an outbreak of blatant heresy---all of which we folk of the 20th century might instead leap to interpret in terms of a clash between modern science and our own popular UFO mythology, although of course our theologians and politicians would also find plenty to say. Likewise, Quintas becomes the focus of an urgent Holy Office investigation conducted by an incompatible, bickering team of harassed priests and secular lawyers whose views range from the skeptical to the credulous, the politically expedient to the mystical. The mentally retarded, adolescent King Afonso sets up camp near the fallen "acorn", convinced by telepathic dialogue with the damaged space-vessel's failing computer that God is granting him personal revelations about the nature of the universe. While the confused young king shocks the assembled clergy with his Galilean heresies, including a quaint though accurate (according to current astronomical tenets) description of the formation of the solar system, his brother Pedro mounts an efficient political coup and wrests the regency from Count Castelo Melhor. And two silent, passive, enigmatic aliens docilely allow themselves to be imprisoned, gazing upon their captors with huge, unfathomable black eyes. Imps, demons, angels, pygmies from Africa or Borneo, strange New World animals "catapulted" into Portugal by the Spanish foe in a fiendish plot to sow civil disorder?

Anthony's ruthless and provocative account of the imaginary happening provides a lucid demonstration of how the unprecedented and the mysterious can only be analyzed and (mis)understood in terms of the prevailing beliefs of the time---its religious and philosophical convictions, the state of its scientific knowledge, its political prejudices, its popular myths and superstitions.

But this is also a novel of great humanity, with a cast of well-drawn, sympathetic, and lifelike characters whose interplay is both tragic and exalting: the soul-searching Jesuit Manoel Pessoa, a rationalist without faith, who hopes at first to defuse the dangerous situation with a cursory proforma inquiry sparing the Quintans dire consequences; his lover Berenice, a herbalist of Jewish origin, who cures the town's sick and is shunned as a witch; the kindly old Franciscan Soares, who believes in the angels; the selfish and gluttonous Inquisitor-General Gomes, who overrides the tribunal with his authority to light the pyres; the tense mystic Bernardo; the enchantingly quixotic King Afonso. "God's Fires" is a story of passion and doomed lives written with insight, biting humour, and bitterness---a far larger book than its disguising science-fiction component would immediately suggest.

What a fine (if lengthy) novel. High themes and low farce combine in this genre-busting book. It ain't quite science fiction and it ain't quite historical fiction, but who cares? I would guess that fans of this book will enjoy "An Instance of the Fingerpost," and vice versa.

This omnibus of some of Pat Anthony's shorts clearly shows her having a versatile imagination. At times she borders on being witty, but seems to forget how to carry the ascerbic wit through to a satisfying conclusion. And like many of today's modern female authors, he seems unable to resist bashing men in some of her short stories, something which is patently adolescent, hence why Pat lost one star from my overall rating.

This collection of short stories is worth reading for several reasons: First, Mrs Anthony covers a wide range of topics with these stories - it's not the same theme repeated over and over again. You are thrown from a boy who remembers the future to a pilot captured by aliens to a ghost story to a virus infection on Mars to your neighbor, the alien, to a city-kid "imprisoned" in a redneck town with Torku to.... do you get the picture? And every time, it's fresh. Creative. The ideas are new. Second, this is not SF where problems are solved with science. No "beam me up, Scotty.", sorry. Most of these stories explore the human condition, human behaviour, human reasoning. Third, P. Anthony has a way with characters and with language - both seem very alive, and she does it with very little words. Fourth, the stories get you (or at least me) thinking. They're not very happy stories, so if you need happy endings, then this book is not for you. But the stories grip you, and they stay with you after you read them. I couldn't stop reading. It was one of these books I finish in a few hours. After reading it, I got Cradle of Splendor, one of her novels, which I didn't really like much. I'll try again with Brother Termite, but what I really wish for is more short stories.

As I write this, I am only part way through this book, but the stories are remarkable. Patricia Anthony is astounding. I can't wait to read everything else she has written.

It was touted as "the war to end all wars"! Young Texan Travis Lee Stanhope has volunteered to join a British regiment in the spring of 1916 for "a piece of adventure," he says. He soon re-defines his own idealism and discovers that instead of "acts of nobility" that "war is hell." Patricia Anthony in her novel "Flanders" vividly recounts this tragedy with a poetic sense of style--and justice. The storyline depends upon a series of letters that Travis Lee writes to his younger brother, still at home in Harper, Texas. A crack sharpshooter, Travis tries to be assimilated into the ranks of his British comrades (despite the differences in the common language!) who have found themselves in the trenches in Flanders. He soon recognizes the sheer horror, depravity, uselessness, and stupidity of this war and experiences booze, unleashed sexual appetite, and even ritual violence. As the war is a tragedy (isn't there tragedy is all wars!), Anthony seems to have captured the essence of this one, from the muddy, bloody trenches themselves to the relationships between the soldiers, who seem to come in every shape and form. As war itself is disquieting, so in "Flanders." It is not an easy book to read, nor to digest; it is a book that is not easy to forget. Anthony's poetry loving (and reciting) Texan-among-the-Brits in far off Flanders fields is also one character that's memorable.(Billyjhobbs@tyler.net)

This novel is powerfully moving, illustrating clearly the utter madness and dehumanising effects of total war. Men are torn to pieces by shell fire, laced with rifle and machine gun bullets, gassed or are ravaged by disease in a novel that calmly records these horrors. The effects of such an environment on one young man fighting the Great War is played out in this novel through the letters home of a young Texan fighting in the British army in 1916. Through the hellish landscape of Flanders, Patricia Anthony has produced one of the most powerful war novels of all time. Bleak and emotionally scarring, like the conflict it portrays, this is certain to become a classic of the genre. Despite the horrors, this novel is profoundly spiritual in content and reflects the twisted and shifting social and moral mores of young men in a conflict they barely understood. Without a doubt the best novel I read in 1999.

Flanders is an excellent novel about an American soldier in World War I. Travis Lee Stanhope, a Texas farmboy and Harvard pre-med graduate, volunteered for duty on the British side because he wanted to see the world and have some adventures before settling down back in Texas. He thought the war would be exciting, something he could brag about to friends and family. His experiences in the trenched soon changed his mind. He began to see war as a nightmare, where his friends died without warning and without reason, and where his survival depended on ignoring his own humanity.

The living conditions at the front were execrable. The trenches they lived in were filled with mud and sewage. Rats thrived in the death-filled environment, eating dead bodies and nibbling on the living ones, too. The soldiers slept in niches carved into the sides of the trenches and sometimes these caves collapsed under artillery fire, burying the soldier alive. The food was bad and so was the water. The survivors learned to ignore the conditions, making jokes about the rats and food and shaking the hand of a corpse buried in the wall for good luck. Reading about these conditions makes the reader very grateful not to have to live like that.

Anthony describes the trench warfare as mostly anxious waiting as artillery fire pounded all around. At night, the officers would lead their troops over the top, into a No Man's Land filled with shell crates and bodies, trying to get into the enemies trenches. Even when the soldiers did get into the other side's trenches, hand-to-hand combat against seasoned German troops was difficult, and mostly deadly. Stanhope became a sniper, and his experience was even more intense as he stayed out in No Man's Land throughout the days, picking off Germans who became visible. This type of fighting was not effective, as no land changed hands permanently throughout Stanhope's career.

The author really did an excellent job of portraying the horrors of World War I. Her descriptions match up with material in history books, but are much more vivid. While you should not depend on this book to learn all there is about the Great War, it is very good at letting the reader know what it was like for the soldiers in the trenches.

This book is almost impossible to stop reading. Anthony gets you hooked early and never lets go. The hero, Travis Lee, reveals more and more of himself and his past in his letters to his brother, and he transforms through his experiences. The best part of the book is the plotline of Travis Lee's past being revealed, and the worst part are the too-true depictions of violence and life in the trenches. You need a strong stomach for parts of this book, but you never want to put it down. The ending will take your breath away.

This book came highly recommended to me from an extremely literate friend. It was my first experience with a Patricia Anthony book, but I'm fairly well read in science fiction overall.

If you're looking for some good ol' comfy sci-fi reading with a couple big plot twists to spice up the read, this book is a great place to start - at 240 pages, it's a quick read. Also, like all (well, most) good science fiction, this story rightly focuses on the unfolding human drama (in the context of new technologies) and one of the main devices used to keep you on the edge of your seat is the strongly protagonist-centric view of the world. A tangled weave of interplanetary political intrigue, religion, sexuality, and J. Edgar Hoover style police state paranoia add a lot of texture to the story.

Likes:
- Holloway's (the protagonist) inner tragedy, while overly analytical, rang true from a basic emotional standpoint.
- Anthony's rendition of an emotionally unbalanced man's view of love and sex shows an refreshingly perspicacious view.

Dislikes:
- The book tries to accomplish an awful lot in 240 pages. The reader gets just a brush with the texture alluded to above. For example, the Beagle, an artifically created personality construct, could have been developed more. Compare cf. the constructs in "Nature's End" by Strieber and Kunetka.
- For me, this book was uncomfortably similar to "Caves of Steel" by Asimov. Earth in political turmoil with an advanced off-Earth human colony? A sci-fi detective story? A government dictated artificial economic stratification of society with overpopulation of Earth? Constructs vs. robots?

Takeaway: it keeps you in suspense, it's got some very interesting plot twists, you won't be sorry you read it, but it won't change your life either (rather, it didn't change mine).

Chapter One. Break out the Likastones.

This book was originally out in hard cover and may still be available from First Books.

Beagle is a nifty police procedural set against an alien backdrop. Holloway is haunted and sad. Beagle - an enigma to all but himself. Who killed Holloway's wife? What force is behind the revolution on Tennyson? The answer is linked in the mind of a dead detective bound to the body of an android. But Beagle may have ghosts of his own to contend with.

One of Anthony's best. Check it out.

I got a reviewer's copy of this book from a girlfriend who worked for a science fiction magazine in New York. Started reading it on the subway.

Aliens Among Us. Sinister Conspiracy. Fate of the Human Race in the Balance. But somehow it all seemed so pointless.

I realized that the basic plot concepts reminded me of a much better book: Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. So I left Brother Termite on the subway, went home and read Childhood's End instead. This book was last seen on the F train headed for Brooklyn.

Haven't read the book, but I can tell you that James ("Terminator") Cameron bought the movie rights, and that John Sayles wrote a script for it several years ago...

In all the science fiction I ever read (and that's what I mainly read!), I cannot remember reading anything which resembles "Brother Termite". The plot is so surreal, yet is written with such talent that it totally seems plausible.

As for the plot: somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century, Aliens - small, gray skinned with large eyes - have landed on Earth. Using treachery they have gained control of Earth. However, most people don't really realize that the President is really a puppet in the hand of the Aliens, as well as the CIA and the FBI. Most people don't realize that the aliens are also plotting genocide against the human race. The entire story is told from the perspective of Reen, the chief of staff of the white house, and the effective ruler of the planet. Reen is a "Cousin", which is the word the Aliens use when they refer to themselves. The time is roughly the end of the of the 20th Century, and there is great turmoil in the world. Humans hate the Cousins, and vice Versa. and everybody - Everybody has a secret agenda. It all starts when many "Cousins" start vanishing and dying. Something is going on, and Reen and his fellows can't understand what is happening. There is definitely a conspiracy, but who is behind it? the CIA? the FBI? other Aliens? You'll have to read the book to find out.

I really couldn't put the book down from the moment I started, although I really had to concentrate to fully grasp what is going on. Not all the plot elements are explained, and much is discovered in stages. Many things happen constantly, many small details occur. That's what made the reading fun. It was also nice to see the way the author put real political figures into the plot (J. Edgar Hoover, John F. Kennedy).
However, I have rarely encountered such a bleak, depressing book. I recommend science fiction fans who love politics to try this book - but be warned, this is far from light reading.

This would have been a great tech review if it weren't for the NUMEROUS typographical errors present! In one chapter alone I found 5 math typos!! Its pretty bad when you can't trust your answer page to be correct! The information learned from this text book would have been so much more helpful if I hadn't had to spend so much time decifering their errors! I wish someone would have proof read this before it went to print! Luckily I have a great pharmacist willing to quiz me so hopefully I can still pass! If I'd had to depend only on this book I would be in some serious trouble! And for as much as this darn thing costs, you'd think they could at least have gotten the "solutions for problems" right!! Look into getting a different review book--not this one! Its not worth the money!

This text is an excellent review text. It is written for persons all levels of experience - quick study guides allow the student to skip what he or she is already familiar with, and detailed chapters are included for those who are not familiar with subjects. Questions or problems at the end of each chapter are answered in detail, to allow the student to see what the examiner is looking for and hopefully duplicate it for the exam, rather than simply designating the correct answer and leaving the student to guess why their answer was incorrect. This is really key, as a large part of the success on the exam is understanding what the question is asking and what the examiner wants to know.

Other salient features include a pre-test, to allow the student to pinpoint weaknesses and prioritize study, a sample certification exam, which is written to duplicate the exam in both style and content, and a very large and detailed section on pharmacy math, which includes every type of calculation which might appear on the exam, and as a practice math test. Since the lack of ability to solve math problems is a primary reason why students fail the exam, this is an excellent preparation aid. The text also teaches the student to think and understand, which is necessary for the exam, as it is not all regurgitation of material - you have to know how to USE and apply the material.

All relevant subjects are covered and discussed in detail. An excellent buy for the money, for students of pharmacy technology - and expecially for technicians trained in a retail pharmacy who may be lacking in hospital pharmacy.

This text could even be used as for a pharmacy technology quick study course, or self study course as it is quite complete.

This book has everything that you need to pass the certification exam. Prescriptions, filling, labelling, record keeping, OSHA, computers and law are all covered thoroughly. There are also chapters on pharmacology and ten chapters on math [the book covers almost every type of dosage calculation very thorougly]. Everything is explained exceptionally well, and is easy to understand. Review questions at the end of each chapter are asked, answered, and explained in detail, so that you understand how to answer questions and do the calculations for the exam. It explains "why", and helps you to understand and apply the information. Each chapter has a "quick study" guide for easy reviewing. There is a "pre-test" to help prioritize study and pinpoint weak points, and a mock certification exam, which follows the format of the exam, and includes questions very similar to the questions appearing on the exam. Helpful hints for taking the exam and answering questions are also included. This book is a must, especially for retail techs [a lot of hospital pharmacy is included], and particularly for understanding the math.