EXCELLENT! EXCELLENT! EXCELLENT! EXCELLENT! Once I began reading "The Return" I couldn't stop! My eyes were having difficulty keeping up with the "movie" version that was playing out in my mind's eye. Three times I cried. I'm not one to speculate the next turn of a story--good thing because everytime I thought I knew what to expect next, the story went in a different direction. The male characters displayed wisdom and compassion; the female characters were strong and admirable. Who says that only sex and violence sell books--WRONG! EXCELLENT read--when is the movie verison coming out and when is the sequel being printed?

I really enjoyed this book, it was a fast read and I couldn't put it down. The Return is a little history, family, suspense, romance, betrayal, power, royalty, Queens, Kings, and exciting. I enjoyed the telling of a story within a story. I visulized my grandfather telling this story giving me history of my roots. The richness of the characters were well developed. ITCOMS book club has selected The Return for the New Millennium. We look forward to David's next book. As a new author the book is well written. Thank you David. In the Spirit!

Bravo! Indeed I did find "The Return" not only refreshing and exciting, but so much more. The words exhilarating, exciting, riveting and heartstopping suspense immediately come to mind. "The Return" has all the components of a bestseller by any standard. I was especially impressed by the tasteful romanticism intertwined throughout the intriguing and riveting action. I was so engrossed in this book that I got behind in my housework! And that's rare for me. I really appreciated the positive image portrayed of Africa, the African-American as well as that of women. "The Return" also gives insight into the author's personality (Iron that does not fear fire). He is a man who obviously has deep respect for God, women, family and roots. I join my voice in demanding a sequel!

This is the best safety and rescue book with a wealth of information every boater should know. A must read, re-read and own it for reference.

We all know in any adventure sport there is a risk. Be prepared and and practice those skills in the event you ever need them. Those of you who know John Lull will reguard him as the "guru" of kayak safety and rescue. Get this book, practice what you read, and have the confidence in any situation.

John Lull's Sea Kayaking Safety & Rescue is a "user friendly", comprehensive manual on how to kayak safely in a variety of sea environments. Offering step-by-step descriptions of real-life scenarios and numerous illustrations of key kayaking techniques, readers will learn how to competently assess kayaking risks, learn effective assisted self-rescues, develop group kayaking strategies, read weather patterns and currents, negotiate surf and ocean rock gardens, and deal with boat traffic. Highly recommended for personal and community library reference collections, Sea Kayaking Safety & Rescue is essential, "must" reading for the novice, and has a wealth of practical information to enhance safety and success for even the more experienced kayaking enthusiast.

While Boys of Life and the Coming Storm are both excellent literary works, Sea of Tranquillity has to be Paul Russell's finest work to date. This novel is truely a masterpiece. Vivid and complex characters who live on in the readers mind long after the book is over. I read this book on a trip to San Francisco several years ago, and I still find myself moved by the voice of the characters. Nothing I've read has come close to reaching into my soul like this book did. It is a terrible shame that this book is out of print. If you can get it, do so, you won't be disappointed.

This book was the first I have ever read from this author. It was amazing. His words actually made me feel what the characters were going through. He has an enchanting style. I also liked how the narrative switched to keep up with all angles of the characters' minds. Stayton was the one I liked the most.

I read this book many years ago however it has stuck in my mind as one of the best books I've ever read. The characters and story are facinating. I'm not at all surprised to see that the other reviewers gave it five stars - I unhesitatingly give it five stars as well.

If you've read the 'Security Operations for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server' guide from Microsoft, what value can this book possibly add? That's the question I asked myself before digging into this book. Answer: A LOT!

For starters, it's a very well-written book - starts with some great explanations of Security Fundamentals - the buzzwords, the protocols & algorithms, threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. I've read many security books, but seldom have I found just the right balance - as technical as it needs to be, but still interesting enough for the non-techies.

The section on Installing Exchange With Security in Mind is particularly interesting. Everything you want to know about messaging/Exchange security is covered - SMTP Relays, spam, content filtering, antivirus, SSL, MAPI/RPC security, et al. Great coverage of email encryption and Public Key cryptography, Outlook client security, POP/IMAP security. Can never get tired of readng about securing Outlook Web Access.

Overall, a must-read for Exchange admins. The only thing I would've liked to see is: i) this book to be released at least a year ago.. this one's at the tail end of the Exchange 2000 lifecycle - too close to the Titanium (Exchange 2003) release. ii) Perhaps some more coverage of specific vulnerabilities of SMTP and Exchange, and how secure Exchange is compared to other messaging systems - Notes, Sendmail, etc. THE TRADEOFF (or benefit rather) is we have a book that can still be carried with one hand... still under 400 pages without the index. Remarkable! (A round of applause for Paul Robichaux..)

Bharat Suneja
MCT

If you maintain or administer Exchange servers, this book is a must for you. It covers a borad set of security topics specific to Exchange server, secure messaging and even secure IM. Very valuable guide for IT. Does not dive at too low a level for practical use.

This book has enough information about security, both of the messages and the messaging environment, for a good Exchange administrator to build and maintain a rock solid secure messaging environment.

There is such a beautiful marriage between the words and illustrations of this book. A treasure for any friend.

This book is a wonderful gift to give to someone you love. It is beautifully written and illustrated. The story, a journey about discovering the "heart of friendship", is very touching.

I was given this book by a special friend and found it to be a great gift for me to give others. Anyone who has been there for you needs to receive a copy. Sometimes the best gifts are ones like this that can be re-read and may mean something new as life and friendships change. I no longer see the friend who gave me mine, but feel close to her each time I read it. My only problem is remembering to whom I have given copies of the book. Solution: I now write in the back of my book the persons name/date/event so that I don't give the same book twice! I also do this with another great gift book called "Hope for the Flowers".

This book is such a joy to read! It is one of the funniest books I have read and yet we learn so much about ourselves with it! It shows us how we create much of the unhappiness that we experience and in an indirect way, how we can step out of it. If you want to learn more about consciousness and how it relates to our happiness, read "Rhythm, Relationships, and Transcendence" by Toru Sato. It is not as funny but it tells us more about how consciousness works in a simple way. I think you will like it.

A review by the marqueeofburano: A wonderful, witty, exposé of our endeavors to live a more miserable life by Watzlawick, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University. The treatment of the subject will surely make you laugh at yourself and thus, perhaps, contribute to make you a better person.
W. deals with the fundamental, painful, necessity of the human being to be unhappy (in order to be quiet). And in fact, he contends that the best chapters of universal literature dwell with disaster, tragedy, guilt, madness, etc.
Dante's Inferno-W. writes- is very superior to his Paradise; same case as Milton's Paradise Lost compared with his Paradise Regained; Faust I's greatness is proportionally inverse to the tediousness of Faust II. So the author embarks hilariously in a methodic introduction to the best and more verifiable mechanisms to achieve unhappiness. Samples:
Always be truthful to yourself. A principle, from Polonius in Hamlet,of the outmost necessity for us ( its application is what gets the guy killed by Hamlet like a rat). So then, we must resist any temptation to yield to any other criteria or opinion, apart from ours. Never compromise or accept someone else's advice. The author then addresses the issue of the old saying: "time cures all wounds"..... According to W. four sound mechanisms exist if you want to avoid time's healing effects and transform the past into a present source of suffering. In the exaltation of the past we find those that only remember the good things about their youth and not the years of insecurity and anxiety. In so doing, they have a consistent reserve of sadness about their miserable present...... Also, this fidelity to the past, impairs our ability to enjoy the present and fully dedicate our efforts to the endeavors of the moment. Another mechanism is to consistently dwell with the guilt complex that past errors create, finding excuses or scapegoats (our parents, God, chromosomes, teachers etc.) while doing nothing to avoid committing the same mistakes again.
The author drives his point with practical examples. For instance the story of the hammer. A man wants to hang a painting. He has the nail, but not the hammer. Therefore it occurs to him to go over to the neighbor and ask him to lend him his hammer. But at this point, doubt sets in. What if he doesn't want to lend me the hammer? Yesterday he barely spoke to me. Maybe he was in a hurry. Or, perhaps, he holds something against me. But why? I didn't do anything to him. If he would ask me to lend him something, I would, at once. How can he refuse to lend me his hammer? People like him make other people's life miserable. Worst, he thinks that I need him because he has a hammer. This is got to stop ! And suddenly the guy runs to the neighbor's door, rings, and before letting him say anything, he screams: "You can keep your hammer, you b......"
Watzlawick not only discussess techniques to create false problems, but also the ones that make it actually possible to avoid solving problems and conver them into eternal torments. Here we get the example of the man that claps his hands every ten seconds. Asked why he does that, he answers: "to drive away the elephants..." -"But why, there are no elephants here"- The guy says: "Precisely".
This is a very funny book. It deals, with a fresh and delightful approach, with many of our karmas and mind bothering mosquitoes.......

Brilliant. When I wasn't laughing out loud, I was pierced by his trenchant obervations. Shows us how we choose unhappiness without even thinking about it. He is no Pangloss, the world is a tough place, but Watzlawick shows us how we make it worse than it has to be for ourselves. Highly, highly recommended for anyone with a sense of humor who wants to know more about him/herself.

Wow, life really is vibrant in this wonderful story. In every tale there is truth, and I dare say it exist here in.

Saul's Book ranks among the top three gay fiction novels written (others are Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room", and Holleran's "Dancer From the Dance"). The writing is vivid and stunning; the characters are extremely well drawn such that you understand their motivations completely while despairing of their choices. A very compelling read. Come, see what great writing is.

I was expecting to see scores of reviews for this book.This is an amazingly good book. Not for the naive or timid. I read it 5 or so years ago and I still flash on it. Paul T. Roger's only book. RIP.

'The reader seems to have some disaster of far vaster import than he can fathom. That is the mysterious effect of Mallarme's poetry. One gets a strange emotional effect past analysis'. So declares translator C.F. MacIntyre of a typically impenetrable Mallarme sonnet. Unfortunately, it's an effect the non-French reader will never experience. In translation, somebody like Robert Frost once said, what is lost is the poetry, and no other writer exemplifies this truism more clearly than Mallarme. Most translations will at least yield some sort of broad narrative or imagistic or intellectual sense. Mallarme's self-contained, bookish, exquisitely artificial poetry (Borges was a fan) exists on a plane beyond sense. It is an intensely intricate agglomeration of sounds, forms, distorted grammar, codes and riddles whose 'meaning' is not literal. Mallarme is usually compared to a costumier, jeweller or musician, such is this artisan's devotion to the poem as crafted object. The only real way to translate Mallarme is not to find literal English equivalents for his words as printed, but to find new word-constructions with sounds and resonances that transmute the originals' spirit, rather than sense. But if the translator had that kind of gift, s/he wouldn't be wasting it on Mallarme translations. Despite MacIntyre's best efforts, then, literal Mallarme in English sounds like the worst kind of sub-decadent pot-pourri, like the imitations of French Symbolism Oscar Wilde churned out in his youth. Pick a line, any line: 'The sun that is exalted/by its supernatural halt/forthwith redescends/incandescent/I feel how vertebrae/in the dark give way'; 'You know that, amethystine gardens, hidden/without end in dazzling erudite abysses'; 'Just any solitude/with neither swan nor dock/mirrors its desuetude/in my abdicated look'. Etcetera.

This does not mean the volume is useless. French students struggling with the originals can use the translations as a kind of grammatical glossary, and will find MacIntyre's synopses and explanatory notes, with background and critical infomration, helpful, if dated. The casual reader, however, will find much to enjoy. After a few poems (including the famous 'Herodiade' and 'L'apres-mide d'un faune'), I gave up struggling with Mallarme, and gave into the pleasures of MacIntyre's annotations. A real-life Charles Kinbote, he doesn't even seem to like Mallarme very much: one poem 'is built up of so much nothing, like a fragile pastry of whipped cream. It is artful in the worst sense of the word... He should have had a stern editor! (As I have)'; 'Line 4 is particularly good, [a critic] insists, because it suppresses the classic caesura! I don't think many readers would suffer if the whole sonnet had been suppressed'. He refers to Mallarme's art as a 'dead end', execrates 'his miserably bungled up French', and cheerfully admits that he doesn't really understand the poems! So what qualified him to translate them?! A delectable egotism blows through the pages, from its overheated, homoerotic dedication, and the unwarranted, though very welcome, detours into autobiography and war memories, to the Olympian sneers at previous commentators. Published in sexually unliberated 1957, MacIntyre is forced to euphemise Mallarme's detailed and relentless erotics, which leads to some splendid tongue-twisting; the frequent suspicion that MacIntyre himself misses the point of a poem like 'What silk...' ('the mouth will not be sure/in its bite of finding savor,/unless he, your princely lover,/breathe out, diamond-like, in your/considerable tuft the cry/of Glories stifled as they die'), which he says is about a woman brushing her hair at the mirror (!), is quashed by his mocking one persistently misreading critic: 'Really now. I wish I still had Herr Wais's niaive innocence. I really do'. Barmy, endearing and delightful.

Verlaine is perhaps my favourite poet--many of his poems are exceptionally beautiful, salacious even. However he wrote prolifically, and as is often the case with prolific artists, his work is of uneven quality. Nevertheless, at his best, Paul Verlaine's poetry is among the most remarkable that I've ever read. I highly recommend this collection.

I first read this collection during Christmas break of my freshman year of college, and have never again had a more powerful experience with poetry. Verlaine is often viewed as the poor man's accomplice of Rimbaud; MacIntyre, the translator of this volume, is often dismissed as an awkward versifier. I regard both assessments as absurd.

Verlaine is not as close as Rimbaud to the free verse dogma of recent decades, but precisely for this reason he plays a vintage music in his poems, mixing whimsical subject matter with rock-solid traditional verse forms. (I don't agree that he did better work after his encounter with Rimbaud-- far from it, in fact.) Consider this lovely, even haunting refrain:

In the ennui unending
of the flat land,
the vague snow descending
shines like sand.

With no gleam of light
in the copper sky,
one imagines he might
see the moon live and die.

Wind-broken crow
and starving wolves too,
when sharp winds blow
what happens to you?

In the ennui unending
of the flat land,
the vague snow descending
shines like sand.

This sort of melodic drollery is mastered by nobody in the history of poetry like Verlaine, and MacIntyre is just the man to capture it. (He also does fine versions of the early Rilke.)

Don't miss this volume!

I am a high schooler in Vermont , and I am reading this book for a english class. We had to chose a book where the main person was forimg his or her identity . This boook is a very complicated book . Which takes time to understand . I really enjoyed this book though . It was very insightful and I highly recomend it .

If Jack Conners existed the sight of his face splashed across television screens would be enough to instill fear in the heart of most Americans . Killing ones mother , father and grandmother are considered horrific even to the most feeble of minds . But after reading the book So Far Gone by Paul Cody you see that in this case Conners is as well the victim . In the first chapter we are introduced to the narrator , a man by the name of Jack Conners . He is in his late 30's and grew up in Newton , Massachusetts . But when we first hear from him he is sitting in a maximum security prison on death row . A priest who visits Conners every few days , a Father Curran , has told Jack that he need s to write about what happened . " Put down everything from as far back and no matter how unimportant and every scrap and shred and shard . And from that , piece by piece by piece , maybe something , some pattern or picture or thing will begin to emerge , Like something you heard whispered way back because he said , what happens in May , what they will do after we walk slowly down the halls and through metal doors , past people who look on with a kind of awe , and into the room with blinds on the windows and seats in the other side for people to watch , what they will do is erase all of that , and there will be nothing here for us anymore , Only a long slience . A great loneliness "( Cody 3 ) Jack is a abused child , who is left with mant emotional scars . He is mistreated and unloved by his family . This makes for perfect drama within the book . Paul Cody uses suspense and ingenuity to create this masterpiece . Cody uses the mind of a killer to make us all look within ourselves and wonder.

Paul Cody first came to my attention through his short story work which I read in Story Magazine. Cody is a magnificent writer capable of transporting the reader directly into the experience of this sad and lost character. It is impossible to feel hate for this "criminal" once his horrific childhood is revealed. This adresses the timely issue of child abuse in a manner so real and terrifying that I felt moved to tears many times while reading this book. I am very picky about my writers and heap on adulations very rarely but I must say that this is one of the four or five best written books I've ever read. A truly overpowering experience. First-rate all the way!

First of all, let me say that this is not light reading. Lynn Pan was on a mission when she began researching this book and she left no stone unturned. The immeasureable hours that she must have put into the preliminary parts of the actual writing shine through brightly. Miss Pan obviously was or became well traveled in preparation for this book seeing as how it covers the Chinese diaspora all across the globe. Her personal experiences in England and some in the U.S. no doubt were the cornerstones of the inspiration for this monumental work but the immense scope of the finished product is a true gift to the Chinese community. Tracing the immigration patterns of the Chinese focusing mainly on the last two centuries, Sons of the Yellow Emperor is an in depth look at the hot spots across the world where the Chinese have taken up residence. From Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the U.S., England, Canada, Australia and so on, Miss Pan has outlined the defining characteristics of the places and people dwelling therein down to the very mainland roots of the different Chinese sects, Hokien, Fukien, etc., and their influences in the regions they spread into as well as how they were influenced by those regions. To top it all off, Miss Pan breaks each section down into short biographies of certain influential historical figures, showing their relevence to their time and place and what bearing they had within the history of the Chinese diaspora. I won't pretend to be educated on this topic at all, but I can tell you that Lynn Pan has eked out a summation of a new branch of history, and done so in such a manner as to be exhaustively informative and delightfully entertaining. Recently, I was in a bookstore and saw her newest work. I suppose it is an addendum to Sons of the Yellow Emperor. It is an Encyclopedia of the Chinese Diaspora huge and filled to the brim with captioned photographs and more insight into this branch of historical writing. Well done; and both works certainly fill a void and bring something of great interest to light for anyone curious.

A well informed book about the subject. The author gave a very interesting and in depth view of the history of the Chinese and how they strived to survived and survived overseas.

Reading the book has insipred me to want to read further about events that has shaped the history of the Chinese ie the Opium War.

Definitely a book every Chinese and everyone else should read.

The book gives a well researched and important explanation of the Migration of Chinese people in the 19th Century. It explains many issues that we see every day as we recognize the strength of the Chinese communities in many parts of the world. It may be an important history to tell Chinese youth today about the struggles of their ancestors.