The author prefaces his diary of day-to-day life in Rome with the comment that some of his journalist friends wished that they lived in Rome. It struck me that his object then was to show that Rome was really just a dull, hodunk kind of town, not really worth pining for, and that the romantic perceptions of the tourist were all in their heads. (which is probably true)

So perhaps for this it is useful for those of us tourists who thought it would be nice to live in Rome. This book seems to say we are just as well off staying in whatever dull place we already inhabit.

The selections from the reviews overstate his writing. The writing most often reminded me of the musings of a columnist in some small town paper (it's definitely journalistic prose). His ability to express complexities seems limited. Lots of exclamation points in the first half of the book! (He tends to be bemused by certain aspects of life in Rome, but often resorts to expressing this bemusement with exclamation points.) At worst it struck me as pedestrian and irritatingly banal (but perhaps this is because he chose to write of the banal aspects of life in Rome).

The book is generally very topical, that is, current as of the late '90s. Some recurring content are reports on the pope's health and the days of Mussolini. The latter I found interesting, the former I did not. He also discusses the Etruscans here and there in a way that is insightful and knowledgeable.

On the whole, the book has a nice, low-key, meandering style, which I found readable and pleasant enough to finish. However, I don't think the author put a great deal of effort or thought into its content and design--it just follows the calendar year, like a diary.

I compare Hoffman's travel writing to that of Mathew Spender's Within Tuscany, which is lighter, richer, with more content, and which shows a remarkable facility with English that Hoffman's prose lacks.

Paul Hofmann writes about his hometown the way any native would, with equal parts admiration and frustration. Sure, he describes the great trattorie, touches on the sordid histories of Rome's luxury hotels, and is continually mesmerized by the city's ancient ruins. But, anecdotes about such topics as the irregularity of the postman's visits, motorino pollution, municipal strikes, and lousy restaurant service, make the book come alive. Thank god this isn't another tired, old, tourist piece about how great it is to live abroad ("A Year in Provence," anyone?) Hofmann's grouping of chapters by month is also innovative and helpful to travelers who want to know what goes on in the city the REST of the year. The book tends to be a bit dull in some places, owing probably to the fact that Hofmann wrote this book in his 70s or 80s. He knows little about hip, modern Rome. Nevertheless, his "diary" makes for a good read and a good history lesson.

Unfortunately, little information was/is avaliable about this book on Amazon's Web Page. Projects sounded intriguing but it is a very beginner book. I did not go further than the table of contents.

I love the assignments especially the hands on ones. I love my teacher Jesse Middaugh and my boyfriend is in the class too! Great pictures and instructions to walk students through each step of the VB learning process.

I don't like this one because it gets a few things wrong, or so my sister Monica claims, she plays the game all the time and for her birthday I got her the Septerra Core book and she was complaining because she said it didn't tell her what she wanted to know.and because of that, I give it 2 out of 5 stars...

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This is a good book, but at times it's murky. It takes time to grasp some concepts. The xamples help tremendously, the explanations don't. Interesting topics are covered. They take it up to Mayr alot!

'Sex and Death' is a pretty ambitious book, being almost a survey of the specific, hot topics in modern philosophy of biology. Tackling such issues as the nitty-gritty, purely philosophical issues of gene selection vs. selection of the organism, the definition and nature of the concept of 'species', and "Life on Earth: the Big Picture", the authors have done a nice job of using a breathtaking array of references, from Dawkins to Gould, Lewontin to Mayr, Alexander to E.O. Wilson, etc.

Unfortunately, keeping all of this succinct makes for a somewhat dry presentation. I agree with the previous reviewer in that often the authors' presentation of concepts are difficult to grasp for those not already familiar with the topics; when more concrete examples are made, the point is much easier to take. Still, this is a minor complaint given the scope and rigor of the analysis presented.

If you're into the accessibility of a Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins, this book will be a challenge to read. In fact, it reminds me much more of Elliot Sober, one of the more famous Philosophers of Biology cited in this book. As 'an Introduction to Philosophy of Biology', 'Sex and Death' is more accessible than the work of Sober, and it is a well-organized and presented survey of the philosophy of biology, assuming that the reader has already had a fairly ample exposure to the subject. For the uninitiated, it would be better to bone up on Darwin, Gould, Dawkins, Lewontin, Mayr, and Wilson before trying to tackle this book; *frequent* references to these authors are made,and a close familiarity with their ideas is presupposed.

This book is about Kim Lindgren and Weaver Wolquist who meet each other outside a St. Paul abortion clinic, Weaver is a 26-year-old "born again christian and Kim is a 23-year-old woman who has no money and is pregnant. Weaver stops her from having the abortion saying that he can help her. As these two become closer they learn of each other's families and the problems within the families. Through all of the things that they went through they somehow seem to find love with one another. This book is unlike any other book I have read before. It mainly deals with two people meeting in odd circumstances helping each other get through their problems, and in the end loving each other. At first I didn't like the book, but as I reading into it further I realized it had a lot of depth to it. It was a very spiritual book in that it dealt with Christian cults and pro -life activists. Out of the whole book the one quote that I liked the most was when Weaver is talking towards the end of the book he says,"Strangers deserve to know only so much, and I have already revealed more than I should have." I like this quote because it is true and it has a lot of meaning to it. He shared everything in his life with a woman he hardly knew to get her through her bad situation. That makes him a great guy for doing that. The books message deals with all sorts of different issues and makes me think of all of the things I need to do to become a better person. The books shows how one's faith can change people's lives and I think that is a wonderful thing to do. This author's style is unusual from any other books that I have read and none have even touched close to the types of things that this writer is writing about. I would not recommend this book for young children or even young teenagers. I think that this book is mainly for adults and maybe young adults due to the subject matter that isd in the book, especially with the abortion issue. Overall I think this book was good. I would recommend it to any of my friends that I thought would like this type of book.

A funny and elegant meditation on the search for faith, love, and self-discipline. We care about Weaver, though he seems a bit brainwashed by his pro-life sect, because he tempers the sincere desire for moral certainties with great humanity. His life is aimless, but he does no harm. He is an astute skeptic when it comes to his religious group. He falls for a "fallen" woman while valiantly struggling to reconcile his ridiculous moral absolutes with fuzzy gray realities. Beautifully written, the book offers no easy answers to moral ambiguities, which is exactly the point.

As a grad student in American History, I hoped this book would give me a brief but useful overview of the role of labor in history. While this is definitely a "short" work, it highlights late 19th and early 20th century labor movements at the expense of early material. Indeed, he only devotes 20 pages for the colonial period, Revolution, and all pre-Civil War developments! How stingy!

My disappointment is partially a measure of my interest in Revolutionary history and the shift from artisans to wage laborers. This early material is both fascinating and relevant for all sorts of later trends. If you share my interests, I recommend you run an Amazon search on authors such as Bruce Laurie, Merritt Roe Smith (a bit later but really interesting), Charles Dew, and Gordon Wood, to name a few. If you are interested in post-Civil War developments, this book may be just right for you: it is concise and easy to read, in spite of more than a few small errors. This is no more than an introduction and survey, but it can bring you up to speed on basic concepts very quickly.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Le Blanc's 22 page bibliographic essay and 19 page glossary. (He also includes a timeline and chronology, if you're into that sort of thing.) These sections are very useful as a quick reference while reading the book and afterward. The bibliographic essay points you to a broad spectrum of movies, documentaries, and books that should satisfy anyone's interests and needs (I can't wait to rent "On the Waterfront" and "Roger and Me" -- they sound great).

For the author the working class for its own wellbeing must be unified against the predations and exploitations of employers. The book focuses on the historical existence and effectiveness of worker solidarity as primarily exercised through unions.

The need for working class solidarity arose as formerly independent craftsmen were forced into a factory system producing for an expansive capitalistic market and in the process lost control of their economic lives. Worker organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the Wobblies, and craft-based unions attempted to address this transformation and the accompanying brutal working conditions. Le Blanc clearly outlines their struggles: the extreme cyclic nature of late 19th century capitalism undercut worker militancy; racial, ethnic, religious, gender and skill differences undermined solidarity; employers mounted intense and often violent opposition with state support.

A main theme of the book is the effect on worker solidarity when union bureaucrats seek accommodation with business or rely on the state for survival. Gompers, first president of the AFL, eschewed worker militance in cooperating with the National Civic Federation and then the Wilson administration during WWI. Later, New Deal labor legislation as elaborated and implemented by the War Labor Board of WWII essentially prohibited workers from any exercise of power on shop-floors. Union leaders demonstrated a willingness to purge dissidents, pandering to red-scare mania, and to enforce contracts that traded economic gains for union members in exchange for unchallenged management control of workplaces - an unspoken social compact that has been shredded in the era of globalization.

The author points to some recent developments within and outside the labor movement as a result of the recognition of the poverty of post-WWII labor leadership. But a weakness of the book, since it purports to discuss the working class, is any real feel for the general citizenry's views on the need for worker activism. What have been the effects of consumerism and of the stunted and stilted information provided by media giants on the American public? Overall the book is a reasonably good introduction as to how the working class has fared over the last 150 years. Though not a fault of the author, the future of the working class emerges from this book as a very precarious project.

The most fascinating part of the De Man saga is the fact that he lived a lie for roughly forty years, like some sort of film noir of a lie lived in plain sight. Everything he wrote after the war can only be seen in the light of the fact, not only that he was a collaborator, but that he must have known that his past would eventually turn up, and that everything he wrote about guilt and truth and language would eventually be read in that light. His nihilism was in a sense one long exculpation. And why was he never fingered during his life? Was there no other Belgian refugee who said, "Wait a minute, I remember this guy from Le soir vole!" How could a highly visible collaborator survive a very public career in the US without even changing his name? The only way to explain it is by saying that he was Belgian and wrote in Flemish, but even that doesn't explain it. And if he was such a cad, how come none of his Belgian friends--or even his wife, who he deserted--ratted him out? Strangely, Lehman never even mentions that, as if the question never occurs to him. De Man's writing is magisterial and affectless, and it is not hard to understand why his students admired him so greatly. His story reminds me a great deal of that of Leo Strauss, another refugee who came to the US (under very different circumstances) and also founded a sect on the basis of a method of reading, deconstruction in the one case and esotericism in the other.

Why is this book out of print? It should be taught in universities as a classic work on 20th century literary criticism and "theory". Its take on the posthumous Paul De Man scandal is clear, comprehensive, and mostly convincing. De Man, a dead deconstrutionist, was revealed to have been a cad in his public and private lives. Lehman demonstrates how the equivoque and equivoation that are central to deconstrutionism allowed De Man to rationalize his past as a Nazi collaborator, as a liar to USA immigration and to influential American intellectuals in the 1950s, and as a shuffler off of responsibilities to his first wife and family, all as mere textual details that didn't need addressing in his later career as a very respected American literary critic and academic. I disliked De Man's mandarin literary criticism even before I knew he was involved in deconstructionism--I thought his insistence on universal textual equivocation, universal lack of definitive textual commitment, and universal textual self-referentiality was part of the conservative, literature-has-no-social-bearing school of literary criticism which dominated the academy in the 1950s, and remained vital though not unchallenged there in the 1960s and early 70s. I dock Lehman's book one star for his too indiscriminately lumping De Man and deconstrutionism with other, more socially involved movements in academic thought that Lehmann also happens to dislike.

A harrowing and often poignant recount of the trials and trivulations of the Simon and Garfunkel team. Chronicling everything from their days in Queens as the teenaged duo Tom and Jerry, to their triumphant reunion concert at Central park, this book is truly a dedicated fan's guidebook. Although the stories were cleaned up quite a bit and it is a little out of date, (it leaves off at Paul Simon's 1986 album 'Graceland') the book's stories are relatively honest accounts of Simon and Garfunkel's careers. Although, I'm not a huge fan of the group's work, I found this book to be an informative and interesting read.

As a devoted fan, it's been difficult for me to accept the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel after all these years. Sure, you can go see their solo concerts every now and then, but it's never the same. Thanks to Joe Morella's detailed explanations on what was actually happening between the two singers, I can now understand and accept what eventually had to happen, no matter how painful. It was particularly heartbreaking to learn that their relationship was such that Simon destroyed the sound track of Garfunkel's voice when they were initially producing "Hearts and Bones" as duo album. That's important to me as I still expect to live several more decades. Talking in the same vain, The Beatles Anthology (the book) served a similar purpose, as far as I'm concerned. I can now live with less frustrations.

I got this book so that my family could do a living room performance in one night. Although I am fairly pleased with how it was shortened, I found many typos that needed to be corrected before we could even read it. I had to sit down with the full text to check it all the way through. An obvious example is when Beatrice says to Benedick "You always end with a jade's trick. O know you of old." (It should be "I know you of old.") If you are only buying one copy, this isn't too hard to do and is easier than buying the full text and cutting the lines yourself. If you are buying several copies for a classroom, however, correcting the typos would be a lot of work. If you are buying this book to read the play, buy the full text, this in one of Shakespeare's shorter plays and one of our favorites.

The book is very interesting, much like other from Shekspeare. The story of two cuples gettig maried is very old. But the way the two cuples fall in love is very new and refreshing. This work has the characters of drama as well as those of drama. This book falls in to chategory of must read it!

I am quite familiar with TCP/IP and a software developer. When I started reading this book, I was blank about SNMP and network management in general. Therefore I bought this book, and hoped that I could understand better the protocol and its related issues and then could develop a network management software.

I found that I was completely wrong. I still had no idea what SNMP was when I read almost 75% parts of the book. In fact in the 75% parts there are not many things to read. Too many unnecessary tables and very little explanation. I gave up and almost forgot that I had the book.

However, I do need a knowledge on SNMP but I don't want to buy other books. I , then, read SNMP-related RFCs, and I found that the RFCs were even more understandable than the book! After reading RFC 1155 - 1157 then I read the book back. Well, I understand the book now, but still the book does not give me much information.

You need a book to understand standards, not you read the standards to understand the book, don't you? My friend recommends me SNMPv3 book from Prentice-Hall, maybe I should read the book too..., hopefully it is better.

I want to have more details with this book and all the chatper to be reviews completely and clearly.