Summed up in one word, disappointed. I never dreamed that the pictures in this book would be in black and white. So much for fish identification when snorkeling, which is why I bought this book. If you want this book for Identification purposes, forget about it. However, if you don't mind seeing page after page of these beautiful fishes in black and white (What is the point?) then this book is for you.

I've been working with the CD-ROM for approximately one year now, and must say that I'm a bit underwhelmed. While it allows me to very easily transport a bulk of information from one city to another, this CD-ROM I often find difficult to work with.

The text is presented in a difficult-to-read font, the legends for photos/figures are difficult to read without expanding them, and if you print out a page you can only print one page at a time, and then only text. Occasionally the text gets translated into gibberish and you have to reboot.

I called someone at Mosby about the latter point and they conceded that the disc has problems running on many systems and gave some hints troubleshooting.

The text hardcopy itself is superb and one of the best medical/scientific texts I've ever come across.

My advice would be to either wait for the next edition to get the CD and hope that it'll be substially better next time around, get just the book, or get BOTH CD and book.

Professor Sabatier's long-out-of-print work is the ur-text of Francis biographies, the one to which most of the contemporary biographers refer most centrally in their own work (Julien Green in particular). Therefore, reading this text in its particular historical and scholarly context is essential; to truly appreciate Sabatier's intervention into the popular and scholarly understanding of St. Francis is to have ready reference to the body of work, and the weight of tradition, to which Sabatier was responding. Unfortunately, Mr. Sweeney sees fit to excise just this apparatus in his "edition" of Sabatier; he cuts out Sabatier's Introduction, condenses several chapters, and replaces Sabatier's footnotes and bibliography with his own commentaries and explanations of the text, set right into the margins of Sabatier's own text, and a cursory bibliography that cuts out the vast majority of Sabatier's own points of reference. Scholars are left without resources for critical or comparative study, and readers who wish to learn more about Francis are pushed into Mr. Sweeney's particular framework of understanding with little warning. I hope another more reputable publisher sees fit to reprint Sabatier's seminal work in an uncompromised edition; until that happens, let the reader beware.

This "Rough Guide" is pretty rough; it's a pocket-sized trip through it from a British perspective, but that's no real handicap, and it does try to cover not only the shows but also some of the movers and shakers, websites, available paraphernalia, urban legends (like the whole Captain Pugwash character names thing), etc.

The trouble is that this is likely to be of more value to those who haven't been introduced to the shows before - shot through with inaccuracies (the capsule review of "The Simpsons: Songs in the Key of Springfield" gets it mixed up with "The Simpsons Sing the Blues"; "Danger Mouse" is touted as the first successful cartoon exported to the US, a point "Speed Racer" fans would debate strenuously; "Danger Man" and "Secret Agent" were the same show, not two different ones...) and not revealling much to those already in the know, it's an okay time-killer in the end, but one for the casual viewer.

Well, what a disappointment. 95% of this book is a re-telling of the Lafayette Bar murder case. 5% is a surprisingly superficial discussion of the shortcomings of the American judicial system. On the plus side, this is the most detailed, blow-by-blow account of both of the trials and the numerous appeals, the changes in testimony, the key witnesses, the red herrings, and the legal issues raised. But the writing is not good enough to rise above tedium.

To be fair, it would be a challenge to explain the changing testimony, the way the lies and the charges of bribery and corruption keep revolving back on themselves, like a hall of mirrors. Were the police intimidating the defense witnesses, or were Hurricane Carter and his friends intimidating the prosecution witnesses? Was Al Bello's crucial testimony bought by the police with promises of reward money, or was his recantation bought by Carter's friends with promises of a secret bribe?

I'd like to explain what troubles me about this book -- but how to do it without getting bogged down with nit-picks?

Try this quote on for size: "But within the Paterson community, the police, prosecutors and judicial system were united in their commitment to keeping Carter in prison for the rest of his life. To them, he was an abrasive, violent person who might one day catalyze the rage of the city's black community and who thus needed to be silenced -- he was to them an embarrassment and a villain rather than a hero." (204) Wice writes this, and apparently believes it, while at the same time acknowledging that prosecutors believed they had the guilty men (204) and while admitting he doesn't know whether Carter committed the murders or not! (202)

You'd think there would be extensive documentation and close reasoning to support the notion that (a) Carter was an activist and (b) the police were persecuting him because of it. But of course there isn't. While the tone of the book is skeptical of prosecution motives or eyewitness testimony, it accepts without question Rubin Carter's version of events, many of which were recently repeated in an error-filled movie.

The book repeats that young Rubin Carter was assaulted by a pedophile and was sent to juvenile detention for defending himself. The book repeats that Carter was on the verge of being paroled from juvenile detention when a vengeful guard (whom Carter had beaten savagely for a pedophiliac advance on a young inmate) framed him, thus ruining his chances for release. Wice believes Carter's story of how, as a young army recruit, he got into a no-holds-barred fight with his sergeant -- and was not punished. He repeats that a rash remark printed in the Saturday Evening Post led to police harassment and Carter's eventual frame-up for murder.

Well, if you'll believe that, you'll believe..... that when Carter was getting out of prison after serving time for mugging three people, he received offers from boxing managers from all over the world with "promises of rich contracts, up-front money and attractive jobs." And the reason that Carter rejected all those offers in favor of an amateur manager who was a New Jersey prison guard was because.... "he knew (the guard) fairly well." (33)

If, while doing the research for this book, Professor Wice had read the original Saturday Evening Post article, instead of relying on Carter's version in the 16th Round, he would have read a different version of the knifing incident that sent Carter to juvenile detention, and a different version of his escape. Like his alibi for the night of the murders, Carter's story of his juvenile escapades has also changed over time.

The book does list points that are favourable to the prosecution case. It mentions that Carter's alibi fell apart, for example, and even mentions the letter Carter wrote from prison, laying out the false alibi story, but it's clear where the author's sympathies are. I don't understand why, when Carter supporter Carolyn Kelley says Carter beat her savagely, Wice calls this an "alleged" assault, but when Carter says he was beaten by his own father (who is no longer around to defend himself) there is no "alleged" about it.

Here's a hilarious example of the book's bias:

"(After his transfer to Rahway Prison, Carter) was uninterested in participating... (a)lthough Carter had a few minor scrapes with the guards and other inmates, he primarily studied the law and wrote his autobiography. He was cited a dozen times for disciplinary infractions, but most were early in his stay, BEFORE THE STAFF AND OTHER MEN HAD ACCLIMATED THEMSELVES TO CARTER'S RIGID REGIMEN. (my emphasis)(74)

Um, Professor Wice, was the prison system supposed to adapt itself to the star inmate or was the star inmate -- oh, never mind.

Wice says of the prosecution: "they were rarely able to substantiate their conclusions with direct evidence." (67)

The same could be said of Carter's claim that he was a black activist or that he was framed. There is no evidence. And while the case against Carter for triple murder is mostly circumstantial, there is a case to be made -- with direct evidence -- that Carter has not always been truthful about himself. Unfortunately, this book didn't look deeply enough.

The book starts off great and captures the flavor of the time period. Then the minor characters in the hospital take over and the idiocy of some criminals and hospital employees in later chapters and the plot and whatever I may care about the protagonist just fell apart for me.

previous book, "Sams teach yourself mcse windows nt workstation 4" was very helpful and written very well but had about 2 mistakes obvious to those knowledgeble in nt. i hope they fixed thos mistakes in this newer edition

...There was a trend in horror literature and film in the early eighties to make the whole slasher genre semi-realistic. That is, instead of using the tried and true mystery formula (you're introduced to a number of folks, and you know one of them did it), the intrepid adventurers out to right the world's wrongs have no connections with the killer, and while we might meet him at various times during the narrative (Rex Miller's excellent debut novel, Slob, is the first good example of this I can think of; the most popular that comes to mind is the last Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool), said intrepid adventurers don't meet the bad guy until the final showdown. The idea certainly has its good points. Aside from the aforementioned realism, it also puts a stop to such dialogical insanities as "So, Professor Moriarty, we meet again!"

That said, a lot of the first attempts to marry the idea to the slasher genre were exceptionally bad. Savage isn't quite as downright stupid as some (my favorite target is a 1981 film, later made into an equally bad novel, called Final Exam)...

Our heroine is an investigative photojournalist, Chris Latham, who is sent by her editor to cover the opening of a new luxury resort that just happens to be situated in a war-torn South American country (named Panagua in the book; the similarities to Nicaragua are a little too obvious to be overlooked). Because of the area's sociopolitical instability, only seven of those who received invitations to the grand opening actually show up. P>

Savage might have actually been salvageable. Had an editor managed to get Boorstin to lop off the first chapter and a half, and had the last couple of chapters been handled just a bit more slickly this might have crossed the line into "good enough to be noticed." As it stands, however, it's been out of print for quite a while, and not really worth going out of your way to hunt down.

From the title, it appears that this book is supposed to be strictly about animals of the order "Pinnipedia," that is, animals that are flipper-footed. This order includes the true seals, sea lions, and walruses. The book starts off well enough with beautiful photographs and good descriptive text, but on page 63, Cleave inexplicably groups walruses and manatees together as if manatees also belong to this order. Manatees, while bearing perhaps a slight resemblance to walruses, are of the order "Sirenia" (manatees and dugongs) which are actually more closely related to elephants than to any marine mammal. Furthermore, while pinnipeds are piscivorous (fish-eating) and can spend part of their lives out of the water (i.e., on land or ice), manatees are herbivores and totally aquatic. The author does not point out these distinctions and thus this chapter is very misleading. Hopefully this will be remedied in any further printing of this book; in the meantime, anyone using this book as a reference should keep this in mind (indeed much more authoritative sources should be used instead such as Marianne Riedman's book "The Pinnipeds" or "The Sierra Club Handbook of Seals and Sirenians" by Reeves, et al).

One of my teachers told me that letters by famous people are usually very dull. Sad to say this seems to be the case here.

Skelton wrote a book on Hindemith and while that's great these selected letters seem to be missing a lot, a possibility suggested when Skelton says he didn't include material he considered of too personal a nature. I don't know if the Hindemith institute asked this or not but excerpts of some of the most interesting letters are missing, particularly the "moral conquest" letter he sent enclosed with Ludus Tonalis (which you can get in the Urtext edition); there he wrote scathing remarks about the Leningrad symphony and the American policy of promoting Russian music over German or italian music during the war years. The read is so dry I haven't even finished it yet and I get the strong sense that you wouldn't learn much more from this book than Skelton's earlier book. I've read A Composer's World and other books by Hindemith and can't shake the suspicion that Hindemith's letters were dull or, at least as likely, Skelton and co. wouldn't let us see the most readable parts.