Buyer beware!! This audio contains only 4 or the original 13 stories contained in the Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Clearly it is an abridgement. !!

"The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes" was Doyle's last collection of short stories on the great detective. The stories may not have been uniformly as good as the earlier Holmes stories, and some of the plots may have been derivative, but they still entertain.

"The Three Garridebs" rehashed the plot of "The Red Headed League". "The Creeping Man" turned in a creepy tale whose premise has been disproved by later science. "The Veiled Lodger" was not even a mystery.

The rest of the stories were much better. "The Blanched Soldier" presented a conundrum which Holmes solved without visiting the scene. "The Sussex Vampire" had a perfectly natural explanation. "The Lion's Mane" involved violent death, but was there a crime? Holmes worked for an unnamed "Illustrious Client", but you should be able to figure out who it was. We meet Holmes' page, Billy, for the first and last time in "The Mazarin Stone". We meet international intrigue in "Shoscombe Old Place" and an arrogant murderer in "The Retired Colourman". My favorite story of the lot is "The Problem of Thor Bridge", where Holmes clears a young lady of murder in the face of almost overwhelming evidence of guilt.

Here we are again with the omniscient Holmes and incredulous Watson exploring mysteries as inscrutable as ever before. These stories are, as a previous reviewer has noted, on the darker side of things, no doubt as a resullt of WWI, in which Doyle lost his son. One even takes place, for the most part, in America, of all places!-There's always this comfortable, almost fairy tale sense in all of the Holmes' stories of this magic Victorian nightworld which Holmes and Watson float above in their upper middle class ease, and which we know (except in one story not in this book) that all will be well with the two friends in the end. Even when we know we are being duped, as when cigar ashes or some other peculiar evidence appears and Holmes announces "Surely you've read my monograph on the subject," and proceeds to expound upon their significance to the case, we are still pleased, like an opium smoker taking another drag from his pipe and drifting back to Xanadu. Like all Holmes' stories, these are bound to keep you turning the pages, as well as to enchant you thus.-Doyle's stories are so enchanting, in fact, that in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books it is revealed that most Taiwanese believed that they were true and that London was a cobblestoned city perpetually inundated in fog!-A very nice compilation, indeed, with all the original drawings from The Strand.

This book has examples in it that are "missing", so to speak, from many regular topology books. It aims to shore up some of these shortcomings, with examples that the student can see and understand. There are charts and graphs, as well as a detailed explanation. Some "problems" often found in regular topology books are solved. Very few proofs, if any, are given. This is not a book meant to be studied without a regular textbook on topology, only to be used as an overall review of problems and short basic premises of topology. Use this in addition to your regular fare, but keep it close at hand when doing homework or preparing for an exam.
There are fundamentals on Cantor's Theorem, the countability or uncountability of sets, compactness, closed and bounded functions, open sets, continuity, connectedness, etc. All these are basic to topology, and this book does address them, but in a brief way. It then shows a basic overview of topology that helps greatly to understand the different fields of topology.

This book gave me an inspiration: it isn't the best written or the best organized, just one of the best topology books I've ever found! It gives you an idea of the areas of topology in a way that is very good and very understandable.

As a graduate I encountered a book called "counter examples in analysis" which I found very useful. I always dreamed of such a book in topology, this book exceeds my dreams. It is great. It does not cover all the examples that I have used over the decades but it does cover some that I have never seen. The style is quite readable for a professional topologist. The book goes into a lot of interesting details (and some while not interesting to me would be another person). In short for me it is an essential book. The question is to whom else would this be interesting to. It is clearly of little use to a first year student and less to more advanced student. It's brand of topology is not the current cutting edge. So the audience for this book is limited to a small group and for these people it is top notch.

We just returned from Maui, having taken the family there for 8 days. We also took 3 guide books, so I was able to compare all three books in real time while on the island. We disliked Fodor's book, but found Frommer's to be very good.

The information is well-organized, up-to-date, and very helpful while on the island. But the best of the tour books was: "Maui and Lana'i : Making the Most of Your Family Vacation (8th Ed)" by Early and Stilson. This is the book I recommend.

This book has a great clor map and online travel directory.

Traveled to Maui for our Honeymoon in January 1999...the Frommers 1999 Maui guide gave us the scoop on the entire island. Because of this book we learned all about the hidden waterfalls and took pictures of awesome "off the beaten path" paradise spots on the road to Hana. We now buy Frommers books for all of our vacations!

While this seemed like a good guide while planning the trip, in actual fact it was not terribly useful. It's poorly organized, so trying to figure out, on the fly, if there is a decent restaurant near an attraction means flipping back to the index too many times. The author also gave starred attraction prominence to a couple of places where she qualified it in the description with, it may take too long to get here for too little to do. Hmmm. Also the restaurant guidelines needed some sort of a noise index. This is one of those books that assumes kids will only be happy in an atmosphere of Disneyland-like frenzy. I like my kids to eat a normal variety of food (not chicken fingers or cheeseburgers only) in normal restaurants. The two restaurants we tried from the book were so unbelievably loud with non-stop sensory stimulation we couldn't speak to one another. After that I ducked into a bookstore and bought Fodor's Around NYC With Kids and packed this one permanently in the suitcase. I want a guide that lets me know if a place can tolerate a crying baby -- I don't need the waiters always dressed in "character" doing floor shows to get my kids to eat.

Our family just returned from a long weekend in NYC. We found the book invaluable. The book recommended the Doubletree Hotel as the best 'kid-friendly' place to stay, and they were right on. The rooms were spacious, modern and clean. The hotel also had a great location right on Times Square. The book also suggested John's Pizza which turned about to be a great call. The pizza was great, the restaurant loud enough for our kids and we were able to walk right in and get a table on a Saturday night.

Our family just returned from a long weekend in NYC, and this book was invaluable. The book's recommendation of the Doubletree Hotel as the best 'kid-friendly' place in town was right on. Spacious rooms, modern, clean and a great location. The book suggested John's Pizza which was another great call. The pizza was great, the restaurant was loud enough to handle the kids and we were able to get a table quickly on a Saturday night.

Although not a fresh idea, it's always a good one: a man finally has enough of his confining, conforming life; and so he breaks out to find what's really inside himself. That is this story's plotline. Too bad it never gets exciting. The writing is downright flat and it seems as though the author cannot resist the urge to contrive a scene and indeed the whole book. Main character Combs travels across parts of America with his guitar and several people he meets tell him that he has talent. By the end of the story Combs has retraced his route and collected all these people, and together they go to New Orleans and open up their own club, which also serves the perfect french fry (Billy Bob Thornton already ran the fry in to the ground). Even the smallest detail doesn't escape the urge to contrive, as when a derelict falls asleep in a house full of cats. But there is only one cat that will sleep with this derelict, and we are told that it's name is Hobo. Need more be said?

This book was a great time. Arthur, a boring accountant by age 30, stuck in a dead end life, does what we have all dreamed of doing: He hits the road, no looking back. The cast of characters he meets along the way, from transvestites to a big toothed cook named Freddie, kept me glued. The author shows a real talent for words in how he describes music, (a wonderful choice of words), as Arthur is drawn into the dream world of back alley nightclubs, and learns that there is more to himself then he ever knew: He has talent. AND this book was funny. I even caught myself laughing out loud at times. The story was an inspiration. Makes me want to pick up a guitar, and road trip.

The Jazz and the Blues is an easy to read and fun book. It moves quickly without a lot of unnecessary description. Mr. Woods gets down to the story and moves it right along to keep your interest piqued.

I'm sure that many less courageous souls have longed to do just what Arthur Combs did--just get in your car and drive and not look back. The story is a down-to-earth, often times humerous account of Arthur's adventures on this journey. It is to the point and not cluttered up with a lot of description to make the book longer.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and think you will also.

This book seems tailored to the Web novice. And it's not very insightful about unions either, relying mostly on old platitudes and even a 1947 book by C. Wright Mills to discuss the bureaucratic obstacles to computer-driven change.

I have designed a few simple Web pages and been involved in Web planning at my union. To me, this book offers little in the way of new insights.

This book has effectively established the "bar" for cyber-unionism. Some might complain that the book is not detailed enough or technical; however, Mr. Shostak is the first author to formally challenge existing paradigms and move unions to action.

As a student at the National Labor College, Vice President and CIO of my union, and webmaster for our site, I recommend this book as a must read for any unionist who is attempting to implement technology in their union. Actual implementation methodologies and philosophies should be forthcoming in his next book which I am eagerly anticipating.

This book gives you the particulars as well as the rationale for trade union activists to be active in the use of computers. It is fair to say that already the book is having an inflence on how union organizers function in this technolical age. Boeing employees almost all of whom are highly computer literate are doing card checks, arranging for workers to respond on line to fill out cards and to then keep them informed about the campaign. the Union at Boeing in Wichita already has organized 1,300 workers in this fashion. This book has the potential to profoundly change the way in which unions reach out to potential members.

Often ranked as "the first significant American novelist"-this is how Norman Grabo characterizes him in the Introduction to this volume-Charles Brockden Brown was an ambitious and inventive teller of tales, although an awkward literary craftsman. Brown was only in his twenties when he published this novel in 1799, but it was already his fourth book. Edgar Huntly, which takes place in rural Pennsylvania in 1787 recounts the strange adventures of a young man who sets out to discover the person responsible for killing his best friend, Waldegrave, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. His investigations put him on the track of Clithero, an Irish servant employed in his uncle's household, but one thing leads to another and Edgar finds himself having to fight Indians and face the perils of the wilderness in order to make his way back home. Most of the story is told by Edgar himself in a long letter-some twenty-seven chapters long-that he is in the process of writing to his intended, Waldegrave's sister, Mary.
Edgar Huntly belongs to the genre of romance, the much older but somewhat less respectable sibling of the novel of social realism that had come into vogue in the eighteenth century. The romance frequently has an exotic setting, and features incidents that stretch the limits of artistic plausibility, where it does not take a plunge into fantasy, as it does in Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk or Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Nevertheless, the genre enjoyed great popularity here down to the time of the Civil War, and Brown shows himself well acquainted with its conventions. He not only throws in a whole series of hair-raising encounters that pit the inexperienced Edgar with natural hazards, predatory wild animals, and marauding Delawares, but supplies a convoluted plot line that he further complicates with stories-within-the main story told by subordinate characters. Even for a romance, Edgar Huntly has an unusually tangled narrative web. It's hardly surprising the neophyte author himself sometimes has difficulty keeping track of the strands.
The reader making the acquaintance of Brown for the first time will not get any help from the note on the back cover supplied by Penguin, according to which "Edgar Huntly is the story of a young man who sleepwalks each night, a threat to himself and others, unable to control his baser passions....One of America's first Gothic novels...." I wonder whether the person responsible for these inane comments ever bothered to open the book. In the first place, Edgar Huntly is no Gothic novel. As E.F. Bleiler pointed out, it takes a castle to make a Gothic novel. But Brown explicitly distances himself from the suspicion of Gothicism in the remarkable address "To the Public" prefaced to the book, in which he prides himself on having found his materials in his native country and rejoices in not having fallen back on "Gothic castles and chimeras" in composing his work. But the statement about Edgar is not just inaccurate-it is blatantly incorrect. Edgar has at the most two sleepwalking episodes, one of which serves to initiate the most remarkable series of events in the novel, when he awakes to find himself mysteriously transported to a cave in the middle of the night. And nothing Edgar relates suggests he has a history of somnambulism in his past-nor that he is "unable to control his baser passions." In fact, the first sleepwalker to show up is the far more uncontrolled Clithero, who almost seems to have infected Edgar with his affliction.
Brown was clearly a pioneer of psychological analysis in the history of the novel. Like Edgar Allan Poe later, he probed the souls of his characters by plunging them into violent, imminently lethal situations. As a student of extreme states of the human psyche, he was not only a predecessor of Poe, but of Hawthorne and Melville as well. Yet Brown lacked the ability to apply his talent to the creation of highly individualized characters, one of the strengths of great nineteenth century novelists such as Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of the characters in Edgar Huntly, the protagonist included, remain little more than phantoms inhabiting a largely crepuscular world throughout the course of the action. However, like other trailblazing figures in the early history of American fiction-James Fenimore Cooper is a perfect example-Brown had an estimable ability to create atmosphere. It is not intended as a sarcasm to say that the reader may feel he or she is turning into a sleepwalker while reading Edgar Huntly.

This book is truly one of the most interesting and purely entertaining books I've ever read. The creepy imagery of the sleepwalking man digging in the street and then the caves and indians will stick with me forever. What an amazingly creative man. An x-files-esque dreamer living in the 1790s.

First published in 1799, Charles Brockden Brown's novel, "Edgar Huntly" is an insane masterpiece. I love Brown. I read this novel for the first time a few years ago, and thought it was about time to refresh my memory. Set outside of Philadelphia in the final years of the 1780's, "Edgar Huntly," like other of Brown's works, test the new American republic's capacity to govern while balancing the needs and desires of its culturally disparate inhabitants.

The novel is purportedly a correspondence from the protagonist, Edgar Huntly, to his friend/love interest, Mary Waldegrave, in the aftermath of her brother's death. Edgar is an educated, refined, enlightened young man, disconsolate upon the death of his friend. An avid walker, Edgar frequently leaves the environs of his hometown, Solebury, returning to the scene of his friend's death, a large elm tree. Near this tree late one evening, he spots a man, conspicuously lurking, burying something beneath the tree. Suspecting this man, Clithero, of Waldegrave's murder, Edgar begins a career of surveillance and tracking, following Clithero to his residence and through the uncharted wildernesses that border his hometown. What follows is Edgar's progress in discovering the truths behind the death of Waldegrave, the history of Clithero, and the foundations of his own self-control and rationality.

Brown deals with a number of issues throughout the novel current to late 18th century America, including the dispossession of Native Americans from their land, Irish immigration, and the instability of a newly formed nation. Philosophically, Brown examines popular 18th century debates over the limits of sympathy, and the ability of sense, experiment, and observation to conclusively explain human nature. In his preface to the novel, Brown says that his novel will not exploit the then-common motifs of gothic fiction. Perhaps, but Brown, taking the example of William Godwin, moves the castles, dungeons, and murders of traditional gothic into the psyches of his characters. Dementia, paranoia, and in this novel, at least, the uncontrollability of sleep-walking, constitute the largely internal threats to personal and national safety.

So join Edgar, Clithero, Sarsefield, the Lorimers, Inglefield, Queen Mab, and an army of hostile natives, on an intricate, often horrifying romp through late 18th century America. Brown's doubts and fears about living in the new nation will entrance and mortify you, and possibly make you consider putting yourself in restraints before you go to bed at night.

A usual book review outlines something of the plot, not enough to give everything away, but at least something to catch a potential reader's fancy. I cannot assure you that this book has much of plot---some men come together to run a new bi-weekly magazine in New York in the 1880s, their financial backer has hickish, conservative tendencies and he opposes a certain impoverished writer who supports socialism (then a wild-eyed fantasy. This rich man's son, who abhors any form of business, is made into the managing editor. A crisis develops, takes a sudden unexpected turn, and the men buy out the backer, who leaves for Europe. Most novels have a main character whose moods and motivations are central to the work. Not A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. Several people figure almost equally in this respect, none of them women, but women are developed more than in most male-authored novels of the time, even including a sympathetic view of a very independent female character. Basil March might be taken for the main character, but that would be mostly because he is introduced first. He is abandoned for long stretches while we follow the lives and personalities of others.

Yet, I must say, I admired Howells' novel very much. It is not for those who require action, sex, or dramatic events. Rather, it is a slice of life of the period, of the place, of family life and social repartee that may be unequalled. Though Howells claimed to be a "realist" and he is often spoken of, it seems, as one of such a school in American literature, the novel oscillates between extremely vivid descriptions of all varieties of life in New York, humanist philosophizing, and mild melodrama, thus, I would not class it as a truly realist novel in the same sense as say, "McTeague" by Frank Norris. Howells had the American optimism, the reluctance to dwell on the darker sides of human nature. This novel may draw accusations, then, of naivete. I think that would be short-sighted. Henry James and Faulkner might be deeper psychologically and Hemingway more sculpted, but Howells sometimes puts his finger right on the very essence of American ways of thinking and on American character. Some sections, like for instance the long passage on looking for an apartment in New York-over thirty pages---simply radiate genius. The natural gas millionaire and his shrewish daughter; the gung-ho, go-getter manager of the magazine; the dreamy, but selfish artists, the Southern belle---all these may be almost stock characters in 20th century American letters, but can never have been better summarized than here. Two statements made by Basil March, a literary editor married into an old Boston family, sum up the feel of A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, a novel that takes great cognizance of the potential for change in people (always an optimist's point of view). First, he says, "There's the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that." And lastly, he says "I don't know what it all means, but I believe it means good." Howells was no doubt a sterling man and this, perhaps his best novel, reflects that more than anything else.

This title should be on the syllabus of every American lit class. Read it and you'll realize that the canon is as full of holes as a chuck of swiss cheese.

William Dean Howells in his lifetime was ranked with his friend,Henry James as a writer of a new realistic kind of fiction,and however mild and idealistic it seems today,was considered by its admirers as refreshingly revolutionary and by others as cynical meanspiritedness seeking to sacrifice all that was "noble" in art.While actually having little in common with James, (he seems to be closer in spirit to Trollope)Howells' name was always side by side with James' and it was probably supposed that their future reputations would share a similiar fate. Unfortunately,that was not the case-while Henry James is considered a giant of American belles lettres,Howells has been relegated to minor status and except by a happy few,little read."A Hazard of New Fortunes",possibly Howell's best work,is one of the better known-but most people aren't aware that it is one of the greatest works of fiction in American literature.It is an impressive panorama of American life towards the end of the last century.People from Boston,the west,the south and Europe all converge in New York to enact a comedy of manners or tragedy,depending on their fortunes,that compares in its scope and masterly dissection of society, with"The Way We Live Now".Howell's light irony touches upon the eternal divisions between the haves and the have-nots,male and female,the socially secure and the unclassed,and with the Marches,the book's ostensible heroes,uses a typical normal middleclass family-with all of its intelligence,understanding,decency on one side and with all of its pretensions,timidity,selfishness on the other-to reflect the social unease and lack of justice in a supposedly sane and fair world.The book is subtle in its power and underneath its light tone probes the problems of its day with compassion and insight.Indeed,many of the problems it depicts are still relevant today.William Dean Howells wrote so many novels of worth that he deserves to have more than just a cult following; "A Hazard of New Fortunes" amply illustrates this.

How The World Was One is a highly interesting history of communications from the telegraph forward, written by a true expert on the subject. The first 100 or so pages of the book focus on the invention of the telegraph, and the great and largely unknown trials and troubles that went into the laying of the first transatlantic submarine cable. This stranger-than-fiction tale is enchanced by the underlying substory of the life of such people as the "great American" Cyrus W. Field. Further into the book, we are told of the invention of the telephone and the subsequent impact it had on communications, and, indeed, civilization itself. Here we hear about people such as, of course, Alexander Graham Bell, and Oliver Heaviside. After this, we are treated to a true insider's view of comsats, a thing which Clarke, as is well known, played a large part in, and we are given here a reprint of his classic "Short Pre-History of Comsats: Or How I Lost A Billion Dollars In My Spare Time." Due to the author's personal involvement, the subject comes off as fresh and interesting, and does not read like dry technical jargon. The same is true of the book as a whole. There are technical bits involved (indeed, in the book there is a reprint of ACC's original comsat essay "Extra-Terrestrial Relays", published in Wireless World in 1945), but Clarke is a gifted writer, and the book's prose is such that it is interesting to the expert and enlightening and entertaining to the unitiated. This book is fairly hard to find, but I suggest you pick it up if you can find it, if you are looking for some good non-SF ACC, or a get-it-all-in-one-place communications history.

This book is an insightful and interesting look at the Communications Revolution. This is a revolution that has touched and changed every aspect of human life. Clarke divides his book into three parts: the past, the present and the future. The first part of the book is a history of the laying of the first transoceanic cable between Europe and America. At first glance this seems to have little relevance to the "technologies" of the modern age. We all admit that our personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, cyber space, and satellite links are precipitating a revolution. This is a revolution that is often portrayed as very recent in origin. Yet these technologies are in fact only the latest manifestation of a cultural mind shift that began over 150 years ago. The author's entertaining description of the coming together of personalities, science, politics, and economics was fascinating. As I read further it became clear that it was not only an interesting story about the past but also a striking parallel to our present situation and a powerful insight into the challenges of our future.

The second part of the book takes a look at the present (1992) state of communications in the world. This was informative for someone with very little technological knowledge. Clarke explains such things as fiber optics and how satellite communications takes place. He also explains the technological difficulties of various methods of communication. Have you ever wondered why we still have transoceanic cables in this age of instantaneous satellite communication? Clarke makes the answer not only accurate but also interesting. Written like an unfolding mystery novel, the reader is drawn into areas of scientific knowledge that might have seemed too complicated or too boring for the layperson. Those of you who are techies would probably find this book elementary and simple from a scientific perceptive. Those of us with a more rudimentary scientific background will find the descriptions presented in the book easy to understand and enlightening. Both types of readers will find the human stories that are told engaging and revealing.

The third part of Clarke's book is as interesting for what it does not talk about as for what it does. Written in 1992 this part makes some interesting predictions about the future. The author is famous for his very accurate predictions of future events. Right after World War II he predicted the importance of satellite communications and is widely recognized as the godfather of Telestar. His science fiction classic 2001. A Space Odyssey is receiving a great deal of attention this year for very obvious reasons. Yet the creator of Hal, has almost nothing to say about the importance of the personal computer for the future. In a book primarily concerned with communication and with how the world is being made into a global village by various methods of communication, Clarke has very little to say about the Internet. Both omissions are remarkable statements about just how much the world of communications has changed in the last ten years.

I found the book to be an interesting and entertaining history of the communication revolution. For those of us who believe that we can learn from the mistakes as well as the accomplishments of the past this will be a valuable and fun book to read.

Clarke discussing the evolution of communications through history. Very entertaining book that goes into a lot of history that even people who think they know a lot, don't really know. I wish it was still in print.

Like Blavatsky and Bailey, twisted scripture, lies and theosophical racism paraded within the modern myth of "spiritual evolution" about sums it up.

Steiner's written authorship was limited to a handful of written works and this one is the most accessible and thought-provoking.

With 1000's of lectures some available in book form (catalogued in German with English editions secondary), Steiner himself pointed out that his written works were intended for a reading audience, whereas the lectures were in the oral tradition, originally not intended for print and largely contextual within the time, place and attendence.

This is a great place to start to learn more about this spiritual Da Vinci. It focuses on his spiritual philosphy with supporting excercises. His Theosophy is transitional in that it bridges his roots in Theosophy with his founding of Anthroposophy. His Philsophy of Freedom is helpful in understanding his development. For Steiner the man, see his Autobiography.

From there the inquirer is encouraged to study his lectures as supplements to his basic books.

I've read a vast assortment of Steiner's books and lecture series, but this book is far and away the best. There's really more information in Outline of Esoteric Science, but it's not nearly as easy to read and incorporate as How to Know Higher Worlds. This book is an invaluable aid in understanding the place of humanity in our universe.