The biggest problem I have with this book is its weight. It's just too big and clunky to hold up to read. Splitting into two bindings would have been nice. But it does cover a lot and it needs to be large to do so.

I bought the Beginners Guide to Linux Programming and I really liked that book. This book is a very good follow-up, but it doesn't give the reader more programming tips.
It covers many topics which makes this book a great reference for anyone who deals with Linux and even other flavors of Unix on a day to day basic. Buy this book if you are looking for a reference book on developing software on Linux that covers advanced topics.

This book is a follow-up to Beginning Linux Programming, but with a wider range of authors. The book is a series of chapters on various tools and applications, all of them Open Source, based mainly round things that application developers might use, though there is a single chapter on device drivers.

Most topics only get a single chapter, so there isn't as much depth as you would find in a dedicated book on each topic, but there is a very wide range of material all covered in enough depth to get the more experienced programmer started with a new topic. There are one or two weaker areas, but overall a good choice of material succinctly presented for the more experienced application developer. I've given it 5 stars as it was exactly what I was looking for - a single reference to help me create a Linux-based web database application, your mileage may vary. I recommend you at least consider it.

Dig Ivan Dig is part of the "Naughty, Naughty Pets" series. These books are ostensibly marketed at ages 4 and up,... The text is unsuitable, unfriendly, and just down right tedious and irksome.
The graphics are unappealing.
Please don't waste your money! There are so many wonderful books out there for kids.

I came across this at a local art museum book store, and bought it for myself as much as for my 3-year-old. We've only had it one day, and can't stop laughing! We've already read it six times. I really appreciate humor that translates for adults; it makes reading time more fun for us, too. Unlike the previous reviewer, I think the graphics are terrific (so does my husband, a graphic designer), the rhyming silly and fun, and the message more than satisfactory. This is a keeper, and I can't wait to buy the others in the series. The only other books we have laughed this hard at are some of the Todd Parr books. Buy it!

How refreshing to find books like these....I now have all 4 in the series and this is our favorite. My daughter LOVES them. Bravo.

Sai Li's point was just what the "Correction" comment states: that current students did fill out the surveys. However, without any biographical information on them (sorry a list of names at the end of the book doesn't do a whole lot of good) and without knowing how those students were picked (i.e., whether they can be considered at all representative of their class and school), we are left not knowing how much weight, if any, should be given to their feedback. It appears as if the "Correction" review was simply an attempt by the author to increase the overall rating of the book by including an additional 5 star review. Pretty transparent, and I second Sai Li's recommendation to get your hands on the AAMC's MSAR book which is the only guide to medical schools officially sanctioned by the American Association of Medical Colleges.

This book excels in giving you the general flavor and background with respect to school curricula, strong and weak points, housing, entertainment, and other local info that would be difficult to find in any one source. I referred to it extensively and used it as a starting point for further research into schools I might be interested in. I have also found the descriptions to be mostly accurate, as far as the few schools I knew about in particular. Friends I knew, who were also trying to pick schools to apply to, got this book after flipping through my copy. Who exactly the student writers are, and their class standings are particularly irrelevant, as I would hope that you wouldn't base your application decision on any one source. As a general reference, and a peek into a particular school and it's local area, this book can't be beat! The few suggestions I would have would be to update this book every year or two (some of the info was slightly dated, as some schools have changed curriculum (e.g. going from traditional to organ-based, etc.)), and to standardize the descriptions a bit more if possible. Also, reading the great descriptions of schools that you're interested in, leaves you hungry for more, they could easily make this book twice as big, but then it would be a little less handy. *I haven't found any other book out there gives this broad a perspective, so I highly recommend it.*

Sai Li is certainly entitled to an opinion, however negative, of our book. However, there is a glaring error of fact in Sai's review. Every review, with just a few exceptions in which we could not find medical students at particular schools (fewer than 10 out of 126 schools), is written by a current medical student or recent graduate of the particular school. Their names are in fact listed in the back of the book. I'm not sure why Sai had this misperception, but I thought it was important to correct it.

It is my opinion that it is very difficult to write an unbiased account of the death penalty just because it is one of those divisive issues that tends to galvanize ones opinion firmly on one side of the issue or the other. It is also difficult in that each reader is going to have a bias that will be read into the text. With that said I do give this author credit in that for the most part he was telling a story and trying to have it be a just the facts type of reporting with no of his bias leaking in. Basically what you have is the story of a few of the guards and executioners at one prison in the south and 3 executions they performed over the 1980's. It makes for average reading given that the guards profiled have completely dull and pay check to pay check lives. The most interesting thing any of them do is their duties with the death penalty.

So the author is telling us the story of some uneducated, rather low paid men who's biggest claim to fame and achievement in life is to work at a job where every few years they help to kill a prisoner. I was only surprised there were not more heath problems, drug abuse and divorce detailed. Overall I thought the book was a bit bland, there is only so many pages of how horrible these guys lives are that the reader can stay interested in. Sure the details of the executions are interesting in a dark way, but that is not enough to make the book a winner. I would keep searching for another title to read on the subject.

I have read a number of books on prisons, punishement of criminals and the death peanalty. I have yet to find one that was balanced and this book is no exception.

From the title and information on the dust jacket, etc., you expect an insiders look at the death penalty and the men who are given the unenviable task of applying it. Instead, what you get (primarily) is a look at the death house at Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison and the 2 men who oversaw 3 executions there in the 1980s. The only form of execution that is covered, in a more than passing fashion, is the gas chamber, which as the book was published had been done away with in every state in the US.

To cover this subject fully, the author needed to explore the other types of execution in the US and speak to executioners in more than one state and who have performed executions by more than this method alone. His focus on death by gassing, which may be the most miserable form of death, is in itself, a staement against the death penalty.

There are better books on the history, types and operation of various execution methods. For a true view of the subject, I suggest one of them.

Solotaroff did a commendable job maintaining his journalistic integrity and objectivity, especially when reporting on a topic as controversial as capital punishment, and that I think, is the key to successful reporting.

The author provided a face to the otherwise annonymous executioners who serve the will of society (or at least the court system) by actually enforcing the sentence of death.

Solotaroff choronicled the life and work of a number of executioners, and discussed the emotional repurcussions of serving as a state sanctified killer. He was able to capture the tumultuous emotions that accompany a life at the switch, and a life of "playing god."

There seems to be a fine line between jailer and the jailed, executioner and murderer, and Solotaroff did a fine job of capturing these subtle differences, and providing the reader with food for thought in regards to the American death penalty.

This book was a great disappointment after Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Ride with Me was nothing but an excuse for Doig to make a little money from all he knows about Montana, a state whose geography holds no interest for me. The characters were unpleasant, and the plot was thin. The old man is nasty and cantankerous without justification. The lovers end up exactly where they began, so all that happens between them during the novel cancels out. The hours the characters spent driving around in that truck brought back many painful memories of the boring vacations my sister and I were forced to take with our parents to see the country. Dull, dull, dull! I'd have given this a minus score if that were a possibility. Zero is too good for it.

"Ride With Me, Mariah Montana" fits perfectly with "Dancing at the Rascal Fair" and "English Creek". The emphasis on well-developed characters and beautiful landscape descriptions continue to be foremeost. Beyond those, there is a story here, a complete story of a family. There are issues of grief, of loss, of love, and of reconciliation that are as real as day-to-day living. Fans of Wallace Stegner and Norman Maclean will find these works every bit as rewarding.

As a young American Studies major, I read _English Creek_ , the second book about the McCaskill family, for a class about the American West. I was enchanted. Then I read the first, _Dancing at the Rascal Fair_ (the first in the series) which enchanted me again. Close to ten years after I read my first Doig book, _Ride with Me, Mariah Montana_ yet again entertained and beguiled me. Doig is a gift to us readers.

There is not a single dud in this series. Even if you don't like "western" novels (and I usually do not), these are great reads with excellant characters.

The text is confusing, very baddly structured and hard to read. Because of the many different authors, the text is not concise. The diagrams and tables are often unprecise, leaving you with even more questions instead of answers. The book is a absolutely not the wright choice for learning immunology. For that I recomend Alberts: MBOC (immunology chapters) and Abbas 5th ed., which are much better books.

I READ THIS EDITION IN CHINA PUBLISHED...

DO YOU THINK STUDY IMMUNOLOGY?

GOOD CHOICE THIS BOOK...

I used an earlier edition of this text to study for Pathology board examinations (with the American College of Veterinary Pathology), and found it readily understandable (for someone with a veterinary degree and Master's degree in pathology) and well-laid out. I was so pleased that I purchased this recently for an associate starting a Ph.D. The text has chapters covering general immunology, evolution of the immune system, species differences, and essentials for understanding most aspects of immunology, from cytokines to cells to roles in infectious disease and cancer. The new edition incorporates recent information while retaining the basic flow. Altogether, this is still the best text on the subject that I have seen!

I think that this book resembled a yearbook, because it gave a fawning account of Oscar's life. Didn't really get any real feedback of his life, the pictures were superior though. For $24.00, those pictures better be good and of superior quality!

Just ordered the book for myself. I am a huge Dlh fan and liked the pictures that highlight the start of his career to the present. I would like to see a more current one though. A must for any Dlh Fan.

Now this is the book you want if you want anything of OSCAR DE LA HOYA! It has the best pictures! Eveyone needs to buy this book! It's AWESOME!

Like "Christian Identity" authors who seek to prove that "the Israelites" were "Aryans", the "Afrocentric" authors such as Ivan Van Sertima use a poor understanding and at-best tenuous grasp of historical fact to promote a distorted, racially-biased ahistorical narrative.

Unable to take pride in the actual social structures and culture of sub-Saharan Africa, a great deal of hollow effort is expended to manipulate data in such a manner as to promote a racial agenda.

Like those who applaud "Christian Identity" works, those who find this and other "Afro-centric" books praiseworthy have generally very little familiarity with historical sources, and/or a racially-oriented perception of their world which clouds their ability to process that information in a realistic way.

One need merely ask how it is, if Africa was so culturally advanced and at the root of European civilization, why it was, when the cultures again met as European explorers worked their way along the west African coast, that African culture was primitive in every respect, with absolutely no remnants technologically, architecturally, philosophically, etc. of an advanced culture (and this in spite of continued exchanges with Islam)?

I'd recommend by-passing racist claptrap altogether, regardless of which race is being presented as the superior, and to seek out actual historical sources.

"Snowden approached...all of the writings of the 'classical writers' of Greece and Rome for the actual references made to Africa and Africans...Ethiopians were the yardstick by which blackness was measured...European family crests showing black faces and coarse hair are accompanied frequently by such African derivatives as Mawr, Moore, Moorehead, Morris, Morrison, Mora, Maurice, Mareau, Moretti, Muir, Mohr, meaning a person from Mauritania [the Moors]. Sometimes the label is more indirect with names such as Schwartz, Schwartzkopf, and Schwartzmann, which are German for Black, Blackhead and Blackman...

...the physical evidence for a [black African] presence in Greece and Rome is compelling and extensive...including photographs of carvings, pottery, paintings and coins...it is only because the racism of the present is projected by today's authors into an ancient world that did not know racism as we do, that we have become so misinformed about Africans, and therefore misinformed about history."

from AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EARLY EUROPE
"Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience"
A review by Asa G. Hilliard

And now it's time for a really good book.

Ivan Van Sertima, genius anthropologist and author of numerous critically acclaimed books including the international best- seller THEY CAME BEFORE COLUMBUS, is the mastermind behind this collection of essays. These essays on the largely untold history of people of African descent and their influence on Western Civilization are from authors who have been all but ignored or maligned by much of the scholarly classical intelligentsia for decades (and in some cases centuries). However, thanks to the changing times, their work and historical perspectives--made practically impregnable with mountains of corroborative archealogical, literary and anthropological evidence--are coming closer to becoming the new standard with each passing generation. If you're a person who has a passing interest in this thing that people have been labelling "Afrocentric" scholarship for generations now, even from a modern sociological perspective as opposed to historical, this book, in its quilt of various writers, disciplines, perspectives, styles and subjects looped together with the thematic umbrella of Africa's cultural centrality and preeminence in the ancient world and its influence on every Western world in history thereafter, is a great place to start. Just the same, I would say this is more a book for anyone who, instead of being merely turned on by the intellectual side of the politics of Multiculturalism and Identity in modern times (which, unfortunately, is just another subtle form of applied racism), has found a spark go off in their minds about the subject matter in particular and what it means to the modern human's soul.

With Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and countless other figures of African descent in late 20th Century culture--not to mention Technology and Globilization's obliterating of the old plantation economic rules--America and Europe has had no need to hold so tightly onto the old rules of racist perspectives on other cultures to maintain a sense of intellectual order or economic/social supremacy. This has been evidenced by many aspects of today's world. Yet it is precisely this visible progress that makes such books as this, returning to a sober, balanced perspective on our actual past--our world history--MORE important, as opposed to not. There was a time--in fact, when most of the authors listed began writing--when such scholarship was taken as seriously as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock on stage. Now times have changed such that the Aryan intellectual paradigms that still govern so much of the unconscious of Western scholarship (wihtout the majority of us even realizing to what degree it has shaped our perspective on society and ourselves) have lost their hold on the world enough to let the light of truth shine in.

There is so much information about the African contribution to world civilization that merely contemplating it and its spiritual/cultural implications will create a transformative hunger in you for knowledge that otherwise would have never materialized. This book is a great appetizer in that context--and a great introduction to more than two centuries of wonderful full course meals.

As is usually the case with these kinds of books, they need an editor to fix several typographical errors that are pretty unnecessary. That and some of the writings that come off a little bit too much like sermons as opposed to lessons keep this from being a five star book for me. But none of that will stop you from from being fed by it; the bibliographies of each writer's essay alone make the book worth its weight in gold.

With works as varied, provocative and mind-blowing as Martin Bernal's lecture on the actual evidence of Ancient pre-Hellenic Greece's colonization by ancient Egypt, English author/professor Edward Scobie's revealing of the history of Black African Popes in the early Catholic church, and many others, this will easily become an important book in the library of anyone who owns it, regardless of ethnic background. Enjoy.

No book can have such an impact as this one. The truth about ancient civilizations wgo entered the inferior areas of western-europe

I just feel sorry for this lawyer who needs to attract attention by betraying his own people!

We tend to forget that charging anyone with a crime is only the beginning of the justice process: then there must be a trial to decide whether the accused is innocent or guilty. Show trials, staged for political purposes, are not concerned with guilt or innocence but with turning on a performance that will satisfy crowd emotions. Yoram Sheftel's book describes, with graphic inside detail, how a show trial nearly succeeded in hanging an innocent man accused of being a vicious concentration camp guard. Perhaps because Shoftel is a lawyer and not a political scientist, "Defending 'Ivan the Terrible'" dosn't explain the socio-political background equally well. It can be read as an exciting (although wordy) courtroom drama in which both the US and Israeli establishments are caught abusing power and the wrong man almost hangs. However, the book will make more sense if it is read against the background of the antagonism between secular Zionism and religious Judaism, for example, as illustrated by the Kastner scandal.

The author of this book is a very courageous Israeli lawyer who labored for more than eight years to prove that a naturalized American citizen of Ukrainian descent, John Demjanjuk, was "railroaded" by the American and Israeli governments, with help from Germany and Poland. It is a story of government deceit and coverup which rivals and in some ways surpasses both Waco and Ruby Ridge. The OSI in our justice department and the Israeli government needed a conviction, and they didn't care that their "vi

Like many of her fellow "Progressives," Jane Addams was born in the midwest and received an exceptional scholastic and religious education. She was strongly devoted to her father and shared with him a reverence for Abraham Lincoln not just as a man, but as a living ideal against which all men should measure their ideas and actions. Typical of many reformers of her era, Addams was not attracted to evangelical duty. Missionary work left her with a sense of futile detachment from the wretched social conditions she witnessed in East London. After visiting Toynbee Hall, Addams decided to establish a similar settlement house in the rapidly-growing city of Chicago, where "the evil and vices of American life seemed to be exaggerated." Her experiences at this settlement house are the subject of this book.

Although, on the one hand, Addams seemed the typical Progressive; on the other hand she did not follow many of the ideas of the more radical reformers. She was very practical and refused to be swayed by the claims of certain social movements and untried panaceas. she did not become a socialist. Although she greatly admired Tolstoy, she found his message "confused and contradictory" and doubted its suitability to the situation in Chicago. She deplored any violent tactics associated with socialist and anarchist groups despite their "noble motives." Addams demostrated an understanding of the ways in which strikes had a detrimental effect on people outside the labor movement (her dying sister was unable to see her family because the transportation system was blocked due to the Pullman strike. Unlike most reformers, she also had respect for the immigrant cultures represented at Hull House. A labor museum put native sewing machines and other instruments and crafts on display for all to enjoy.

One observation made by this reader was the animosity on the part of European reformers toward the work of the settlement residents. Tolstoy offered petty criticisms and one English visitor concluded that reformers in America were indifferent to the plight of the poor because they could not recite the "cubic feet of air required for each occupant of a tenement bedroom." Such remarks smack of a "caring competition." Addams, however, was well aware that the settlement house experiment was far from complete. Jane Addams' honest and humble account--albeit long and sometimes rambling (don't let the skinny paperback fool you)--demonstrated her unwavering commitment to achieving the improvement and unity of humanity.

Although, I did find this book to be hard to read at times, I did find it very interesting. It was an inspiring book, showing what a group of dedicated ladies can do when they set their minds to something. Jane Addams is quite the heroine along with the many other ladies that helped her run Hull-House. A very inspiring story. We should all be as dedicated to doing good in the world.

Most of the people who reviewed this book were forced to read it in college, admittedly. A couple of them openly confessed to having given up part-way through. My question: Why are you reviewing the book you haven't even read? Granted, it's not a Hollywood film, but it is perhaps one of the greatest works of the 20th century, written by an author who stands on par with Gandhi or Mother Teresa in her committment to social justice. Think about it this way: Addams' settlement house (or Hull House, as it was called) was like an ashram built in the middle of Chicago's dirtiest late 19th century slum. She was doing social work of a kind that had never been done before - working with immigrants, single mothers, orphins, troubled youth and the unemployed. The scope of her sociological experience has never been matched. Politically, Addams was an advocate for the abolition of war, and these views not only secured her the Nobel Prize, but also a black-listing with the House of Un-American Activities. I don't see what is not to like about this book. It is autobiographical in the strict sense of the term, but Addams was larger than life. If you are even vaguely interested in ethics, social work, sociology, social justice, or democracy, Addams' story will inspire and amaze you. Her life was a paradigmn of exellence. It was a life that will inspire you to achieve greatness yourself. I cannot over-recommend familiarizing yourself with this figure, and 20 Years at Hull House is the best place to start.