Nick Snider's book has been credited with bringing hundreds of new collectors to the field of sweetheart jewelry. As an avid homefront jewelry collector, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I was disappointed to find page after page of photographs with hardly any description or even identification! World War I jewelry was mixed together in the same photo with jewelry from World War II. Pins from American war relief organizations were listed under "foreign". Short essays at the beginning of each chapter were informative, but hard to relate to the pieces displayed with them. In my judgement, homefront and sweetheart jewelry collectors will still be looking for that "definitive guide" to our avocation.

A boy lives on a farm and gathers 10 old pails to create something special. This is a simple tale about the lost art of using one's imagination and creativity for amusement. It is a modern day farm, yet not one television or video game is in sight. Nice illustrations accompany the easy to read text.

I suppose that anthropologists, historians, sociologist and other scientists have to pay more attention to so called frontier communities, to such societis as for example the Cossacks. It's very hard to divine the real content of the new book by N.V.Feodoroff, but I want to hope that the author in his book confronts two mithologems: the Cossacks as "the glory of Russia" and Cossacks as "the enemy of people"... It's awfully important to scientist to beware of creation of any new myth in accordance with contemporary ideology. The truth must be the truth (as possible).

It intends to be the kind of book that is very much needed: a guide to and intelligent interpretation of the current extreme-Right movements in Europe. The Front National in France, the neo-Nazis in Germany, the National Front in England -- we need to know more about these. But this book is woefully superficial. My disappointment began when I saw that there is no index. Can you imagine, a book that purports to give information on all these phenomena without an index ? After that, beginning my reading of the text, I soon learned that the author's information is shallow at best. I have read a few other books on the subject and I found really nothing that I did not already know from these other works. On many details this author is quite wrong. On important matters, for instance the really significant split in the Front National of France, he says so little that he might as well have said nothing. His asides and psychological observations, now and then, rarely, give a little something. But then this author is so annoyingly pretentious that even the occasional apercu must be taken with a pound of salt. His disquisition on French grammar, error-ridden, will earn him a well-deserved F in that department.

While the first quarter of the book has nice pictures of Weimaraners and some (basic!) basics about the breed, for the most part the book is a template of a basic "how to raise a dog" book, without too many specifics related to Wiemaraners. You might be better off buying a Wegman book for nice Wiemaraner pictures and a basic dog training book instead!

Marvell's is not an easy life to write. His remarkable caution in a remarkable time led to a dearth of biographical source material. Murray, at times, seems to have limited sympathy for Marvell, and the thinness of his source material sometimes gives the impression of 'slightness' to his treatment. But in the last third of the book, I got a glimpse of a Marvell I'd never seen anywhere else - tough, fearless and at risk in ways we can't imagine. I give the book THREE STARS, but relative to other available biographies on Marvell, it probably deserves FOUR. If you're interested in Marvell, it's well worth reading.

A handbook for anyone interested in contemporary Nazism and the far political right. It is, however, becoming a little dated as some of the movements have changes names and directions, and some of the personalities have moved to new things.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes with an air of intelligence and knowledgeability, so I was somewhat puzzled to find a reference on page 296 to the ENGLISH Royal Family. As far as I am aware, there is no such thing ! Perhaps the author is American and does not know that England is just one part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The correct term would have been the United Kingdom Royal Family, and British Royal family would have been acceptable, but English, never !
The author leads the reader through the whole gamut of the extreme right, from the sinister to the plain ridiculous. From large worldwide organisations to the individuals with ludicrous conspiracy theories. Fascinating reading which will give you lead after lead for personal research.
Goodrick-Clarke's conclusion highlights the negative consequences which could result if the current trend of forcing multiculturalism on a reluctant indiginous population continues to be pursued. Disaffection with mainstream politics, and a new rise of the extreme right, could bring major divisive change. Here in Europe we are already seeing the beginnings of what he warns of, with the entry of the extreme right into mainstream politics via political parties with rapidly growing memberships.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written two outstanding books on Nazism and its links to religious/occult philosophies and figures: "The Occult Roots of Nazism" and "Hitler's Priestess." In both of those previous books (the first based on his doctoral dissertation at Oxford), he engaged in prodigious original source research and showed a bright light on subjects that had previously received either little attention or sloppy sensationalistic treatment.

If "Black Sun" is a trifle disappointing, it is so only by comparision with his own earlier achievements. This latest work is much more journalistic and relies, unfortunately, on others' research more often than not. Moreover, Goodrick-Clarke, in attempting a survey of current aryan/Neo-Nazi/Satanic/far right groups and writings, ends up covering ground already covered in books like Joscelyn Godwin's "Arktos," Kevin Coogan's "Dreamer of the Day," and his own "Hitler's Priestess" (which is about Savitri Devi, who combined Hinduism and Hitlerism).

It is not as if Goodrick-Clarke didn't spend his time in the trenches: it appears that he engaged in extensive correspondence with a number of his subjects and, as always, he has obviously read and digested much of the material that he summarizes in a clear-cut fashion. His chapter on Miguel Serrano breaks new ground in reporting on the extent of that author/diplomat's eccentric Hitler worship. But on other figures of the neo-nazi fringe, such as David Myatt, one is left with the impression that Goodrick-Clarke may have given too much credence to their own self-presentation or, conversely, to the hyperbole of their critics.

Make no mistake, this is as good a summary of present neo-nazi, extreme right ideas and personae as one is likely to find, but in dealing with the current scene - in a book that was written over the course of nearly a decade - "Black Sun" falls prey to the criticism, (voiced in some other reviews here,) that it is not entirely accurate or up to date. Especially in dealing with the knotty and ambiguous area of neo-nazi and Satanic overlaps, Goodrick-Clarke would have benefitted from inside information which was apparently beyond his grasp.

Still, it is never quite cricket to criticize a book for what a critic thinks it should be or might have been. There is much information here that cannot be found anywhere else, and with the caveat that one should double check any facts that may have been superceded by subsequent events, "Black Sun" is a compelling read.

The Black Sun is a very good book. It deals with info no other book has ever dealt with. I'm not sure why so many of these reviewers have dissed this book so. I imagine some people just don't want this info out.

This book is absolute rubbish! Don't even waste your money on it. You'd do better reading The Cat in the Hat rather than this. For any Romanov fan, this book is a must-a must throw in the trash. I don't know why people still insist that Aleksey survived Ekaterinburg. Just drop it. He didn't survive. Anastasiya didn't survive. Maria didn't survive. None of them survived! They most likely just burned the two "missing" bodies and scattered the ashes around the site...

I don't think so. At least I'm not convinced. I found the history and the narrative fascinating. However, when I got to the doctored pictures, I thought, "Hey, a DNA test would settle the question." Why hasn't it been done? There was talk of "not enough money" but surely a DNA test can't be all that expensive, and they've already been done on the Romanov remains found in the mass grave.

This book included documents and photographs I had not seen before. I intend to keep it because it is interesting.

By the way, at the time of the Alexei and Anastasia "pretenders," how did they know that two bodies were missing from the grave, and how did they know which two were missing?

Appearances are deceiving: just as the man on the right of the cover doesn't look a bit like the little boy on the left though they are supposed to be the same person, this book is not really about "the escape" of Alexei Romanov, as the title says, but about a family who honestly believes their father/husband was actually the tsarevich. If you want solid historical documentation and scientific data of this fact, you'll be terribly disappointed. But if you only want to explore, open-mindedly, a very exciting possibility that more than likely is *not* true, you may have a good time reading this book, and learn a little bit on the way too. I did. The book has many faults: it is a bit frankenstein-like in its clumsy attempt to glue together its different parts. There are repetitions, contradictions; boring and useless material. It also ignores obvious questions such as, what happened to the other missing body or, weren't Alexei's and this guy's eyes of a completely different color? But the book also has a nice layout, plenty of pictures and the testimony of family members that in the least reveal a personal and often moving picture of life at the times of one of the most important events of the last century: the Russian communist revolution and its aftermath. It also has an incomplete but interesting theory about how the tsarevich might have escaped his execution and survived since then, though of course the holes in it at times seem bigger than the cheese. But, who knows, in an event so confuse and controversial such as the execution of the tsar and his family, with questions still unanswered (where are the two missing bodies, for instance?), this book might just have the enough amount of "possible" to make you enjoy the ride. After all, though according to the executioners the tsar and his family were all shot, bayoneted and confirmed dead, should we really take only the word of a bunch of cold-blooded killers for it? When you finish this book you'd probably be at least curious to see the results of a DNA test comparing the Romanov and Filatov families. And whatever you chose to believe or think more reasonable, in the end you may also find yourself wishing it was all true, wishing that the little boy who had such a difficult life since he was born suffering from a painful condition, had indeed survived the terrible ordeal his family went through and lived to have a rich and reasonably happy life. And, most of all, lived to become the nice guy the man on the right cover of the book was, if not on his external appearance, at least in character and spirit.

More travelogue than guide. The author seems to be saying "I did this better than you ever could."

I found this book out of date and difficult to use. Fortunately my travel companion had another Burma guidebook that served us well. Burma is a difficult place to travel in and a thorough guidebook is essential. I would also strongly recommend a local guide. It will make the trip a lot easier.

I liked this book for the very reason other reviewers did not -- it is not "just another guide book." It incoroprates cultural, political, and historic information along with suggestions of places to go, eat, and lodge. Since I have more interest in getting into the heart of places I visit rather than merely skiming the tourist-surface, Greenwood's book provided the extra guidance to help me get to where I wanted to go.

This book trying to cover everything among three-tier design within 470 pages, which is impossible. In order to understand this book, I need to read other books, like "Javaservlet" and "Beginning XML". But after I finish those reading, this book is not necessary anymore, so why wast time on this book? Some of the programs in this book are not executable and even worse.....some figures (screen shot) are misplaced.
My opinion of this book is "terrible"!

The title of this book seems to imply that it is meant to teach you both Java and Xml in one go, but you really need to have already done some serious Java programming and particularly have a few servlets under your belt. It an excellent book for those who wish to learn the specifics of using Java to read and write Xml. It takes you by the hand and shows you how to turn your servlets into applications that can turn XML into any format for the web or B2B using SAX, DOM, JDOM in Java programs to take advantage of the power of XSL, XSLT and XSD.

The pace of this book was its best feature, starting with HTML and CSS and then slowly adding in XML & XSL before jumping into the enigma of server side transformations using Java. You may want to pick up "Java 2 From Scratch" or another intro to Java book prior to reading this. I think this book was a great attempt at fusing two complex languages and sets up a good foundation to move on to more detailed books.