This book collects issues 7 - 10 and 4 of Todd McFarlane's short-lived Crow series. McFarlane bought the rights to the Crow, but the comic was cancelled after issue 10, because nobody really liked it. Jon J Muth does have a writing talent, unfortunately somebody made the mistake of trying to continue Eric Draven's story, rather than beginning anew.

If you decide to buy this book, do so only for the art, and not for the storyline. It's a shame, considering the vast talents McFarlane has at his disposal

I found the book confusing,not knowing what point the author was trying to make. He seemed to mix in different arguments for a certain aspect of decolonization without really a big transition. I didn't think it was well organzied, I felt lost.

Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the English ambassador to Russia (Sir George Buchanan) during the time shortly before the revolution, made something of a career of writing books and novels about Russia before the revolution. In "Dissolution of an Empire", a memoir, it shows. She writes in an overly emotional novelistic tone, making it fairly clear that her dialogue at balls and so forth is not to be relied upon, but is merely the SORT of thing she heard there. She consulted so many other works about the period that one is never really sure how much of what she is writing about she actually KNEW or WITNESSED. That in turn makes this into mostly just another book about the Russian Revolution-- told in a more fluid style than many scholarly works but with less valuable content. She has no new insights on the period. And for those who don't favor the style of a "Victorian novel" the book is very difficult to get through. There are many other memoirs of the period of more interest and better content. (I strongly recommend, for example, any of Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden's books.)

That Dunkirk represented a defeat for the British can surely no longer be doubted by anyone. It is, however, a fact that the saving of in excess of 300,000 British and French troops DID, whatever Mr Harman suggests, allow Britain to continue the war against ... Germany after the fall of France. Only in that context can the rather jaundiced term "miracle" be applied. Nevertheless at this stage the lack of a decisive victory for [Germany's] forces could well be considered a victory in a larger sense.

Mr Harman may well have researched this book thoroughly, but unfortunately he clearly only presented the facts that suited his own case. His constant use of Lidell-Hart, an alarming self publicist, and Fuller, a notorious member of the British Union of Fascists, as major sources stand only to illustrate this point. Equally his one sided presentation of the facts regarding Churchill and Edens' deliberations, in an attempt to promulgate the Petainist myth of "Perfidious Albion", illuminates this as an unsafe revisionist version of the truth. It is notable that works of this nature spring forth when those accused are entirely unable to answer the charges presented.

A significant amount of research wasted...

Great photos but ponderous writing. Page 83 excerpt, "The architects clearly enjoyed the possibilities of this experimental architectural archeology whereby a fundamentalist concept of authenticity is replaced by an inclusive and imaginative view of historical processes."

"A Gathered Radiance" is a slim book, less than 130 pages. It relies entirely on published sources, almost to a fault: entire paragraphs at a time are quoted from one book or another. Most frustratingly, only a few books are quoted this way, and they are the commonly-used first-hand sources: the books of Pierre Gilliard, Sophie Buxhoeveden (only her biography of Alexandra: her other two books were not consulted), Lili Dehn, J. C. Trewin (quoting Sydney Gibbs) and Ian Vorres (quoting Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna). Occasionally she quotes Sir George Buchanan, and a few other sources are consulted once or twice. But that's about it. The author has a few interesting insights, but mostly she just quotes. And quotes and quotes. On the other hand, you could say that at LEAST she quotes, allowing you to choose the merits of the quoted material yourself, rather than relying on her analysis. But that is not much to say for a book.

To sum it up, "A Gathered Radiance" is mostly a factual overview of Alexandra's life (with lots of quoting!), and the religious content (the author is billed on the cover as Nun Nectaria McLees) is fairly negligible: an introduction titled "Alexandra Romanov and Christian Monarchy" (which was actually sort of interesting) and an Afterword about Alexandra's canonization. Quite frankly, there are better biographies of Alexandra out there; this one doesn't have much to offer that can't be found elsewhere.

The most important thing to remember about the "Macedonian conflict" is that the Greek position has changed dramatically over the past decade. Official Greek government policy was that Macedonia did not exist. When Greece took over Aegean Macedonia in 1913, they killed, tortured and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Macedonians. They changed the names of people, villages, and landmarks from Macedonian to Greek in their attempts to eradicate the Macedonian name.

Two things to remember:

1. It is ironic that Greeks now "love Macedonia" when they tried to eradicate its very existence.

2. If Macedonia has always been Greek, why did the Greek government deny its existence until the 1980's?

The information contained in the book is very useful for 1st time teachers. If you have been teaching for more than a year you will have learned most of these things from trial and error. There are useful plans on how to build storage cabinets and bins. It recommends you share the plans with your shop teacher and have him help you with your room. There is also a great chapter that tells tips of the trade for teaching different mediums like clay, printmaking and painting. It deatils some time tested advice on things like how to set up for these projects and what disasters to anticipate for. There is a chapter with some activities and lessons I could have done without. I purchased this book for advice on how to layout my classroom and manage and keep up with supplies not for lesson plan ideas. I got a few solid ideas. Plus I will keep the plans on how to make organizational furniture for the future.

This is an excellent book if, like me, you are researching soil science and want to find a somewhere to begin reading about Mn in soil and plants. It is however one of the most boring books I have ever read. I would make two further comments about the book, the first is that one can walk away with any conclusion that one wants because a lot of the papers presented here contradict totally. This is probably a reflection on the conference that it reports. Secondly, soil science has moved on significantly with respect to looking at Mn in soil. One could better spent 100 and something dolllars reading some more recent papers. I have however referenced it in my PhD thesis because of its interesting observations of Mn in plants, specifically plant roots. To sum up, it is a good starting place for such an obscure topic but it could have been so much better. My advice is to look at it if it is in the library (and don't worry if you walk away confused, we did), but think twice about buying as there must be more coherant and up-to-date texts available. I hope you find this useful. Anton

Trying to write coherent military history about a battle that occurred almost 2,500 years ago is a daunting and problematic task. Written sources are few and often unreliable or fragmentary. Terrain can change so drastically over such a long period that simple things like determining the exact location of key events can be impossible. Artifacts such as weapons, equipment and human remains have usually deteriorated so much over the centuries that their use as interpretative tools is difficult and controversial. No one can argue that the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC - where Greeks defeated the first Persian invasion of their land - was a historically important action. Had the Greeks lost then or ten years later against the second invasion, there would have been serious historical repercussions on the development of later European culture and society. However, the task of writing a coherent Osprey campaign title on that subject is another matter. In Osprey's Campaign series volume 108, Marathon 490 BC, Polish archaeologist Nicholas Sekunda has decided to attempt this difficult task. Unfortunately, Sekunda's effort falls flat for a number of reasons - primarily because the volume is too oriented toward archaeological issues rather than military history. However another telling weakness is the slippery slope of interpretation built by every author who ever attempted to study Marathon; as Sekunda writes just before he begins his narrative of the battle, "the reader should be warned that virtually every account of the battle written reconstructs it [the battle] differently." If it is true as Sekunda suggests, that different authors could write different narratives of this battle due to the controversial and fragmentary nature of the evidence, then why should anyone read this account?

Marathon 490 BC begins with short sections on the origins of the campaign, opposing commanders, opposing armies and opposing plans. The campaign narrative is 55 pages in length, but the battle itself is covered in less than 6 pages. The volume concludes with a short aftermath, notes on visiting the battlefield today, a campaign chronology and a bibliography. Marathon 490 BC includes three 3-D "Birds Eye View" maps (the Battle of Marathon in three phases - deployment, Greek charge and Persian rout), and five 2-D maps (the Aegean in 499-492 BC, the campaign in the Cyclades, the campaign of Marathon, the plain of Marathon in 490 BC, and Marathon today). Three battle scenes by Richard Hook are also in the volume: Philippides before the Spartan ephors, the Athenian charge and the Athenian reach the Herakleion after the forced march back to Athens.

Reading Marathon 490 BC, several facts soon become apparent. First, that Sekunda is very well-versed in archaeology, very familiar with classical Greece and very familiar with the Marathon topography. Second, Professor Sekunda's methodology is erudite, but uninformative. He spends far too much time using the limited space of an Osprey volume to contest or illuminate various archaeological issues about the battle - issues that properly belong in an archaeological journal article, not a campaign summary. At the very least, Sekunda could have include some of his major points in an appendix, rather than choking the campaign narrative with tedious explanations of various diggings. Third, Professor Sekunda does not know how to write military history or to analyze facts of a military nature. For example, Sekunda advances the poorly-supported theory that the reason that the Persians divided their forces at Marathon was that they could not employ their cavalry advantage due to the possible Greek use of abatis obstacles. This is patently silly for several reasons that Sekunda obviously failed to grasp. The Persians were on the battlefield for almost five full days before the Greek army arrived, so the Persians could have employed their cavalry before the abatis were in place. Furthermore, where would the Greeks get the materials for abatis - Sekunda notes that the battlefield was mostly beach and marshland, with few trees. On the other hand, Sekunda also fails to ask the blindingly obvious question of why didn't the Persians employ obstacles to their front on the beach. Persian control of the sea meant that they had the time and the means to bring in material from elsewhere and construct earthworks, which would have hindered an assault by hoplites. On the main issue - why did both Persian flanks collapse under the Athenian charge - Sekunda offers not a wit of insight. Sekunda ends up telling the reader what he already knows - that the Greeks won - but he cannot explain why this occurred.

The only really strong point of this book is the order of battle data, which does a good job pointing out the relative strength, composition and disposition of each army. The three battle maps are decent, but given the very small area of the fighting and conflicting evidence, they really can't show much but general movements. In the end, Marathon is just one more of those historical events of which many of the pertinent facts have now been lost to posterity.