I purchased this book with the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of the more esoteric functions of my camera. I was disappointed to find that at best, this book is an iteration of the manual provided with the camera, and at worst, provides irrelevant and even inaccurate information. The Magic Lantern Guide for your Canon A2/A2E is the same price and a much better buy.

William Spanos has his good moments, but you won't find any of them in this book. Wow, can you say BAD?

First of all, you can't read Spanos without a deep knowledge of the work of Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida. But once you've overcome that hurdle, you'll find that this book is far more boring than anything Melville ever wrote, and not particularly intelligent.

What is appalling is Spanos's overwhelming arrogance. For years, Spanos has been writing about the Vietnam War as an event that delegitimizes the discourses associated with the idea of America and of the triumph of democracy. Now he's arguing that contemporary studies of Melville and his Moby-Dick are deeply implicated in a rush to bury the event of the Vietnam War.

COME ON!

I don't just say that because it sounds dumb. I say that because it IS dumb. Spanos essentially ignores the important points of the book and focuses on individual phrases that he says modern literary critics have forgotten. Why have they forgotten them? Because they're insignificant, dispersed, and totally unimportant. For example, Spanos takes one minor passage in which Ishmael reflects on the sermon and argues that it proves that Melville is a prototypical postmodern writer (and thus anti-Vietnam... another faulty assumption Spanos makes) AND that it proves that Melville doesn't believe in symbolism.

EXCUSE ME? MELVILLE DOESN'T BELIEVE IN SYMBOLISM?

I wonder whether Spanos has an understanding of Moby-Dick that even rivals that of Cliff's Notes. It doesn't take an intelligent person to see symbolism in Moby-Dick. But does Spanos see it? Nope.

Even if we buy that Melville doesn't believe in symbolism and is a postmodern writer, what does that have to do with Vietnam? This problem looms over the book, and you'll have to look to HEIDEGGER AND CRITICISM (1993) for an answer. Essentially Spanos thinks that anything remotely associated with humanism or America in general is complicit with violence like the violence we saw in Vietnam. So being a post-humanist means not being complicit with the violence of Vietnam. So he goes on to say that Melville (in a theoretical way) predicted the Vietnam War and delegitimized the discourses enabling it.

I almost wanted to put down the book when I read that. This is academic writing it its most ridiculously stupid. Ridiculously stupid.

This book was horible, The author should be banned from even writing books (Or even her name for that matter) Don't buy it!

I'd like to rate this zero stars.

The enthusiastic catch singer will find nothing of use in this outdated, overpriced collection of what could have been an excellent compilation of English vocal composition of the period. "Modern Use" should have been stripped from the title. The book is an exact reprint of the edition which originally appeared in 1876, edited by one Rev. J. Powell Metcalfe, who, with typical Victorian squeamishness, has altered the words of over 50% of the songs, replacing the original text with his own sorry drivel.

The whole point of singing a catch is to convey a meaning which is apparent only when the words of contrasting verses are sung in counterpoint. Of course the musical scores are faithfully reproduced, but Metcalfe's meddling impoverishes these songs, reducing them to mere curiosities which no modern audience would care to hear.

The only redeeming feature of the book is a set of short biographies of the composers which appears in the preface.

This book is a big disappointment! It's a horrible misuse of technology.

It appears that the book is based on a standard book about photography in general, kept on a word processor, that is customized a bit for each different camera. That way, there's enough material to hold the covers apart. A word processor can make a good book better, or it can provide a platform to crank out a lot of books that are not very different from each other, which appears to have happened here.

For an advanced digital camera like the S20, the general sections on photography and how cameras operate are not terribly applicable. It appears that the author couldn't handle how to do S20 night shots using the standard material, so he just threw in some mentions to the S20's controls and left the inapplicable general material in there.

If you are considering this book as a supplement to the camera's manual, go back to the manual, at least it's all relevant to what you want to do! And if you are considering this book because you've lost your manual, go the Canon Web site and get another manual, it will be more effective and it's a lot easier to carry around.

Don't buy this book!

Dutton's 1882 Tertiary History is a literary and scientific masterpiece: those who have read Thoreau and Muir will certainly agree with Stephen Pyne that this work is more imaginative than that of the other giants 19th-century nature writing. Too, I find the prose more compelling than that of Thoreau. And while some of the science (i.e., interpretation) may have changed since Dutton's original study, the data that Dutton presents with both care and flair has not. But an extremely important part of this book is the illustrations, specifically the wood-cut lithographs of drawings by Thomas Moran and William Holmes. These were not added to the original book as flourishes; they were, in addition to their beauty, illustrations of the scientific and aesthetic points Dutton was making in the text. Looking at an 1882 original, or even at the 1977 Peregrine Smith reproduction, one discovers these illustrations to be a delight: the capabilities, even in a black-and-white lithograph, to produce subtleties of light and shadow are astonishing. Not so in this UofA Press production. Their lack of care in figure replication and in overseeing the printing process has ruined most of the beauty of the lithographs: most are so over-inked that much of the detail is lost and the figures seem dull and lifeless. In fact, many of these lithographs are better replicated in the...Penguin Nature Classics paperback version of John Wesley Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River. UofA Press has done a great disservice to an important work. Save your [money]. Go to a library and delight in one of the earlier versions. Too, the entire Atlas that accompanied the monograph can be viewed on the WWW through the Library of Congress site.