I bought this book along with the Ensemble Studio book. This book has a few tables that list the actual number of Attack Bonus of the unique units (like cataphract +8 vs infantry) that I can't find elsewhere unless you actually play the game (it becomes handy). Also the chapters on Campaigns are very very good (to me, better than the ES book on this aspect). I actually won a few campaigns using the guidance of this book that I can't win before. If you are starting as a single player and want to win the campaigns, I recommend this book. But if you want to be a good multiplayer gamer, this book offers no help at all and get the ES book instead (see my other review).

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I received the book through Air Mail three days ago and I just began reading yesterday, but I already recommend it. There is a nice introduction, and then it explains the civilizations, shows units carts and gives detailed strategies on maps. Then it takes an extensive explanation, during several chapters, on how to develop a civilization and rule the world. After, it shows detailed walkthroughs to each campaign. Some online ettiquete finish the book. I highly recommend it to any player who is beggining on Age of Kings, mastering, or playing knowing its brother, Age of Empires (my case). Buy it and excel at your games, I guarantee!

This is a highly interesting book, although it presents the President as a guy that just goes from swimming to sitting in bed all the time. It's probably not entirely accurate, but is still a good one.

I read this book when I was in Junior High. I still remember it after all this time. I think I must have read it at least five times. It is my most favorite of all Kennedy books because it is about his life on a day to day basis as a real person. I highly recommend this. It would be great to do one of these on President GW Bush.

Sondheim and Lapine wrote an excellent musical about the pointillist painter George Seurat. I really started to love the musical when I read Marc Bauch's "Themes and Topics of the American Musical" (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2001. ISBN: 3828811418), which I recommend to get to know how intertextually Sondheim worked. Bauch put Sondheim in the tradition of the American Musical with reference to his themes.

This show is like a work of the main Character Georges Seurat. Point and point are putted together to a great piece of art. Stepehn Sondheim who recieved the Pulitzer Prize for this astonishing work of American Musical Theatre puts all the points together to one brilliant composition of story and storytelling his co-author James Lapine who wrote the book while Sondheim wrote the lyrics does a great job, too. It is the most beautiful kind of lyric I ever had seen in this masterpiece: Children and art. I really enjoyed to read this book and it is essentially for everybody who is interested in the Musical Theatre.

I was challenged in reading Mr. Bishop's book not because of his academic ability, but because I had to respect his objectivity yet respect for the subject and the phenonenon of Bruce Lee. i do know what a pak sao and straight blast are. And I still found the book essential in understanding those concepts and activities as well as the activities of people in the JKD world. Perhaps this is why Mr. Lee dissolved his organizations before he died. Still, i was troubled by Mr. Bishop's compartimentalization and fragmentation, if you will, of martial arts from martial arts philosophy. They are inextricable and essential to understanding the whole. Until one experinces the martial art he left to many of his students, it will be difficult to understand how martial arts is not pugilism.

Since this book takes Lee as an intellectual very seriously, it is a good resource for students in philosophy and theology, such as myself, who draw on his thought in their writings. I've been trying to find a book that would list the books in Lee's personal library, and I've found one.

It's inspiring to know that there are academics like Bishop who are interested in giving space to Lee's thought in academic discussions in Philosophy or Theology.

With regards to Lee's relationship with the non-martial art world (i.e., those who don't know or have no interest in the significance of the "straight blast" in JKD), I agree with John Little who, in this book, says that there are more people who can learn from Lee's "motivational philosophy" than from efficient self-defense techniques.

Student of Pacific School of Religion
(Graduate Theological Union) in Berkeley, CA.

This is a good book for academic discussions on the philosophy of Bruce Lee, both in philosophy and theology. At last, there's a book that takes Lee seriously as a thinker.

John Little's comment in this book is important: Lee's thoughts might have more impact to the world (especially those who don't know what a straight blast or a pak sao is), more than his ideas on efficient self-defense.

A student of Theology
at Graduate Theological Union
Berkeley, CA

After catching the author on the Patrick Phillips talk show speaking about Bruce Lee, I went out and bought the book. I was very impressed with the impact that Bruce Lee has had on the everyday people Bishop has written about. I had no idea that Bruce Lee has made such a profound contribution to culture and civilization and the book has made me look at Bruce Lee in an entirely different light.

I don't normally do these kind of reviews, but I was moved to add my opinion when I saw the review posted by Oliver Sodemann of Germany. Did we read the same book? I thought this was a fantastic book, one of the best I have seen on Bruce Lee in the 30 years I have been collecting. Sodemann's comments sound more like a personal grudge against the author rather than a serious, constructive criticism of the book's faults or merits. While I admit the film credits section could have been more thorough, it was just a couple of pages at the end of what was otherwise a very well-written and inspirational book. Never before have I seen someone get so upset about something in the appendix of a book. I think it is ironic that the other review dated the same day praises the book for not leaning too much toward useless trivia and focusing on the important aspects of Lee's legacy. I'd put this book up there among the best of the bunch on Bruce Lee.

This book is a really great examination of what it is about Bruce Lee that so inspires millions of people. Once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. Too many books on Bruce Lee tend to be heavy on useless facts and light on substance. "Remembering Bruce" doesn't get bogged down by a lot of silly trivia and minutia, but instead focuses on the positive impact his philosophy and legacy have had on people.

I am sorry that the money was spent to give this book to me as a gift. It is not well researched and not well written. If you have bought everything that Abbey wrote, read it all, bought everything else, read them all, gone back and read at least Desert Solitare and Down the River again, then have to be able to say "I've read everything by and about Abbey"; well then you might, but only might, consider this book. Even then try to borrow it. In fact, I'll send you mine if I haven't tossed it. I have been an Abbey fan for years, not always agreeing but always admiring the point of view. This book was truely not worth my time, I am somewhat amazed that three other people thought it was. Oh well, just as you can say this about me I'll say it about them, there's no accounting for taste.

What a wonderful book! Reading it was like sitting with the author and talking about Ed Abbey over a couple of beers. Bishop's style is so smooth and relaxing. He could give a lesson to all current biographers: we don't need to know everytime the subject had tea with someone or tied his tie over the course of 800 pages! It was just the right mix of disscussion of his life and his books. The last chapter, "Farewell..." was very moving. Edward Abbey was a man I would have loved to have known personally because he was so interesting and caustic, and especially because I don't always agree with him, which makes an interesting mix. I have read 2 novels and 1 book of essays of Abbey's and look forward to reading everything else he has written. A real nice job by the author.

James P. Bishop, Jr. has created a vivid and real picture of a great man who was as human as the rest of us. I most enjoyed how Abbey's contrariness has been captured. After reading this book, not only do I feel I've come to know of Abbey in some small way, it has given me a greater appreciation for the American Southwest and the need to speak out against government intervention. Written with frank truth and compassion ... a rare combination.

Partisian's right, Towne and Strnigfellow paint an accurate, contemporary picture of Bishop Pike. Most people interested in the controversy surrounding the bishop and his trial for heresy nowadays will likely be Philip K. Dick fans eager to delve into the figure behind Bishop Archer in Transmigration of. Towne and Stringfellow provide the chance to do so. Readers can form their own conclusions on what Pike was really looking for in Judaea, what his views on the Trinity were and how his religious thought evolved towards what was then, in the 1960s, a radical form of social activism. Readers should know the authors don't like to beat around the proverbial burning bush as PKD does when he mulls Pike's life and death over. Their account reads more like trial testimony in places than Wilderness Revolt Action Adventures starring St. Thomas and John the Baptist vs. Evil Roman Time Travelling Tyrants. Still, a pearl at a pretty price for mere mortals managing to get buy on a meagre alotment.

Pike was one of the most controversial figures in American theological history. Before his mysterious death in the Judean desert the Bishop of California wrote on everything from situational ethics to the occult, he was a leading figure in the movement to desegregate the Christian church, was the target of a heresy trial that only succeeded in discrediting the whole concept of heresy in the American church. Towne and Stringfellow were Pike's contemporaries and thus this book is the best guide to the Bishop's life yet written.

This review is biased because I am related to James Duhig. Having said that, this book is a good read if you are interested in reading a real account of "Trinity" and the struggles that a poor Irish boy endured to rise to the highest ranks of the Catholic Church in Australia. Good reading, I hope you enjoy the book.

OK, first of all, I can't help but notice that in many of the negative reviews of Finnegans Wake the reviewer admitted to "not getting past the first page" or some such thing. I think that anybody trying to read this book needs to realize that it's not nearly as difficult as it seems on first impression. You need to approach it with an open mind, though. Don't expect it to follow any familiar rules, and don't feel lost when it doesn't. People who couldn't get past the first few pages probably let their biases of what a novel "should be" interfere with their enjoyment of the book.

Example: I just started reading FW for the first time, and I'm about halfway through it. So far I've enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm also a 17 year old senior in high school. I don't have the background to understand many of Joyce's allusions, I only speak two (English and Spanish) of the sixty languages he uses. But I still understand enough to know that I like what I'm reading. And even when I don't understand, it doesn't matter - simply the sound of the language is enjoyable. "As we there are where are we are we there from tomtittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo." What the hell does that mean? Who knows! But it doesn't matter, it rocks!

The point is that with an open mind and occasional extra research, I've gotten something out of Finnegans Wake. I know I haven't even scratched the surface, but it just goes to show that as inaccessible as this book may seem, there is something in it for everyone.

James Joyce's last novel, and incidentally the one his wife considered his best, is, as they say, unreadable, in that if you sit down and go through the book from cover to cover (as I have done) you'll only get the vaguest idea of what was going on. So if that's your idea of the all-time downer reading experience then spend your money on something else, because this is one of those books that is liable not only to change the way you look at life, but the way you read and think. Joyce called it a night book - the "action", such as there is any (and the action comprises pretty much all of human history and civilisation) takes place while the characters (a Dublin pub owner, his wife and family and sundry other unsavoury types) are asleep. But you'd never know that if I hadn't told you, because the language is a punster's dream (literally), a braided and twisted weave of most of the various tongues in the world, based on an idea by the English language, all to be spoken with a fairly strong Irish accent. (Non-Irish people often don't notice this, but the rest of us can hear it.) It's not a book to while away a plane trip. It's a book to spend a few dollars on and then spend the rest of your life dipping in and out of it for profit and pleasure. Some of it is pretty straightforward, such as the visit to the Willingdone museyroom or the episode about the chicken scratching around in the rubbish heap (a lot more gripping than it sounds), while other bits are maddeningly opaque. But if they read novels in heaven they probably read this one. The best way to get the most out of it is to have read every book ever written, but failing that, an open mind, an active imagination, and a sensitivity to the buried layers of meaning in words will get you through. Frank Zappa fans ought to love it; this is conceptual continuity with a vengeance. (Wow. I never thought the day would come when I'd get to review a novel by James Joyce.)

Here Comes Everything. Not Everybody. In terms of quantum reality theory and cyborg anthropology, The Wake is structured around a recursive temporal spiral, overlaying an archetypally-driven consciousness matrix.

While one could break the book down into a basic linear story, which weaves and meanders through the seven-stage structure, like a river, the reductionism or deconstruction approach is itself vulnerable.

While there are many serious threads, FW is also a minefield of literary and linguistic-phonentic puns. I once read a review in which the writer dismissed the word "upfellbown" as one of Joyce's many nonsense words. Nope. Upfellbown is a phonetic portrayal of the German word apfelbaum, or apple tree, which Joyce had mentioned slightly earlier in the text. Where people often go off the deep end is in attributing undue significance to these individual words.

If The Wake is about anything, it is about phenomenology or holism versus reductionism. The significance of the whole versus the sum of the parts. You don't understand The Wake, you experience it. On a vastly simpler level, the superb Bruce Willis movie 12 Monkeys brilliantly captures the beauty of the recursive temporal symmetry that underlies Joyce's re-entrant epic.

For those who have never read FW, it is basically about an Irish bricklayer called Tim Finnegan (Finnegans Wake being a traditional song, of sorts) who falls, probably drunkenly, from a ladder. The 'story' that follows is either his Death Dream or Near Death Experience, in which the entireity of Earth's history cycles through his mind. (There has even been debate about the identity of the Dreamer.) Symbolically, Finnegan's fall from the ladder could be representative of the Fall of Lucifer or the Fall of man.

The Wake means whatever it means to the individual reader at that point in his or her lifetime. For me, the many references to the Triple Goddess and Masonic ritual leaped out of the text. Yet had I not read so much about these things, the references would mean nothing. Yet, I have probably missed thousands of things that others will see.

Quick example... The three main female characters, Kate, Issy (Isis) and ALP form the principle references to the presence of the Great Mother/The Triple Goddess. Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are about return. The return to the cosmic womb of the Great Mother. The beginning and the end of Time.

Issy is Isis, who is in herself the Mother Goddess. Issy's room is blue with a ceiling of stars - "the twinkly way". A classic feature of the ceilings of Masonic lodges. Sirius, the Star of Isis is the Blazing Star of freemasonry, whose square and compass logo can be extended out to form a pentagram, depicting the four elements, plus the fifth element - the Creatrix. The third degree ceremony of freemasonry is a symbolic death and rebirth, symbolized by the skull and crossbones - the sign of Osiris risen. The Wake, which itself is about rebirth and resurrection - Finnegan = Finn Again, has many esoteric references, and even obvious ones, such as PHOENIX Park, and the fact that the book is set on March 21st, the Spring or Vernal Equinox - the beginning of the pagan New Year.

Aw hell, I'm rambling. That's the trouble with The Wake. It sucks you in. Give it a shot, but don't try to understand it from the outset. Try to just read it all the way through first and then maybe do some dissection. Whereas Ulysses is 24 hours out of Bloom's life, allegorically interwoven with the Ulysses myth (instead of returning to Ithaca, he returns to Number Seven Eccles Street), FW is just too massive to see a linear series of exact correspondences. There's also a great deal of literary chaff. The man had a sense of humour, after all.

The bottom line for me, is that The Wake is about the transforming power of the Feminine - like Mary Poppins, like Chocolat, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, like Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, like Cities Of The Red Night...

Here Comes Everything...

This book isn't as accurate as The Day Lincoln Was Shot. Jim Bishop, is accurate for most of the events that took place on November 22, 1963, except the facts about Lee Harvey Oswald. His statements about Oswald waiting for Kennedy on the 6th floor of the School Book Depository is flying in the face of all the eyewitnesses. No one saw Oswald on the 6th floor. He was seen on the 2nd floor five minutes before and 90 seconds after the assassination. Many people ran to the Grassy Knoll and not the School Book Depository after the assassination.

Bishop's statements about Oswald's mother trying to cash in on her son's death is wrong. She proclaimed her son's innocence to the day she died. If you watch the films of Oswald's funeral service, she's crying. Bishop tries to make you believe that she was a bad woman who raised a bad son.

If you want to find out the facts of the Kennedy assassination, this book isn't the one for you. It condemns a man who was "just a patsy", as he said the day before he himself was murdered.

This is a compelling book for assassination buffs such as myself, full of rich detail. I have lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, where Kennedy spent his last day, and the torrent of detail that spills out of this narrative animates the sites which I have visited so many times. There is this terrible mounting suspense as the main characters chitchat because you know what is going to happen. When Jack turns to Jackie and tells her to take her sunglasses off as they cross Turtle Creek in Dallas, a spot I've driven across many times, you fairly want to jump up and shout, "SCREW THE GLASSES! STOP THE CAR AND GET OUT! THERE'S A MAN WITH A RIFLE AROUND THE CORNER WHO IS GOING TO KILL YOU!" But they keep on going and there is no stopping them from driving on or you from reading through to the bitter end.

What separates Bishop's account of the day from Manchester's account of the day is the Kennedy family's support of Manchester and their lack of support of Bishop. Consequently, Bishop is more apt to relate events that would be buffed out of any account edited by the Kennedys. You get much more of a raw look at the events. For example, Kennedy viciously chews out an Air Force general because the weather forecast was wrong, leading Jackie to dress too warmly in her pink wool outfit. The Kennedys would have edited out this petty bullying.

Bishop also has a good feel for Oswald's mother, Marquerite, and Jack Ruby, both of whom were flaky to the point of insanity. Bishop could have delved a little deeper into Marquerite, a thoroughly annoying character. Once you understand Marquerite, you see where the madness began with Lee Harvey. Bishop also gives good insight into Jack Ruby, a major flake, by simply following him around as he weasels his way into the local action at fires, radio stations, and police stations with packages of sandwiches.

My only criticism is that Bishop did not pay as careful attention to getting the details correct as I would have liked. For example, he calls a KC-135 aircraft that flew a fragment of Kennedy's skull from Fort Worth to DC a "K-135." He says that the gun that Jack Ruby used to shoot Oswald was chrome plated. I've seen it on display in Dallas. It has a dull black finish like most handguns.

However, even with those types of errors, this is the second best book on JFK's assassination, right behind Gerald Posner's account. I could not put it down. It pulled me along until I finished and then I wished it had gone on further.

Jim Bishop is an outstanding writer and his format using hours of the day (i.e., 7:00 am, 8:00 am, etc.) took you to where everyone was at that time--Lee, JFK, the FBI Agent responsibile for Oswald, Jackie, the football, Ruby, etc,. His research was in-depth and made you never question its validity. I lived in Dallas when this event took place, but was too young to know what was happening. Jim Bishop took back to Dallas on that day and gave me more than I ever expected to receive from the book. This book will make you feel like a history buff. His excellent writing ability led me to purchase another of his books--"The Day Lincoln was Shot"--This one is "Ditto".