Ever since 14 July 1988 when I read Chronicle of Youth with absorbed attention and keen feeling I have been fascinated by Vera Brittain. This fine work, without duplicating Chronicle of Youth, sets out the letters written by her and her brother and friends till all her correspondents were killed in the war. This is a poignant work, well worth reading. One stands amazed and impressed by the eagerness of these Englishmen to serve their country, even though they knew the hell that the Western Front was, and though so much was repellant about the condition under which they soldiered.

Anyone who is interested in WW1 and the men and women who lived it, should read this account of the war first hand!

This is what the war really meant to people, both in and out of the trenches, for these are the letters written from and to them.

A thought provoking book, that it is true, is even more shocking.

It is about a generation of people that we should never forget.

I have been interested in Vera Brittain since her autobiography, Testament of Youth, was featured on Masterpiece Theatre in the 70s. I came across this new book by chance when looking for Testament, which my book group is reading and enjoying this month. This collection of letters not only recaptures Vera, her brother, and three close friends, it adds great dimension to their WWI experience. This is a book I will treasure a long time.

This is true!!! I read this book when I was pregnant with my first child in 1991, and it changed my life. I am now a doula with an BS in nursing on track to be a midwife by 2001. The 3 people, 3 fellow nursing students, who I have given copies of this book to, to help them with their birth experiences, are also persuing careers in the OB-GYN 'field'. The 10 women that I have loaned this book to have all come back to me to confide that they too believe that there are purely physical totally sacred things that we humans must acknowledge. During their birth experience they trusted them selves because they 'just knew, the same as the women at the farm just knew'. Every woman I have ever spoken to who had a powerful, positive birthing experience admits that they read this book before the birth and now have this book in their permanent library. Please understand that there are many people who have never read, seen or heard of 'Spritual Midwifery'. The majority of mothers that I know have not read this book,BUT the ones who have are deeply empowered and committed to empowering more birthing mothers. OH, and get used to over coming the language-generation-gap while reading this book, it will be good practice for when you have teenagers!

Spiritual Midwifery changed my life in two ways. First, this book showed me birth scenes that were loving and powerful; it made me want to share in that experience. Secondly, it inspired me to write a book of my own, GIVING BIRTH: A JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD OF MOTHERS AND MIDWIVES (2002), in order to give women an updated view of midwives today. I interviewed and observed dozens of midwives and mothers, and many, many of them raved about Ina May Gaskin's book and her work. I even interviewed a pair of obstetricians who had gone to The Farm to have their baby with Ina May! I love the window into the lives of birthing women, their partners, their babies, and the midwives who helped them that Spiritual Midwifery offers. It is fantastic.

This is truly the best book I've ever read on childbirth. It is full of real stories of real women giving birth-the good bad and ugly. It is very inspiring. NOT your typical "breathe, play cards and study Lamaze book!" Full of practical advice as well as detailed information written in plain english for midwives. Full of pictures, art and wisdom. Pati Faul

Mark Bishop has written a geneological history of most, if not all, of existing karate styles that have their roots in Okinawa. Though his work is not sourced and footnoted as is customary in academic writing, he does indicate that his information comes from interviews with karatedo masters in Okinawa, and presumably these interviews were conducted in the masters' native language. Since the vast majority of martial arts "history" is oral, and his book is so detailed, I find his accounts quite credible. In this book, Mark Bishop has done a good job of conveying the commonalities of all karate styles, despite the efforts by some to differentiate and mysticize them. Bishop should also be commended for debunking the frequently told myth that martial arts began in Okinawa when weaponless peasants developed fighting techniques to counter the aggression of Japanese samurai. He also presents his interview subjects as real people -- some of the karate masters he interviewed struck him as slightly bombastic or secretive, while others came across as humble and eager teachers. Instead of editing these impressions out he includes them.

This is not the book for people with little or no experience in the martial arts looking for a guidebook so they can learn how to win bar fights. The book is most valuable as a historical reference.

I found this book to be an excellent introduction to all of the martial arts in Okinawa. Mr. Bishop tries to write something about all of the differrent styles, their techniques and the lineage. Dates are given where possible with photos and skecthes where necessary. Very entertaining read.

Wow, I felt as if I visited the dojos addressed in this book. It did serve to demystify Okinawan Karate, which I found a mixed blessing. As they say, "ignorance is bliss." Oriental culture tends to venerate ancestors and "those that have gone before." While that is a noble practice, it can also be maddening for the Westerner that is not adept at reading between the lines to get to the truth. Mr. Bishop does a wonderful job at calling it like he sees it. In the end, this is an excellent overview of Okinawan styles of Karate. It contains a very detailed look at many different styles including philosophies, training methods, history, current conditions, and personalities. Although it didn't address every style of Okinawan Karate, I would recommend this book to assist those interested in picking a style, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone already interested in Okinawan Karate.

Augustine's Confessions combines an intellectual biography and conversion story with apologetics and theology. It is an essential source document on one of the most highly regarded Western thinkers and for early Church history. As a conversion story, it sets the standard in Christian thought. In short, any serious student of Christianity cannot afford to miss reading this book.

The Penguin Classics edition, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, provides a good translation. However, you are going to get what you pay for. Like most books in the Penguin Classics series, this edition of the Confessions leaves a lot to be desired. It has a bare bone's introduction, no notes to help the reader understand obscure passages, and no index. This edition is fine if you want to read Augustine without the distractions of commentary. However, if you want to seriously understand the Confessions, spend some more money and get an edition with better support.

I was asked to read this book as a freshmen in college and I loved it. It is not an easy read, but once you read over a part once more, Augustine's logic makes perfect sense. If you've read any other Augustine, such as "Freedom of the will", this book fits right in there and explains it perfectly. In fact, this book explains most of Augustine's tenants perfectly. If anyone wants to know why Christianity took such a harsh stand against sexual sins...it's Augustine lashing out at his past. He was really tormented. Worship God or worship sex. He chose God and I'm sure he thought about going back. Augustine also developed the full Christian idea of free will, which is manifested in this book as well. Augustine is an incredible figure and a role model for modern Christians. His trials are not much different from ours, seeing as we live in a society so obsessed with sex. Augustine's Confessions is one of my favorite books. A must-read for any theologian and philosopher.

After Sacred Scripture itself, perhaps no other book has brought more people to a deeper understanding of the truths of the Christian faith than "Confessions." Simply put, it's the story of one well-educated, intelligent man who led a profligate life in a sophisticated pagan society. It took his mother, prayer, and the grace of Almighty God to make him a saint--and indeed one of the greatest saints of the Catholic Church.

What is most striking about Augustine's story is how easily it relates to our own lives and our own times. It is impossible to read "Confessions" without seeing a little bit of yourself in his tales of his early life. The book is perfect for anyone struggling with their Christian faith. Indeed, it helped bring me back to the Catholic Church.

This translation is well-written and highly readable. I own it and highly recommend it.

I haven't been impressed at all by this book. We are building a web site that will eventually use 11 languages so we have kind of a high interest and knowledge on the subject ;-).

We found that the book was rather imcomplete it doesn't talk about how codesets are handled in forms. It also contained some "errors" such as suggesting the use of a flag to represent the various language (this is definitelly not politically correct!).

But I guess for $20 you still get a few good tips.

Here at Honda we purchased 50 copies of this absolutely informative book. While it's out of print now, we bought several more copies from online We have made it required reading for a number of corporate offices, both in Japan and Southern California.

If company is on the web, and you're offering products and services to a worldwide market, this book is required reading! Among the first books ever to address the web and becoming truly international.

I heard about this book last week and I wanted 20 copies for my IT department at Zacky Farms. A friend lent me his copy and I was awakened by this insightful and very helpful "how-to" book.

If anyone is serious about Web e-commerce then they got to get this book! I heard a revision is upcoming, is this true?

Erica Hui, Senior CPA for International Sales

I mostly agreed with Eric Ma. There are some areas that Wrox needs to review the whole process of publishing Java-related books. Here are some drawbacks that I can draw from reading recent Java-related books:

(1) Repeated Contents: Materials about Servlet, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, etc are repeated over and over many books. This could waste time, money, and papers for both Wrox and readers.

(2)Books or Articles?: I asked myself: is Wrox publishing books or articles? Each book is written by many authors and the book's flow is inconsistent. The assessment that it is not a book but a collection of articles may partially true. It is true that a book if written by a team of authors could speed up the process of releasing it, but if Wrox editors and coordinators have to do their better jobs.

I suggest that Wrox should review its strategy of publishing books to avoid the repeating of materials over and over and thus bring down the cost associated with publishing the books. The final result is: readers and publisher will both save time and money. Otherwise, readers will loose their belief with Wrox.

For the past 2 years Wrox has been publishing books dedicated to Windows-based data access (ADO etc.), but the same cannot be said about their Java/database collection. Although you find chapters on JDBC scattered all-over almost all server-side Java related books by Wrox, there was no single volume from them that teaches JDBC first, and then show how it is used by the newer dependent technologies, until this book arrived. After looking through this book, I must say the authors and editors have done a rather commendable job.

Why do I make the above conclusion? Let me give you my general impression of the book first. A theme repeated in several of my recent reviews on books from Wrox is about the problem in coherence associated with multi-author books. Well, having more than a dozen of authors for a single book seems to be a fact of life (for books from Wrox at least) now, as the publication cycle gets shorter. I was rather surprised to find out that the organization and coherence is very good in this book, i.e., there is very little overlap among chapters. Also, this books uses JDBC cleverly to tie other pieces of J2EE together, making smooth transitions from one chapter to another. If you want to know, this factor alone prompted me to add an extra star to the overall rating of the book.

Let's now run down the chapters of this book quickly. The first 115 pages deals object-oriented and database modeling, and can be skipped by any "Professional" developer. Then after your obligatory intro to JDBC API, the next chapter covers the JDBC 2.0 optional package. This is the best treatment of this topic I have seen. Then another chapter is all about SQLJ, another first. The effort of having a chapter on database performance should be lauded, where connection pooling, prepared statements and stored procedures usage are demoed. The reminder of the book is about applying JDBC in various J2EE components, such as JSP, servlets, EJB, JMS, and XML. For this part of the book, even though I accept the fact the proper stage has to be set for each one of them, I still don't believe the book found the right balance between focusing on JDBC and showing what these other technologies are about. A large number of pages are used to teach basic JNDI, servlets, JSP's, and EJB's stuff (remember there is already a book on J2EE from Wrox!). Therefore, it is up to the reader to discover the real nuggets of gold hidden in this pile, which are far and in between in places. I found that some critical issues are not highlighted or details are lacking, such as how to use connection pooling/data sources in servlets, JSP's, and EJB's, the threading issues related to sharing database connections, and good database practices in BMP EJB's. However, the one thing I cannot complain about is that the book did not forget to teach the transaction aspect of EJB with a good depth (there is a short ans sweet chapter on using JTA/JTS inside EJB). There is also a chapter on the brand-new JDO framework, even though the spec is still in a state of flux. Finally, there are 4 case study chapters in the book - although the design and implementation are limited in scope and as a whole those samples do not teach all you need to do know about enterprise scale J2EE system development, they do provide a flavor of how JDBC is used in real world, together with setting up Tomcat, JRun, Orion, and WebLogic to access MS SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Now my overall take of this book. For VB/SQL and pure back-end PL/SQL developers who are eager to jump on the Java express train and need a suitable platform (especially for the ones who learn best from playing with actual code), I recommend this book as one of several you should own. Compared to other JDBC books from say O'Reilly and Sun's JDBC Tutorial, this book is the most up-to-date, contains the most source code, and has the broadest coverage of related topics. But keep in mind some of the advanced topics such as EJB and JMS can be intimidating for new-comers. On the other side of the coin, people who are advanced in various server-side Java technologies are unlikely to benefit a great deal from this book and should look elsewhere for info (for example Wrox's J2EE and upcoming EJB titles).

I have almost finished the book now (up to chapter 8). It is an excellent introduction to VB.Net and the authors explained the concepts very well. The code samples are easy to follow and accurate, well sort of. Although not the fault of the authors, some features are now superceded by Beta 2 version of the software. The most noticeable difference is in the data access area.

All in all, I find the book very useful and is a good introduction to VB.Net. The only exception is chapter 8 where the authors tried to cover too many topics at once.

Since the release of Beta 2, you need to be mindful of the differences between Beta 1 and 2 (the book understandably only covers Beta 1 but it does try its best to alert readers of potential changes). If I buy the book now I will use this book as a guide but also go through the walkthroughs and sample codes that come with Beta 2 installation which is more up to date.

This book was not meant to teach VB.NET. It gives a very nice overview of the new VB.NET. You have to be a very experience VB developer to rip the benefits out of this book. Chapter 5 explained OOP and how it works in VB.NET. I expect when Wrox writes VB.NET OOP or VB.NET Professional, it will delve deeper in the concepts of OOP. So far this is the only book I’ve read that explains VB.NET and how it works with the .NET Framework.

Overall, this book is for experience VB developer who is not looking for VB training but the changes and how to deal with them. Good Book.

I was very skeptical of this book, as WROX has dropped the ball before, with their "intermediate" type books.

Fortunately, this book did a nice job of presenting the new concepts, that we all have to look forward to, and backing them up with concrete examples of how we will have to change our current "code thought" to make them work.

I was a bit disappointed with the lack of discussion about some of the larger issues that may present themselves in .NET, like late-binding not being supported; however, all in all, the book covered most other "rumors" that I had heard, and questioned.

One other plus, was the coverage of Object Oriented Programming with VB.NET. Having never programmed C, I was glad to see a good deal of attention given to explaining concepts like "encapsulation" and "inheritance", which I, for the most part was unfamiliar.

I'm very pleased with this book, and have recommended it to several co-workers, who also purchased it and were happy with it. It's a good buy, and it's good preparation material, for what's to come.

This book is an attempt by Mark Bishop to do a complete history of Te and weapons martial arts in Okinawa. He goes into archeological evidence of early stone weapons in the early parts of this book and then proceeds through generations of royalty and the modern folk tales of weapons and Te experts from the turn of the century.

Unfortunatly, there just isn't a lot to talk about concerning these subjects. Much of the information, especially 100+ years ago is difficult if not impossible to substanciate. I thought that this was going to be another book like his first where he got stories concerning Te and Kobudo and tried to sort through them by comparisons between different masters. This isn't what the book is.

I felt that there wasn't much substance to the book and I was much better off with the Kobudo and Te section from his last book where he wandered from dojo to dojo talking to masters about their styles. Certainly, that section in "Okinawan Karate" was probably larger and certainly meatier than this entire book, which was much too small and unsatisfying.

This is for a die-hard amateur karate historians only. There are some facts (not really fully referenced unfortunately) that aren't available elsewhere that are worth looking at, but they could fit on just a couple of pages.

Mark Bishop writes well, and does so again here. With the title I was expecting more. Like his first book, stories about weapons and the Master's who used them. Instead what we have is a history of weapons. He goes from the stone age through the Okinawan weaponary.

The very first section does a great job of cataloging the various types of weapons practiced with in Okinawa, including the umbrella.... I feel this. like all of Mr. Bishops book should ne in your Martial Arts library.

Mark Bishop; the next Donn Draeger of this century ! Mr. Bishop with all his usual depth and research plumbs what assuredly is "obscure" to even those who MAY perhaps fathom it. To those of us who ARE fellow practitioners of a given ~martial path~ this work's purpose is somewhat obscure. The intended message is somewhat clouded.... regretably. Perhaps the next time round...