Despite, or perhaps because, the illustrations are somewhat stylised, but beautifully set with foliage and flowers, this book is a classic coffee table book (if the table has strong legs!). It will be purely by accident if it helps you identify birds you see (and will take up your whole knapsack if you took it into the field!) but it is a joy to turn through, sensuously, in front of a log fire, remebering those very days in the field and remembering how long birds have been on earth and how long we have watched them.

And, sacreligious as it may seem, at USD30, buy two and take one apart to frame and line the walls of your study.

A classic in every sense of the word!

I am the registrar of a small educational institute that teaches courses on, among other topics, world religions. _Scriptures of the World's Religions_ is one of the two central texts that we use because of the high quality of the text.

This is a wonderful collection of poetry readings by some of the best actors in the world. If you allow yourself only one tape of poetry, I would recommend this one. The rendition of Lawrence's "The Snake" is spellbining, and the reading of Macneil's "A Death in the Family" is quietlly gut-wrenching. And you will be surprised how well Bill Shatner recites about whales. Buy this tape, and you will listen to it again and again.

This compact little book includes postcards of six favorites from Audubon's watercolors in the Birds of America: Great blue heron, Wild turkey, American white pelican, Roseate spoonbill, Whooping crane, and American flamingo. The quality of the reproductions is very satisfactory, and the cards are well enough perforated to allow for easy removal without tearing into the images. The card size is small enough for postcard postage. All in all a nice value.

This is a very good music book for children beginning to learn to play the violin. It starts with explaining how to hold you bow and violin with nice illustrations. The lessons in this book go from basic to moderate playing levels. Everything that you will do in this book is explained in detail at the top of every page. There is an illustration also. There are some very nice pieces of music in this book also. I reccomend this book to any beginners.

The title is accurate: this is certainly a comprehensive edition of the work of William James. Included are several hundred pages of essays that lay out in complete detail the psychological and philosophical ideology of William James. You can not buy a better James work, and especially not for $25 or less.

Tom Wolfe has a magical touch for breathing life into non-fiction, as in The Right Stuff, but in Bonfire of the Vanities, his skill as a novelist and a satirist is blatantly evident. This bleak and witty portrayal of New York life in the eighties is both hilarious and dark at the same time. Wolfe's characters represent the spectrum of human behavior, while his situations are riddled with ironies and paradoxes of truth about human existence. This book is most enjoyable, I would imagine, if you have at least some knowlege of New York, because much of its humor and depth stems from New York culture, but it is also true that New york is a micrchosm of american existence on a whole, so Bonfire of the Vanities may, in fact, be a universally American Novel. Whichever, it is worth reading if not only for the reason that it is funny, brilliantly written, and makes clear the fact that Tom Wolf's name belongs on the list of satirists that includes Jonathon Swift and Oscar Wilde.

I was born & raised in New York and lived there until 1987. This book perfectly captures the culture & attitudes of the city, its shrill power politics and opportunism and hypocrisy.

Wolfe has called this a "social novel," a once popular form, now less so.

The social novel is sociological, as opposed to psychological. It paints with a broad brush. Its "main character" is an entire city, or profession, or period in history (rather than the psychological novel's narrow focus on a single individual's inner thoughts & feelings).

This book is funny and truthful. And despite its thickness, a quick read, because it's also an exciting page-turner.

Tom Wolfe, an eloquent, if sometimes pessimistic, writer who deeply understands modern culture, wrote this massive, classic tale of greed, ambition and power. He casts the story of financier Sherman McCoy in the financial world of Wall Street, but includes the racial, political and economic issues of New York City in the early 1980s. Even 13 years after its publication date, this is still a gripping read. You can use this book as the starting point for reading about business culture from a fictionalized perspective. Or, you can combine it with Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker and The New New Thing, for insight from fact and fiction into the major episodes of greed and economic boom in the past 20 years. This undeclared trilogy examines the desire - not confined to Americans, though the books are U.S.-based - to achieve wealth at any cost. We at getAbstract.com recommend this book, all by itself, as a seminal volume in business fiction.

I have read several books on PHP, but found this one particularly interesting because of the well structured-ness of the content.
All the topics are fit in a logical progression and i could feel myself gaining more knowledge at each progressive step. However, individual chapters did not help me become an expert in that area, but i felt justified with the money i spent on 974 pages of quality PHP reading.

With the book market flooded with compendia on PHP and MySQL,
I have been looking avidly around for a PHP book with coverage on PostgreSQL and ODBC.
This book has come at the right time for me - It covers the functionality aspects of MySQL,
PostgreSQL and ODBC - MS access and SQL server, through a common application that
runs through each of these chapters. I must admit however that the application was not high-end, but
it served very well the purpose of demonstrating the functionality of each database with PHP. I further
appreciated the use of GTK to develop a standalone app for the same database application. I am looking
forward to buying more of these common-theme-thread books - It has really helped me to good effect.

Good book to start serious programming with DB (MySQL or other ones) outside of learning to do
real medium to large scale web app development with PHP.
Also notice that this book has been written by authoritative peers like Luis Argerich (i am a fan of
his phpbuilder articles), Thomas,Rawat and scollo(from the earlier Professional PHP Programming) and
James Moore (moderator on PHP-GTK) and reviewed by many memebers from the PHP quality team.

I am mastering professional PHP knowledge undaunted.BUY IT NOW!

I discovered The Pardon by reading an exceprt from it in "The Mammoth Book of Legal Thrillers," a collection of writings from top lawyer-novelists in the world. The Pardon definitely belongs in that elite group. The premise is immediately gripping: A psychopath is stalking the governor of Florida, claiming that he can prove that the governor executed an innocent man. The executed man was defended by the governor's son, Jack Swyteck, a young criminal defense attorney who defends death row inmates. The opening scenes, which revolve around the execution, could well be the most heart-pounding I've read in the genre. The courtroom scenes are skillfully written, filled with believable surprises and easy to follow. The pacing is breathless, but the underlying tenstion between father and son that plays out through the story really makes this novel stand apart from the rest. This is an enterntaining read with engaging characters who will have you rooting for them till the end. It takes on a very serious subject in a completely non-preaching manner (I wouldn't be able to guess where the author stands on the death penalty after reading this novel, which is to his credit). Granted, this isn't Moby Dick, but you rarely get more for your money in commercial fiction.

Excellent thriller from beginning to end. Easy and enjoyable to read for a couple of days. I have read two other Grippando's books (Informant and Under Cover...) and this one ranks up the top.

I read this novel when it first debuted and remember thinking it was one of the best debut legal thriller I'd ever read. The story was so compelling and took you on a fast ride. Jack's is a lawyer of integrity that you'd want on your side. I've read all of Mr Grippando's novel todate, they're all good, but this one stands out as my favorite.

John Fowles is the man responsible for the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Magus. He hasn't published a novel in fifteen years; literature's great loss. Fowles deserves profound admiration. His skill is astounding, his command of narrative is unsurpassed. Perhaps my own favourite aspect of his fiction is the manner in which he handles sensational material in a highly artistic fashion. The Collector is a good example of this. A middle class girl is kidnapped by a working class clerk, the collector of the title, who keeps her captive in his basement. The novel is probably the most depressing work of fiction ever published, after Ian McEwan's The Child in Time. The Collector is intense, claustrophobic, frightening, finally almost unreadable. Fowles is his two characters. His skill at presenting them is matchless. And this is the problem. He's too good. The book provides no sunshine, no resolution, not even a sliver of faith in the human capacity for kindness. It is relentlessly bleak and pessimistic, but only because (paradoxically) Fowles is such a good writer. Read The Magus instead; a joyous celebration of storytelling, suspense and mystery.

With the exception of Nabokov's Lolita, this is the best book I have ever read. From the very moment I laid my hands on it I could not put it down and I have re-read it many times since. The premise is as such: a clerk (Frederick Clegg) becomes obsessed with a pretty art student (Miranda Grey) and holds her captive in his basement. Half of the story is told from Clegg's point of view in a recollective style, whilst the rest (the middle section) is relayed through Miranda's diary. The obvious differences in their views on life and the impossibility of them ever reaching a common ground is what grips you. Brilliant characterization and a brilliant study of human behaviour. Many people have suggested that The Magus was Fowle's best work, but The Collector puts it in the shade. Compelling.

when i finished reading 'THE COLLECTOR', i threw the book across the room in frustration and disgust. such is the power of john fowles, luring the reader deeper and deeper into a world of twisted fantasy which is portrayed in a terrifyingly realistic fashion. the book centres around two characters, fred clegg, a quietly insane and lonely man who loves to collect butterflies (hence the name of the book - a strong metaphor), and miranda, a girl that he imprisons in his house so that she can know and love him. clegg feels disadvantaged in many ways, and so takes out all his feelings of rejection and inadequacy on his unfortunate prisoner. i have read some reviews that suggest that the book should not have been divided into sections - miranda's and clegg's - and on this point i would have to entirely disagree. the juxtapositioning of the two points of view is the very essence of the story, showing the two sides of human life: on miranda's part, her passion for life and discovery, for learning and making a difference; and clegg's, showing his selfishness, rigidness and desire to own or kill everything that shows vibrance and emotion, everything he is not. this was fowles' intention, to show us that we all have both good and evil inside us,that mirnada was not entirely perfect and clegg was not entirely evil, but that the evil in clegg eventually overcame miranda's good. this book is a dire warning to human kind to embrace life and see that we have opportunities outside what we are given, that we always have the option of free thinking.in a way, clegg was more trapped than miranda: her in body, but him in spirit.