A keen dive into L.A. noir, before anyone else, and a likely influence to Hammett's Red Harvest and its subsequent manifestations, from Yojimbo to A Few Dollars More to film Last Man Standing. Not the same story, however. Great voice- hear the word "homeboy" used correctly in context from nearly seventy years ago. Ellroy's White Jazz is possibly the only evolutionary offspring.

Every fan of Chandler and Hammet owes it to themselves to DEMAND that their local mystery store carry this book. From the tough as nails dialog to the bleak ending, bitter as a bucket of limes, this is the penultimate hardboiled novel. Fast One makes Grafton, Cornwall, et al look like lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom. The literary equivalent to a baseball bat baptism

It's a crime that this book is currently out of print. If Paul Cain had published more novels (this was his only one, though he wrote many fine short stories), he might well be as famous as Hammett and Chandler. One reviewer, years ago, wrote that reading Fast One was like traveling to Antarctica -- once you arrived, there was no where else to go. In other words, this novel is truly the hardest, toughest, bleakest and bloodiest of the hard-boiled genre. It defines the outer edges of tough-guy fiction. Spare, terse and without redeeming social value, it is a remarkable work. I highly recommend it. Do whatever you can to find a copy, but you can't have mine

The cover alone is worth the price! Each stone in this photograph of 46 specimens of turquoise is identified at the start of the book. High quality natural stones from the most important mines of the Southwest are pictured side by side with treated and plastic versions.

The book is a collection of 10 articles written for New Mexico Magazine. Titles include "Turquoise and the Native American", "Buyer Beware: Hidden Facets of Turquoise", Young Native Jewelers Signal Change of Guard" and "The Plight of Old Pawn". High quality photographs of famous mines, artisans and jewelry, both historic and current, will whet the appetite of would-be collectors but also leave an impression of love and respect for the land and its native inhabitants.

Read this book under a strong light to catch the full depth of color!

It can be consumed in a weekend and will enable you to speak to competetive strategy methodoligies and application of theory. It gives you a clear understanding of MBA crap-speak with regards to competetive business strategy, as well as providing a wealth of current management tools that will enable better understanding of any business or organization. Highly recommended, even if you do have a business degree, because no one can remember all this stuff...

David Bowman's "Let the Dog Drive," while frequently funny, seems to suffer from a case of wackiness for wackiness' sake, a sort of look-how-crazy-I-am voice that leads us through various scenes of senseless violence and college bull session-like ruminations on such highbrow fare as Emily Dickinson. Which is a shame, since there's a lot of good material here, hiding just behind the screen of self-conscious hilarity. The scene that lends the book its title hints at potential the rest of the story never quite lives up to, leaving us to grow tired of the orange motif, the limp terrorism subplot, and various instances where characters are shot or beat up without managing to elicit any sympathy from the reader. When a suposedly focal character dies and you find yourself not particularly caring and in fact being *annoyed* that the other characters are obsessed with her, you know this story is in trouble.

Mr. Bowman has a way with words. This novel is less modern art and more grand master than I have experienced in a good long time. He paints bold, odd, character brushstrokes and then shades in the small flawless details. This book catches your eye with the superficial- but if you gaze deeply enough you will find small delicious sparks of magic.

This book was one of my first adolescent literary loves. It was among the first that began my lensding library of contemporary fiction. As such, I have purchased it about five times. Each time that it comes back, I read it again. It is fresh and touching each time as it was the first. In Sylvia, I found a literary woman who was worth idolizing. She is by no means perfect, but it is by that token that one cannot help but love her. Not love her a little; rather, she challenges you to not fall madly and passionately in love with her. When you do, she won't give you another thought. She was a woman both self-absorbed and extroverted. Needless to say that I fell in love with her. She is a woman ruled by the men in her life, but fixed by a female literary force, both powerful and meek. In contrast, Orange Boy is ruled by women, powerful ones who are destructive when brought together. The conflicts of male and female energy, of intellectual and sexual concerns and of family versus personal responsibilities are presented in "Drive" like nowhere else that I have yet to find. This book is as brilliant as it was the first time that I read it. Thank you to Bowman for his intimacy with beauty.

A pretty well-done and engrossing bio of a great band. One of the great things about the book is that it's made me listen to all the albums again. I had been biased toward 77/More Songs but am gaining a greater appreciation for Fear of Music and Remain in Light.

My biggest quibble is with Bowman's treatment of Tina Weymouth. Yes, she seems to be difficult and her hatred of Byrne now is unfortunate. But Bowman seems to subtly mock her, perhaps in an attempt to downplay her own talents and contributions -- saying that her outfit in "Stop Making Sense" made her look like big clown, indirectly comparing her to a fat woman in an African tribe, regularly pointing out that she's not as cute as she was when the band first debuted, ridiculing her singing and (to a lesser extent) her bass playing. It's all a bit unseemly.

That said, it's still a good read and an important document. Loved all the stuff about the colliding music/art world of 1970s New York. Despite everything, here's one reader who still hopes the Talking Heads play together one more time.

. . . . this smart, interesting, funny, impossible-to-put-down book reads so well that it wouldn't matter if I'd never heard a single Talking Heads song. Author Bowman could write about the history of the can-opener and make it engrossing and thought-provoking. He's that smart, sensitive and eloquent. I just wonder if he meant for me to hate Tina Weymouth or if that's my own deal. All I know is that I'll never spend one cent on Tom Tom Club. Instead I'll buy another copy of This Must Be The Place, because 3 people have already asked to borrow mine.

I'm a big-time Talking Heads fan and I take issue with these messages from the "true" fans. Of course the main issue of the band has always been David and Tina. I remember reading about their fights in Rolling Stone around 1978. Chris was married to Tina. He's going to take her side of course. As for Jerry, Bowman portrays how time after time Jerry and David worked together, independent of the other two Heads. Whether or not you prescribe to Bowman's pro-David view, the pages are mostly about how the Talking Heads created their music in the studio, and that music's relationship to world culture. For example, I take the Walkman for granted, but I laughed when I read that originally it was designed it with two ear phone jacks because they imagined people would listen to the same tape on the street side-by-side? Apparently, no one could imagine Americans isolating themselves by walking down the street wearing headphones! The book is full of these terrifically weird quirky details. I have to say what the book could have used is an in-depth interview with Brian Eno. Eno comes across as a kind of Darth Vader. He's quite the mysterious guy! There are many reasons to read this book, but foremost, to me, is that it is well written and engaging. This is not your average "rock scene" self-indulgent journey. I stopped flagging pages with post-its after using half a stack on this book - it's got that much juicy info.

This book is pretty much a snapshot of the Linux Documentation Project's documentation. There are some very good chapters in this book, but unfortunately some of them are woefully incomplete, and should not have been included. Understand that all the material in this book is freely available on the net. If you value your printer, and don't mind shelling out some money for a bound tree-ware version, this is a very good book.

Not that it's wholly bad, but I'm still waiting for a real decent, honestly done linux book--something that would at least justify its title. Of course, this book's title doesn't mean much, so I shouldn't complain . Anyway, it's not that much about programming anything, but more about how linux is designed--with diagrams but with little code. (I guess it's no good for us readers to live through another half-a-year without having purchased yet another book with a depiction of i86 paging architecture ;-)

Writing ain't perfect either (I'm being charitable and ascribe the funny stuff to the writing failures, not incompetence.) A IRQ..." and more ponderous blah blah. Well, unfortunately, that's not *assigned* IRQs (on linux and anywhere else where interrupts are used.) This is not nitpicking on my part, this is an example of authors' mental mish-mash that I, as a student, remember suffering from in the past. The problem is that interrupts and IRQs are NOT the same or equivalent things. For someone who doesn't know that yet, this text will impede comprehension of the issues. This kind of thing. Well... whatever, I guess. Hopefully the reader isn't a complete newbie and won't be thrown off by a nice little bit of semantic backstabbing.

I must say, I hate the whole series, this book, and all the "Commentary..." books, where you got 400 pages worth of damn source printout (I'm not kidding, pure source code) with perhaps another 100 pages of questionable 'commentary'. It's clear to me that Coriolis, after having successfully got rid of writers like Abrash, decided to jump on the quick rip-off bandwagon, in that particular case, linux-related. Linux--that's where the money is today!

So, here's my the ones I mentioned from this black-cover series) as it perhaps does contain something of value--but there's not nearly enough there to justify an above $10-a pop price or 600-page volumes. The publishers have clearly mastered the art of fattening books up with blatant nonsense, like api references and, now, even multi-hundred-page source printouts.

Considering how much linux info is available completely free, I can't see any reason to spend money on this book.

Bowman uses his typical crazy wit and style in telling a strange story. That's what this book is about. There's nothing here to lift you up. There's nothing here to make you contemplate the philosophical in life. But there's plenty to satisfy the escapism that books offer. A unique story with tons of "what ifs" to stimulate your thinking. What a way to wrap so many concepts (i.e. conspiracies, humans' dependence on electricity, the joy of life and the recreating of life, etc.). But it also shows the worst sides of human nature, such as greed, drug use (as an alternative), and the mystifying social interactions that plague the human relationships.

While I still regard "let the dog drive" as a better book, this one is one of my personal faves because there' s nothing else like it out there. Bowman is a true original...bringing in parts Vonnegut, parts Garcia Marquez, parts Earl from creative writing class....

After falling in love with Bowman's wild first novel "Let the Dog Drive," I couldn't wait to get my hands on his next novel. "Bunny Modern" did not disappoint me at all. The only summary I can give this novel is that it is about everything that you would never think of on your own. A mystery/detective, science fiction, philosophical and historical love story that is impossible to put down. Bowman creates an incredibly weird, yet undeniably true, postmodern world in which everything is different and nothing has changed. Doesn't make any sense, yet nothing has ever been more true. Just read the book. I think we should all get loaded on Vengeance (the nanny drug of choice in "Bunny Modern" to get riled up) and coerce Bowman into writing another novel quickly!

This is another boonie dog book review from Wolfie and Kansas. We read "Bunny Modern" by David Bowman from a regional, rather than canine, perspective, because the book appears to be based in part upon a Guamanian riddle. Q: What did the ancient Chamorros (inidgenous inhabitants of Guam) use for light before they had candles? A: Electricty.

"Bunny Modern" is set in the New York City area in a postelectric future. Bowman's comic science fiction novel is premised upon a worldwide blackout caused by a "Morphic Aberration", rather than the typhoons and lack of maintenance on baseload generators that periodically leave Guam in the dark. Nonetheless, much of the portrayal of postelectric life in "Bunny Modern" rings true. Bowman's portrayal of the reaction when the lights finally came back on was very similar to the reaction of our noncanine animal companions of primate derivation when they recently got power back 32 days after Typhoon Paka. "Bunny Modern" is a book that will entertain readers in Guam, parts of Canada and New England, or any other place that has entered the post-electric age for an extended period of time.

Lots of flashy colors and photos but little or no structure to the content.

Adjoining chapters are structured differently and written with different "voices" so the book is difficult to read straight through. Many photos seem selected purely for shock value and contribute no substance to the topic.

Specific emergency care procedures are rarely set apart from description and assessment. In those rare cases where step by step emergency procedures are set apart with a subhead and in a separate paragraph, they appear as many as ten pages away from the description. Making this generally useless as a reference book.

The final insult is that at least a quarter of the entire book isn't indexed. They didn't index scenarios or appendices so the information in more than a quarter of the book can only be found by serendipity.