The area of Williamsburg is large that if you are planning a weekend trip or a week's vacation, it's imperative to get a "lay of the land" before you go! This book allows you to do that!

This book helps you decide where to spend your time in this wonderful city: Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Busch Gardens, Golf and Golf galore, not to mention the tons of shopping and restaurant choices to make!

A lot of people get fooled thinking that there isn't much to do in and around this town.....this book showcases all the different activities (and when the busy times are at each) as well as giving you a glimpse of what to do and not to do with the kiddos.

I highly recommend visiting this area .....and buying this book before you go!

this is a wounderful and helpful book. It will make your vacation more fun than work. It has tons of great tips along with great prices. You can pick from hundreds of fun parks and musams right down to were you eat dinner. Whether you are a person that likes to have the whole trip planed before you leave or are very spontanouis you will love this very helpfule guild book.

What a magnificient analysis full of profound and original insights.This book was done with such exemplary clarity that one need not be a student of philosophy in order to comprehend the ideas that are discussed.I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in discovering the important pathway into the lives and thoughts of the great minds.

Este libro ofrece un utilísimo recuento de hechos ligados al reciente auge en la entrada de capitales hacia América Latina, abarcando tanto las relaciones macroeconómicas como los aspectos específicos del sector financiero. Los trabajos se ven enriquecidos por comentarios de reconocidos expertos en la formulación de políticas y destacados participantes del sector privado en los mercados de capital. La novedad e interés de sus planteamientos e información son más que suficientes para motivar e inspirar un buen número de disertaciones doctorales de primer nivel. Sin duda una obra de lectura obligatoria en los cursos de finanzas internacionales.

Nearly 30 years ago, as an art student, I bought my first copy of this classic work. Small, clear and well organized, this book remains the essential guide for anyone who needs to understand the basics of graphic arts and printing production. Most of the artists and production people I know always keep a copy within reach. Like them (and me), you'll consult it again and again.

Reading Serrres before this book was something of an adventure... You never know in advance quite what to get out of a reading of his work. Now, being able to flesh out all of the vaguenesses of his work with a general outline of this man's mind, I am more perplexed than ever. He comes across as very childlike in many respects and also very WEIRD. Seemed like Latour was humoring him in some parts as well. I admire Serres just as much having read this, if ony because he is stepping off onto a ledge in attempts to perhaps create something entirely (? ) original in the history of philosophical thought.

Science is full of magic and myth. But so-called "primitive" people are also very scientific. So what is the difference between modern and primitive, between science and magic? Maybe not as much as we have been led to think. Michel Serres is a wild, marginal philosopher whose 20 dense, often obscure books try to break down the boundaries between science, culture, and art. Bruno Latour is an anthropologist of scientists, author of pathbreaking studies of the strange and unscientific, almost magical, work of laboratory scientists. Here we have a series of five deep, clear, and often playful conversations between the two. No jargon, fast pace, a peek at two brilliant minds on the key issues in science and literature. They both know their science--Serre started as a mathematician--and neither are Luddites who want to tear science down. But both argue that science often conceals more than it reveals, and they show how both science and arts build barriers between human beings and nature, for example, or between the present and the past, the modern and the primitive. One of Serres' best examples of how little difference there is between science and religion is his comparison between the science of a Carthaginian sacrificial rite (where children were killed inside a giant bronze statue) and the magic of the space program (where astronauts died inside a giant machine). BL ...it seems to me that there is a double test---first you link Baal and the Challenger, then they have to exchange their properties in a symmetrical fashion. We are supposed to understand the Carthaginians' practice of human sacrifice by immersing ourselves in the Challenger event, but, inversely, we are supposed to understand what technology is through the Carthaginian religion. MS Yes, the reasoning is more or less symmetrical...We could construct a kind of dictionary that would allow us to translate, word by word, gesture by gesture, event by event, the scene at Cape Canaveral into the Carthaginian rite, and vice versa...the respective cost of the operation, comparable for the two communities, the immense crowd of spectators, the specialists who prepare it and who are apart from the rest, the ignition, the state-of-the-art machinery in both cases, given the technology of the two eras, the organized or fascinated rehearsal of the event, the death of those enclosed in the two statues, whose size dominates the surrounding space, the denial...--"No those aren't humans, but cattle," cry even the fathers of the incinerated children in Carthage; "No," we say "it wasn't on purpose, it wasn't a sacrifice, but an accident," inevitable, even calculable, through probabilities....The series of substitutions functions exactly like stitches, like mending a tear, like making a nice tight overcast seam...Each term of the translation passes on a piece of thread, and at the end it may be said that we have followed the missing hyphens between the two worlds. Baal is in the Challenger, and the Challenger is in Baal; religion is in technology; the pagan god is in the rocket; the rocket is in the statue; the rocket on its launching pad is in the ancient idol---and our sophisticated knowledge is in our archaic fascinations." (159-160). BL "But you are always tripping up your readers; you are always operating simultaneously on two opposing fronts. When they think they are reading about collective society, you bring them back to things, and then, when they think they are reading about the sciences, you bring them back to society. They go from Baal to the Challenger and then from the Challenger to Baal!" MS "Its a magnificent paradox, which I savor. To walk on two feet appears to mean tripping everyone up. Is this proof, then, that we always limp?" (142) MS "All around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. I cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not fill the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls the tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss." (p. 132) MS "There is no pure myth except the idea of a science that is pure of all myth." (p. 162)

We used this book in a systems programming class I had at IIT in Chicago. It is not the end all "bible of PC", but it is certainly a very, very good book. Much of the information you will never use, but there will come a time when you will need that one sub-routine that no one else can find or understands, and you pull a code snippet out of this book, apply it to your code, and appear "god-like" to your colleagues. This has happend at least five times since I've owned both editions, and for that, the book has paid for itself. If you write code that goes beyond what the component libraries in your prgramming environment can provide, such as multimedia, games, or networking, it would be a wise investment to have this book in your arsenal. David C. Freeman

Well, what to say about this book ? On one hand, it has really good examples for system programming. On the other hand, you sometimes should ask yourself: "Man, this is a good code and it works well...but, what is the use for myself?" What I want to say, is that you often learn good tricks but you will never need them. Sometimes there are also things, which are very difficult, but not very well explained and you need another book to understand it completely. But at least the biggest part of this book is very useful, and every ambitious DOS coder should own it...unfortunately, the later books of this series also contain Windows-programming...Windows and System-programming....hmmm. (Sorry for my bad English, I'm from Germany)

I tend to agree with adrian2's comments. Abacus books, in general, often have flaws. Many exist in their Atari ST documentation, still this book contains many things the expanding programmer will need to know to do more than just use existing library routines found in their language. The code and documentation will help you do lots of fancy tricks in DOS. The 1992 version has lots of Quick BASIC code and if you program in Quick or Power BASIC you might want to find the 1992 edition. There is also THE DOS PROGRAMMER'S REFERENCE by Jamsa, which has less Quick BASIC code, but is also an excellent book. Both should be in any serious DOS programmers libraries.

Having just finished a biography of Servetus (Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone - which I highly recommend) - I was thirsty for more of the same, so I picked up 'The Pope and the Heretic' and bought it without a second thought (along with 'The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars').

I was very disappointed. The author takes a prurient interest in Medieval torture techniques which lends a sensationalist slant to the book. This in microcosm, is what it wrong with his treatment of the subject as a whole: it is a sensationalised account of an important scholar which pays scant attention to the man's ideas, and too much attention to his ultimate sad fate.

I realise that the 'general reading public' probably has little taste for a dry, academic approach, but the author surely underestimates his readership badly here: anyone interested enough in the period to pick up and buy a book on an obscure 16th century heretic is likely to have a strong interest in the period, and may have a good working knowledge of the historical background. White's 'simplifications', at first simply annoying, become insulting, as they start to mount. He gets the details of Servetus' imprisonment in Calvin's Geneva wrong - understandable, maybe. He then describes Charles V's rag-tag soldiery who sack of Rome in 1527 as 'teutonic hordes': Charles was the most powerful (secular) man alive at the time, and as Holy Roman Emperor, commanded an army which was a mixture of many nations (including Spanish and French). At first I wondered if White was confusing Charles V with Atilla the Hun (it's difficult to tell, because he doesn't actually mention the name of the ruler who led the army which marched on Rome, or, for that matter why they did so). His gross characterisations of the complex and (to our modern minds) contradictory characters of the period (Elizabeth I, is a prime example) have all the heavy handedness of a poorly researched high-school essay: an analogy which occurred to me more than once as I read through this work.

The book's structure is equally annoying. Perhaps the author is aiming to shake things up by intentionally chopping around in time (we learn the details of Bruno's life when he left his monastry at second hand, whole chapters after the author has him depart) - but the end result is that the book feels fragmented and sloppily put together. Repetitive detail in subsequent chapters creates the feeling that what we have here is a succession of essays, hastily cobbled together by an author who couldn't really decide how to order his work.

But the biggest defect is in the writing, which is cliche ridden and soul-less. Important passages which deal with the turning points of Bruno's life are marred by pointless excursions into silly detail (at one point, for example, one of the characters 'pushes Bruno downstairs', while he is being arrested - and White speculates wildly on Bruno's state of mind when he is imprisoned by the Roman Inquistion - detail which he can have no way of actually knowing) in order to add colour, while there is little or no attempt to dig into the Bruno's ideas (which is surely the only reason anyone would be interested in the man - as White points out, the inquistion gave us plenty of martyrs (over a million)if all we want to contemplate is christian's inhumanity to fellow christian).

The jacket promises us that Bruno inspired Spinoza. How? Spinoza is mentioned in passing, but the subject is never explored in great enough depth to convince the reader that Bruno's ideas helped fashion Spinoza's philosophy. Other key figures in the enlightenment are dragged in (Newton, Locke etc.), but there is little or no attempt to link them and their thinking with Bruno. Instead of proof, the author falls back on assertion - and the scant footnotes do little to back the assertions with evidence.

I was left wondering if I could trust any of the history I found in this book, much less White's attempts at analysis and synthesis.

I can't say if the book will fail its audience: but I know that it failed me: not just in a lack of scholastic rigour (which is bad enough) but by being deficient in that lightness of touch which is the hallmark of great historical writing.

This is the story of the under-appreciated philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno, who was executed by the Roman Inquisition for exercising free anti-church thought. A very specific historical episode like this requires hard history and scholarship, but Michael White writes as if this is a general interest story for a general audience. Therefore this treatment is nonsensical from the outset. White fails to deliver the goods on any of the important areas influenced by Bruno's story, and the book flies over a great many interesting areas of subject matter but lands in none of them.

The key flaw in the book is White's attempt to place Bruno's work in a historical context, which merely results in disjointed coverage of his actual philosophy and extremely unconvincing attempts to show Bruno's supposedly vast influence on figures like Galileo, Shakespeare, and Spinoza. White takes the opportunity to cover, in two short chapters, the evolution and history of scientific and religious thought in Europe (chapters II and III), but these treatments are far too basic too be of much use, and show the writing style of a quick high school research paper. White even assumes that he's qualified to call the works of Aristotle "amateurish." Another possibility that is squandered is deeper insight into the causes and effects of the Inquisition, but White only provides a basic reporter's coverage of Bruno's trial.

Worst yet is the biographical aspect of the book, as the story of Bruno's life is out of order and fragmented. His actual philosophical and scientific works, which should be the centerpiece of the book, are given short shrift, especially his important attempts at unified knowledge rather than specialization. White fails as a biographer as he includes the supposed private thoughts and opinions of Bruno and the other players in the story, men who have been dead for centuries and didn't write autobiographies. This is unprofessional and quite impossible to take seriously. In the end, we are left with little knowledge of Bruno the man and his potentially important story, so one must wonder about the very point of the book. Not recommended.

Understanding this book as a cheap detective novel is playing to the down side of things. If you really want to like this book, try thinking of the song, "True Colors" by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, most famously done by Cyndi Lauper and available with a lot of popular hits on the CD "Twelve Deadly Cyns." The first line of that song, "You with the sad eyes," also reminds me of the poem "Woman, Why Do You Weep?" at the end of HUNDRED WHITE DAFFODILS by Jane Kenyon, which was not published during Jane's lifetime and will never be as famous as a pop hit like "True Colors" (I remember some Paris concert where the crowd could sing the words to "True Colors," and you could see it on videotape, but you can only get the regular video on DVD). Typically emotional in that song is the line, "If this world makes you crazy and you've taken all you can bear, you call me up because you know I'll be there." (Copyright 1986, and this isn't really fair use of those lyrics, because this is not a paid, professional commercial for the contents of that song.)

Fortunately for our sanity, the church of our times is no longer imposing punishments in a manner which might now be more expected from secret military tribunals or the war on drugs as waged outside the jurisdiction of the world's greatest superpower. In THE POPE & THE HERETIC by Michael White, the church at Rome seems to have learned from the Bible how to excuse itself in the manner of Pontius Pilate, and its official condemnation of Giordano Bruno on February 8, 1600 required another hearing on the same day. "This hearing was called because the Holy See never sentenced heretics to the stake directly; with characteristic hypocrisy it always passed that duty on to a civil authority. The official statement from the Holy Office to the governor of Rome was invariable: `Take him [the heretic] under your jurisdiction, subject to your decision, so as to be punished with the due chastisement; beseeching you, however, as we do earnestly beseech you, so to mitigate the severity of your sentence with respect to his body that there may be no danger of death or of the shedding of blood. So we Cardinals, Inquisitor and General, whose names are written beneath decree.' This statement was effectively an order to the secular court. They were to take Bruno and burn him alive." (pp. 4-5). Only after sentence had been passed did the bishop of Sidonia take away his priest's insignia "and condemned his soul to suffer the perpetual flames of Hell, symbolically degrading his spirit just as the flames would degrade his physical body. The cardinals and the secular judges wanted to erase the very essence of this heretic, just as of all heretics." (p. 5). The rest of the book attempts to describe the true colors of Bruno in terms that a popular audience, certainly not as committed to the laws of science or jurisprudence as professionals in those fields would be, can easily understand.

The society of the late 16th century was exciting in a lot of ways, and this book attempts to capture that excitement more than any philosophical doctrine or memory techniques that Bruno had developed. Even modern science is only mentioned as an average person might be able to picture it. "To a degree, scientists began to conceptualize as Bruno had done, rather than only as Galileo had taught them. . . . The best example of this comes from the work of one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, who created what have become known as Feynmann diagrams, pictorial representations of complex subnuclear transactions. And Bruno's vision of picture logic is actually used by almost everyone in the industrialized world each day, for we live in a world dominated by computers, and computers are machines that generate images." (p. 197).

My favorite part of this book is about Giovanni Mocenigo, who invited Bruno to Venice in 1591. (p. 35). There were "three popes between the death of Sixtus V in August 1590 and the accession of Clement VIII in February 1592," (p. 36, n. 1) providing the kind of confusion in which "we can only assume magnified self-confidence and an exaggerated sense of self-worth provided him with the strength he needed. He was blind to the genuine dangers and believed he would find acceptance and leniency." (p. 37). As a superpower, America seemed to feel the same way after WWII, just before Americans stopped talking about the real situation. To get his work printed, Bruno had to go to Frankfurt. He was packing on May 22, 1592, when Mocenigo "began to complain that I had not taught him what I promised. Then he used threats saying he would find means, if I did not remain of my own free will, to compel me." (p. 44). America has been about that unlucky, trying to teach the rest of the world what democracy is supposed to be like, when Americans themselves are prevented from interfering with operations of the CIA or whatever else passes for American foreign policy in the dark corners of the night. You might find some other lesson in this book if you are reading it in a prison while serving time for possession of some illegal substance, but it ought to be showing you the true color of something.