"We ought to be tuning up to what is around us, but our own static is too loud." ("Listening," from _The Undiscovered Country_)

"At times I think that all the plants, birds, fish, and every other living organism are waiting for our departure so that they can resume timeless engagement with the earth." ("Fire in the Plants," from _A Beginner's Faith in Things Unseen_)

This smorgasbord is a nice addition to any nature-lover's bookshelf and could inspire the reader to search out one or more of the featured titles to delve deeper into John Hay's work.

The Thirty Nine steps is said to be one of the most important novels in the thriller genre. Featuring Richard Hannay a former South African miner, who is caught in a spy story, the effects of which may lead to war in western Europe.

The story is fast moving. Hannay is placed in predicament after predicament (like the Perils of Pauline) following the discovery of a body in his London flat. He escapes to Galloway, then Dumfriesshire (rural south west Scotland). Pursued by both police and foreign agents Hannay's life is at risk - and we witness his use of a number of disguises, and his experience as a mining engineer, in escaping each predicament.

At times the novel feels like a loosely related series of escapades, but the final chapters (as in Childers' The riddle of the sands) pull the disparate strands together satisfyingly. Fast paced with an appealing central character, the novel is recommended as a quick and easy entertainment. However, there are some flaws readers ought to be aware of.

In the Scottish sections of the novel Buchan writes the dialogue of the locals in dialect, contrasting this with the the "received pronunication" of the other characters. As a technique it appears to belittle the validity of the dialect spoken, and appears to patronise the locals. Although, Buchan's sleight here is countered by his portrayal of the locals. They share a certain cunning and deviousness. Additionally, the use of dialect (and a particular type of lowland Scots dialect) renders parts of the text difficult to follow.

Most concerning about the book is the inherent anti-semitism. Analgoies and metaphors rely on negative imagery of jews; and one of the characters (scudder) is overtly anti-semitic in his comments. While this was a prevalent attitude in a certain strata of British writing pre- World War Two, it jars today - and rendered parts of the novel, for this reader, offensive.

Buchan is certainly readable, but his work has dated. His influence is apparent in the work of Greene, and inherent in his work are the influences of American thriller writers of the early twentieth century, and Conan Doyle's Holmes, Challenger, and Brigadier Gerard stories.

If you enjoyed this novel you might want to try Graham Greene's Gun for sale; The Confidential Agent; Stamboul Train; and The Ministry of fear.

The main appeal is a Wordsworthian ramble through a rural scene populated by deep and knowing pastoral types, such as the roadman and the fly fisherman, though no Lucy, nor any available women at all to signify the potential future of a British race. All the characters are either aristocrats or peasants, befitting the narrator's acknowledged anti-middle class sentiments. Curiously, the hero himself is middle class, a mining engineer, though retired at 37 years old, idle but restless, and by nature the best picture of an English sport. He is Sherlock enhanced with amazing physical prowess.

Readers will notice disrespect towards police. Our hero throws a good punch right in a cop's face, and police are everywhere ineffectual. In today's prosecutorial climate, our hero would be in for a 10-year felony.

Anti-semitism: It's there, it reflects the times, of course. However, I must say it's far worse than charmless. It's insistent, each time sudden, and gratuitous, violent, and associated with images of extermination. Towards the end of the book, our hero expresses mild condescension towards anti-semitism, not a satisfactory rebuke.

This book offers a minimum of political background to WWI. Don't pick it up for a slice of life. It' for people who just can't get enough of Sherlock.

The Merits are

*A good and organized description of how to build a simplistic polygonal game engine from scratch

*The book tries to give you an essence of the bare necessties needed to make a my_first_3D_shooter type game.

*The language used by the author is very lucid and straight-forward.

The Demerits are:

*With APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D available, it makes almost no sense to build an engine from scartch. A better idea would have been to show how to make an object oriented game framework based on either OpenGL or Direct3D.

*The source code in the book is not truly object oriented.

*Almost all the demoes in the CD-ROM run only in DOS.

*The author spent a lot many pages to explain the techniques behind the 3D Engine, but he did not bother to write a simple game using the engine as an example. All we find is a sprite animation of a skeleton in the end.

The book talks vaguely about programming sound and sprite/inverse kinematics animation.