This is a really useful book for those who are approaching death and those who are critically ill and don't know what the outcome will be. I'm not Episcopalian, but felt really supported in terms of ethical and spiritual help when my father was dying and I read it.

When confronted by potentially controversial ethical issues, such as those surrounding death and dying, churches rarely distinguish themselves. There are a number of pitfalls. Knowing that they cannot please anyone, they may simply remain silent, abdicating their responsibility to provide moral guidance. Worse, they may make pious-sounding, but vague, pronouncemnts that address issues without actually saying anything. When take clear positions, they may have a hard time making a convincing connection to their own tradition. This work avoids all those pitfalls. The Episcopal Church's End of Life Task Force addresses issues such as assisted suicide clearly and concisely even as they respect the human anguish and moral ambiguities involved.

Although specifically Anglican in perspective, the early chapters offer an understanding of death and its place in human life--including theologically appropriate uses of medical treatment/resources--that will be of value to all Christians (and others interested in what religious traditions have to say). After discussions of mourning, the church's role, and social policy issues like access to health care and the importance of palliative care, the book provides several very helpful resources for use in local parishes. This book by a distinguished panel of clergy, ethicists, physicians, and attorneys (not to imply that any of those categories excludes any of the others!) can serve as a useful resource for all who want to make the end of life a more faithful experience, both for themselves and for others.

This book is a must have book, for those that want to do campaign s where you have mixed characters, or just want to give extra flavor to your stories. It about time White Wolf released a book to explain in cleaner detail, what really happened with the Tremere, what is all that brought them there, and how the Order of Hermes really feels about it. This is besides the point of making rules for the revenant, ghoul mages...

Using the framework of classic Greek drama for thefiction/metaplot parts, Cohen and DiPesa have put together the first compelling book of Mage's Revised Edition.

For some reason, even though he's listed on the cover, Mr. DiPesa gets no credit with Amazon. What is the deal with that?

Through his whimsical spaces, Moss shows us how architecture can be invested with idea, how idea does not have to conspire with ideology, but be layered with a machiavellian character to create a kinesthesia of layered spaces. The BOX project inspires enthusiasm with its poetry, its exactatude, and its radically independent aesthetics and vocabulary of form. This small and beautiful book studying one building should be part of every creative library.

This is a Great book which Provides in debt strategies for, Probably one of the best golf games ever, It includes instructions and tips for all the courses, and a few secrets, Do you think you can conquer the best golf courses on the planet by yourself. YES ! Good for you. NO ! Don't let that get you down, Buy this guide, And maybe then you can pass the golden bear challenge

As a storyguide beginning his third MAGE chronicle and as a player starting in a separate chronicle, I found this book very useful in further detailing the ways in which true shamans work in the World of Darkness. In some ways, the book continues the themes expounded in the Dreamspeaker tradition book, but it goes further and is not limited to Dreamspeakers alone.

That said, this book does focus on shamanic methods and viewpoints, and has a heavy emphasis on interaction with spirits. It's not a spirit compendium, unlike Werewolf's Axis Mundi, and though it touches on shamanic possibilities for all Traditions, it seems far less useful for non-shamanic groups like the Celestial Chorus and the Order of Hermes.

Outstanding features involve blessings and curses of being a shaman, new merits and flaws, the potential "catch-all" nature of Spirit magick, discussion of totems and the World Tree aspect of the Umbra, and finally a new collection of spirit-related rotes. It's all well-written and presents minimal rules-related content. The story is illustrative without being intrusive.

Bottom line was that this gave me a greatly expanded perspective on what it means to be a shaman, the responsibilities as well as the benefits. The only drawback for me was that the authors chose not to explore alternative visions of shamanism, such as technomancer or Hermetic possibilities. Consequently, the book will be primarily useful to chronicles featuring Dreamspeakers, Verbena, or Cultists.

Subtitled "The midnight confessions and revelations of 37 rock stars and legends", this is a great bathroom book that tells you Lou Reed's early idol was Carole King, what makes Laurie Anderson think about sex, what Tina Turner would've been if she were white, and a thousand other things. Good, intelligent questions, the kind you always wish interviewers would ask, answered by the likes of Bowie, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Marianne Faithfull, Dylan, Neil Young, Chrissie Hynde, etc. And great photos. A classic of its kind.

Part 1 (6 chapters) - Absolutely a waste of time, not worth a read. And the code examples are not related to JWSDP.

Part 2 (6 chapters) - Discusses on SOAP, UDDI and WSDL. The code discusses using a Older version of Apache SOAP and Apache Axis. The code needs a complete rewrite.

Part 3 - Discusses on JAXP, JAXB, JAXR, JAXM and JAXRPC. Good introductions but the JAXB chapter is based on DTD (which is obsoleted in the latest specs). JAXM and JAXRPC chapters just reproduces the Sun JWSDP tutorial...not much value addition.

Part 4 - Security, WSFL, WSIF (based on IBM Specs) currently these specs are obsolete no further releases.

It might've been a good book during 2002. The code and content needs an update to the latest specs and SOAP implementations.

Just as I stated in the title, it's a great book to start you with. It's written in a clear and precise manner where you could learn the basics of Java Web Services and not be intimidated by it.

It is a good introductory book to web services standards like SOAP, WSDL and UDDI but also goes further and talks about topics like WSFL, WSIF which are not covered by all books on web services but are essential to any real business processes exposed as web services where flow control and service unit(s) choreagraphy is as important as the single unit service request/response. Java specifications relating to web services are also covered like JAXM and JAX-RPC. I wish more examples and code was given, perhaps even a chapter or two, for ebXML which may not be a part of web services standards but still uses SOAP and defines industry standards for business to business collaborations especially dealing with supply chain commerce issues.
I agree with a previous reviewer (John Sfikas) that this book alone isn't exactly an eye opener for experianced professionals who have been dabbling with all the tools mentioned in this book like Apache SOAP, Axis, WSTK, Tomcat, Jetty etc. and know the challenges facing B2B collaborations on the internet quite intimately, but this book combined with "Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI" will give a much needed practical grounding to start making sophisticated web services in the real world. I highly recommend getting both these books but be prepared to use your brain and further what is presented in these books to deploy web services satisfying your needs. They will certainly not amount to spoon feeding you a near solution to your collaboration problems.

The good news? This book is finally back in print for the first time since it's original publication back in 1984. The bad news? It was poorly written and edited then and it still is today. At the very least you'd figure someone would have had the sense to run this thing through Spellcheck before republication. Alas, that wasn't the case. While not the most focused book, it is the only one I've found that is devoted entirely to Atari. Anyway, I enjoyed most of this book, especially the parts about Nolan Bushnell, Chuck E. Cheese, and Pizza Time Theather. More in-depth information about some of Atari's groundbreaking (for the time and home market) games would have made this book so much better. I can only hope that someone else (maybe Nolan himself) will one day do this pioneer company a little justice in print. Until then, this will have to do. Game over.

Altough a good read, and well investigated, I was expecting to read about the Rise and Fall of Atari, not the Rise and Fall of Noland Bushnell and the other people that worked there.

I expected to read about all Atari Products, both the good ones and all the flops they made, and the ones that never made public light. I expected a trip down memory lane. I expected too see at least a couple of pictures and photos to complement the book and what it talked about...

Yet, the book mostly talks about Nolan Bushnell, the guy who founded Atari, and it talks about the VCS. The Atari 5200, Atari 400 and Atari 800 are mentioned briefly (1 or 2 instances), there is no talk about all the other computers that followed (XE, XL, etc), the Atari's ST, the Lynx, the Jaguar, the Atari Portfolio (remember those?)...

ZAP! The Rise and Fall of the People at Atari, or ZAP! The Rise and Fall of the Atari VCS is a more accurate title.

I know the book was written in 1984, but it could have been revised... even as today, Atari is still kicking a little making video games alone.

Cohen's book does a great job documenting the founding of Atari and introducing readers to the colorful personalities who worked there. At the time of its original publication (1984), it was one of the first books to do so (if not the first). Now, however, there are several books that chronicle the same events: Leonard Herman's Phoenix, and Steven Kent's The First Quarter, for example. These latter books are also more comprehensive than Zap!, since they don't focus only on Atari but include the history of Nintendo, Sega, Sony and others.
In retrospect, it is fun to read the author's predictions when he wrote the book in the fall of 1983. The videogame market had not yet collapsed completely. Nintendo had not arrived, and Warner had not sold off Atari. Cohen discusses Atari's potential bright future with telecommunications projects, the likelihood that computers will make videogame systems obsolete, possible competition with Nolan Bushnell, and videodisk arcade games becoming the wave of the future. Now that we are actually in the future, we know that none of these things came to fruition.
Zap! is still a good reference and an interesting read for those who are curious about the beginnings of the videogame industry's once-dominant company, Atari. However, since the manuscript was written some 18 years ago, don't expect a lot of revelations or anecdotes that haven't already been written about in many subsequent books.

I thought I was buying a book written by Mary Higgins Clark. I am one of her biggest fans. The short stories were pointless and poorly written. One story was written by Mary Higgins Clark and even that was pointless. On a scale of 1 to 5, this rates a 0.

This twelve-story anthology loosely focuses on the title, MURDER IN THE FAMILY. Though the tales are well written, they lack the suspense and cutting edge expected of this famous group of popular authors that contributed to the collection and that of previous short story books produced by the Adams Round Table. For most mystery readers, previous Adams Round Table editions are stronger (see MURDER AMONG FRIENDS, etc.). However, die hard fans of Lawrence Block, Mary Higgins Clark, Stanley Cohen, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Mickey Friedman, Joyce Harrington, Susan Isaacs, Judith Kelman, Warren Murphy, Justin Scott, Peter Straub, and Whitley Strieber will want to read the tales. Yet even the strongest of loyalists need to keep the expectations a bit lower than usual as the gaggle of writers fall short of what each one usually provides.

Harriet Klausner

Lawrence Block, et.al.'s Murder In The Family packs in high-profile mystery writers whose new presentations have not seen print elsewhere. Mary Higgins Clark probes a father's motivation for revenge, Susan Isaacs presents a chilling portrait of a family which should not be in business, and Dorothy Davis tells of a letter which transforms lives in this excellent collection.

I thought Ms Jackson the civil rights activist pursuit of the truth was honorable; however, the author was way off base. I was at the Quantico Criminal Investigation Division at the time of this incident, and I am BLACK. My name was even mentioned in the book. As a matter of fact Lindsey Scott worked for me. This was not a racist plot to courts-martial and convict him. I don't know if he committed this crime or not; however, the NIS and Military Police did what they should have done. There may have been some errors in the investigation, but it was not racist. There were many other black assigned to the Military Police during that time other than Lindsey. This book's display of the accounts that happened during this investigation are so far from the truth, it is pathetic. Raymond W. Collier Criminal Investigator, USMC

It is apparent by the misrepresentation of fact, the selective interviewing, and the ignorance of standard law enforcement procedure that Mr. Cohen's account of the Lyndsie Scott case is a skewed and inaccurate portrayal of the truth.

I found the story enthralling and it has given me a new insight in to the so-called Military Justice System. By the end of the book, I felt I really "knew" these people. While the main focus was the injustice done to Marine Lindsey Scott, civil rights activist Lori Jackson,also featured in the book, was truly an inspirational woman. I look forward to the movie! Author Ellis Cohen is to be commended for such a well written account of this amazing story