Father John Crowley was an unassuming man of unassuming physical presence whose humor and passion for the people and place of the California desert almost disappeared from memory. Joan Brooks' Desert Padre captures the spirit of a fascinating man. Her meticulous research lets Father John Crowley speak in his own voice about Owens Valley water wars, show business in the Alabama Hills and Death Valley's Shorty Harris.

Don't let the copious quotations from Father Crowley's weekly "Sage and Tumbleweed" columns keep you from getting started in this book. Most authors intrude on their subject. Ms. Brooks, like Father Crowley's nom de plume - Inyokel, steps aside for her subject to take center stage.

For anyone fascinated by the American desert, by California history or by the life of an unusual common man, Desert Padre is a "must read.

Crowley is not really the author of this book but the editor. _Drunkard's Progress_ is Crowley's collection of a genre of prose, the "confessions" of the alcoholic. Crowley's contextualizing essay does a nice job connecting the told-story, or the ritual of recounting alcoholic experiences with the first groups, like the Washington group, who employed this as a tactic toward achieving sobriety. Crowley also makes connections with the similar ritual within modern day recovery groups. As a contemporary literature scholar, I found Crowley's previous text, _The White Logic: Alcohol and Gender in Modernist Fiction_ to be more interesting, largely becuase it offers a literary interpretation and criticism of a variety of novels rather than being a collection of brief narratives like this book. However, for the reader and scholar interested in the foundation of the drunk-narrative-as-ritual-therapy model, Crowley's collection will be interesting reading.

About 45 songs, almost all of them familiar to me, make up this book. The range is from La Bamba to Billy boy. It wound up, however, on the bottom of my pile of guitar books. Tablature takes up a lot of space so that even simple songs usually require a page turn, a feat that I, as a beginner, have yet to conquer. The chords are fairly easy and I have had little problem with them. One other problem for me was that only a few verses of some of my favorites were given.
Once I master picking the tunes it will probably rise in the pile.

The subject of this recursive time-travel novella is conservatism, which Crowley associates with entropy. The story is assembled from political and philosophical cliches, and there are more than a few logical inconsistencies in the plot. The result is poor science-fiction and unconvincing social criticism.

A misanthropic inventor creates a time travel device which he uses to try to make himself rich. A secret society dedicated to preserving the British Empire sends an agent to obtain the device. They know about the device because the agent obtains it, making it possible for them to send the agent back in time to obtain it AND to use it to arrange the assassination that creates the society in the first place!

For no reason that is ever satisfactorily explained the machinations of the imperialists result in a reality in which London is full of aliens (something I THINK would be opposed to the aims of such a society!) and towards a future in which the world will become a forest of underwater trees in an ocean of stillness.

All of this is based on the casual assumption that no argument needs to be made that tradition is anything other than static, and will lead inevitably to stasis. It makes for an intellectually lazy story.

Combining several diverse themes, Great Work of Time explores time travel, British imperialism, angels, the life of Cecil Rhodes, and an unimaginable future world tangled and snarled with impossibilities made real by the alteration of countless destinies. Partly a twisted history lesson and partly a chronicle of regret, at its simplest level Great Work of Time is a morality play that exposes the flaw in the argument, "If only humankind could rewrite its own history." A work of aching beauty, this short novella is a small gem from a gifted writer.

The book's description on the back cover doesn't even match the content nor does the CD-ROM. It looks and reads like a thrown together blob of stuff ... can someone tell me where to find the durn spreadsheet widget .. its mentioned on the back cover but not in the index, the table of contents nor on the CD-ROM....

I don't recommend purchase lightly. I've been wearing out its pages for two weeks now, with occasional bouts of furrowed brows and impatient snorting. I've come, though, to a conclusion in which I'm confident: if you're a Tcl user, you should invest in *Tcl/Tk Tools*.

Why? Because you'll use it, and use it well. Almost everyone involved in Tcl has questions (so how do I really compile a Tcl script? How much does it take to do drag-and-drop and tool tips? Are the RDBMS extensions current with vendor features? ...) answered here. Simplify your life by putting these 650+ pages on your shelf.

What is *Tcl/Tk Tools*? It's a collection of descriptions of different popular extensions to Tcl and Tk. While lead author Harrison gives the impression they're written by "the extension authors themselves", there are a few exceptions to this pattern. The book is not written as a tutorial or introduction to Tcl, sagely pointing to John Ousterhout and Brent Welch's books for that role (although I've been thinking of experimenting with putting *Tcl/Tk Tools* in the hands of novices, to see what would happen. I suspect they'd survive in good shape).

*Tcl/Tk Tools* isn't exhaustive. It doesn't include several of my favorite extensions, including Scotty, NeoWebScript, stooop, tclMsql, the PlusPatches, ... It doesn't matter. If you care about only *one* of the extensions described here, you'll do well to have your own copy.

Harrison and his co-authors do a good job of hitting the target of telling "Here's the philosophy behind this package, and here are some examples of how to use it effectively" that he lays out in the Preface. While it's easy to move from one chapter to another, it's not at the expense of the authors and their personalities. D. Richard Hipp's thoughtful precision and De Clarke's care in engineering effective solutions come through, as do the assurance and lucidity those in the Tcl community expect of Don Libes. Less successful is the forward look that Harrison intended, toward "the plans the extension authors had for future enhancements and extensions." I assume this was in part a casualty of the realities of the publishing cycle; certainly many of the chapters appear to have been finished before the appearance a year ago of 7.6's betas.

Two unglamorous aspects of the book multiply its value: the index is sound (that's saying a lot for me; I have high standards in indexing), and Harrison's Chapter 17 on what he calls "Configuration Management" lays out much valuable wisdom that newcomers need to learn. Reading the latter is painful: it has all the important, tedious subjects ("Combining Extensions ...", command-line munging, ...) one wants--but without mention of Win* or loadable libraries! These frailties are inevitable when broadcasting on dead trees, of course. What's disappointing is that *Tcl/Tk Tools* doesn't go farther in joining the Internet Age: although a two-page Appendix lauds news:comp.lang.tcl and lists the FAQs and nine URLs (some of which have already moved, of course), and individual authors take it on themselves to provide appropriate references,
* it's not apparent that there is any page where Harrison and/or O'Reilly maintain errata, updates, new examples, funny animal GIFs, or any of the other resources readers might be expected to exploit--I couldn't find one at the URL the Preface gave, nor elsewhere at www.ora.com;
* some authors supply no e-mail addresses;
* some authors give references ("look in the archives") that will be inscrutable for those not already in the know; and
* there is wide variation in the quality of information authors give about extension prospects, bug lists (a particular sore point with me), mailing lists, and so on.
Understand, please, that I'm not labeling these moral faults; as on every project, the good engineering comes in deciding where to make the cuts, and what definite values to deliver. I personally look forward to seeing books that build a more dynamic relationship with online sources, and am simply noting that *Tcl/Tk Tools* doesn't achieve that standard.

The quality of production is high, higher even than the elevated expectations I have of O'Reilly. Typos, mistakes in word choice, and code errors seem to sum to around zero to five per chapter. Screen shots are judicious and illuminating, rather than gratuitously space-filling. The CD-ROM (with binaries for indeterminate but predictable releases of Solaris and Linux) does the little I asked of it.

Summary: whether you're a full-time Tcl-er or a greenhorn, you'll profit from having *Tcl/Tk Tools* at hand. Whenever you're in a pinch, there's a fair chance the Index and/or Table of Contents will quickly lead you to a useful datum. During more contemplative moments, you'll want to read the chapters in a connected fashion, and the accuracy and insight of the authors will make you glad that you do.

This was the first book I read on Tcl/TK (a mistake), but it was nonetheless helpful. I do refer it often. I particularly found the introduction to Expect useful.