I just returned from a mountain biking vacation to Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave National Preserve, and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area and this guidebook proved indespensible. It contains almost all information necessary to plan your trip and somehow manages to be both concise, thorough and readable.

Story introduces each chapter with a brief description of the geography and history of the park. Then Story lists several rides within the park, each accompanied by detailed descriptions (including technical and aerobic difficulty, best time of year to ride, overall length of trail, etc.) and maps. Though some road bike routes are included, most trails are for mountain bikes. Each trail I rode was accurately described. Each chapter also contains boxes describing the fauna (animals) and flora (plants) you'll likely encounter within each park.

This book isn't just a cycling guide, it contains virtually all the information you'll need to plan your trip. Story concludes each chapter with information about local lodging, camping, bike shops, grocery stores, and restaurants (his recommendations are first rate). He also provides helpful contacts (park visitors centers, etc.) which should be able to provide any other information you might need. Story has also eliminated the extraneous elements so many other cycling guidebooks seem to contain (elevation maps might be visually enticing, but let's face it, they aren't necessary).

What is really remarkable about this book is Story's terse, engaging writing. The abundance of information this book contains is presented in readable, often witty language. He doesn't just describe, he gives the reader a feel for each park and the surrounding communities (when applicable). Unlike most guidebooks I've read (which usually contain flat, predictable humor), Story's humor actually works; it isn't "laugh-out-loud" funny, but wry, witty humor that always relates to and never detracts from the subject matter.

The only improvement I would suggest for future editions is to provide a general map of each National Park. The trail maps only feature a small segment of the park where the trail is located. It is sometimes impossible to decipher where each trail is located within the entire park itself. This is particularly difficult for visitors not familiar with the area (like me). It was sometimes impossible to tell from the maps where the most convenient place to stay (closest lodging to the trails) is. The next edition should provide a map showing where each trail is located relative to the entire park. Before visiting a park, you should obtain a complete map from the National Park Service (Story does tell where to obtain these).

Story has set high standards with this guidebook, the first in the "Bicycling America's National Parks" series. It's the kind of book you'll enjoy reading even if you don't plan to hit the trails anytime soon. Story's writing is so engaging that finishing the 300-pages is effortless (300 pages may sound long, but it really isn't). This book is a must read for any cyclists interested in visiting the National Parks of California. I can't wait to read the subsequent guidebooks for other states.

This book must be the first of its kind--a guidebook about bicycling in the national parks. The author shows that the common misperception that bicycling is not allowed off-road in national parks is just that-- a misperception. This book features some outstanding road rides as well as mountain bike rides. I think the descriptions of the parks themselves and the rides therein are well-written and clear. The author gives the kind of information you'd want to know before setting off on a ride, and does it in a colorful, sometimes very deadpan funny way. There's also some cool trivia about the parks and good, useful information about where to buy supplies, repair your bike, do laundry, take showers, camp, and other stuff like that. I think this is a book that shows you how to take part in the most fun sport in the world (bicycling) and do it in some of the most spectacular places in the world (the national parks of California). A must for any travelers to the national parks who want to get out of their cars and explore. (By the way: it's not just for hardcore bicyclists--there are numerous family and beginner-level rides as well.)

What a great book! It helps you to explore American National Parks in every detail. Wonderfull guide to american natural wonders, which you can discover on your bicycle every day. By the way, I have never been in the US, but who knows...? The book is so tempting that one day I will certainly make a bicycle trip through the US.

The main character Ike is a dog and a liar. His owner Mrs. LaRue sent Ike to obedience school because he chases the neighbor's cats, steals food off the table, and pulled Mrs. LaRue down the street and tore her best camel coat. The obedience school has a sauna and a pool. Life is easy at obedience school, so I would like to stay thare. I like this book because it has letters to read. I recomend this book to you!

As the local newpaper reports: "Citing a long list of behavioral problems, Snort City resident Gertrude R. LaRue yesterday enrolled her dog, Ike, in the Igor Brotweiler Canine Academy. Established in 1953, the Academy has a history of dealing with such issues..." Poor Ike, as he tells it, in clever letters home to his mistress, his unfortunate incarceration is all a big mistake. Brotweiler is filled with bad dogs, and he doesn't fit in. He is very unhappy and just doesn't deserve this gross injustice. But as we take a peek at his life in obedience school, one thing becomes immediately apparent, Ike's not living a cruel doggy jailhouse existence as he claims, but is spending his days in the lap of luxury at what appears to be a plush canine spa, complete with pool, sauna, and waiter served gourmet meals..... Mark Teague's engaging text, with its dry, dead-pan delivery, is peppered with hilarious, guilt-laden hyperbole. But it's his marvelously creative and imaginative illustrations, rich in witty, eye-catching detail, that really make this book stand out and sparkle. Each two page spread shows Ike in bold color, leading the life of a pampered dog at "Club Pet" juxtaposed with the black and white jailhouse scenes of his letters, and kids will revel in being in on the joke. Perfect for youngsters 4-8, Dear Mrs. LaRue is an entertaining, fun-filled romp that shouldn't be missed, and definitely one of the best new books of 2002.

Although this book is going to be a Christmas present for a 7 year old, it was so good that I admit that I thought about keeping it for myself!

This picture book tells the story of Ike, a fun-loving dog who gets into trouble once to often. His person, Mrs. Larue, send him to obedience school, from whence he sends letters to Mrs. Larue describing the "awful" circumstances of the school. The joke, which kids will get due to the contradictions between the illustration and text, is that the school is more of a resort than the prison Ike makes it out to be in his letters home.

A very funny book with charming illustrations and real way with words. Highly recommended.

I would recommend this book to anyone but especially to women. The story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is about a public figure who is very different from the private person. It tells the inside story of her life. There are many things she was holding from the public. Her life behind the camera as the wife of the president is particularly interesting. This book reveals many secrets about the life of Jackie and her family. There are also many good lessons to be learned. I think that this book is well written and holds you attention. Morgan Bush

I really enjoyed this book. It was very refreshing. There are so many books out there on the Kennedy's that are there just to sling mud, portraying rumors and myths as facts. It was nice to read a book about Jackie, the person. It's an uplifting book about a remarkable woman.

The target for the book is any experienced Java developer who is interested in Struts but has little or no experience with Struts. The book starts with an explanation of why Struts is a "good thing" and shows how Struts fits into a web architecture. The author then gives an explanation of each of the pieces of the Struts architecture and demonstrates a simple application. Although the explanations were clear, I felt that the author was making the architecture overly complicated by explaining things out of order. A diagram showing the interrelationships of the different Struts classes and config files would have been helpful. The author covers all the expected topics such as internationalization, exception handling, logging, and the Struts tag libraries. The chapter on the Struts tag libraries could have used more examples to make the explanations clearer. The book concentrates on Struts 1.1 and the author does a nice job of explaining the changes from the 1.0 version and the features available in the new version. The chapter on the new Validator framework is clear and the examples are on target. The chapter on Tiles is short but the author does a great job of explaining how it fits into the Struts architecture. The chapter on performance seemed completely unnecessary since there was nothing in it specific to Struts. Overall this book is a good addition to the Struts library. The book has some shortcomings but it provides a good deal of value.

Struts has quickly become the leading framework for developing Java-based web-applications. This book does a terrific job of discussing the various elements of the Struts framework, from the ground-up. Starting with an introduction to the MVC pattern, the author clearly defines the role of the basic elements of Struts and delves into how to model and extend these components to write real-world applications.

For users already familiar with Struts, the book expands beyond the basics and discusses how to use some of the libraries surrounding Struts, such as the Validator framework, Tiles, Logging (Commons, log4j). There are great chapters on using Struts with EJBs, exception handling, internationalization, the various tag libraries that come packaged with Struts, and advanced Struts features (some of which are new to version 1.1).

If you are new to Struts or are already using Struts, I have no doubt you will learn plenty from this book. (Like most O'Reilly books) It skips on providing information irrelevant to the technology, and focuses specifically on how to help you build and model clean, maintainable web-applications. Gone are the days of including JSP scriptlet code inside of your HTML (I know I'm tired of looking at it). I've used Struts to build the past two web-applications I've worked on and I have no doubt I'll use it for the next - this book will be right beside me.

This book is a must have! I've been programming with Struts for about 6 months and I didn't want a beginners guide. This book hits the perfect level with me and covers the stuff that I wanted to know about. It's definitely not a beginners guide, although I think even beginning Struts developers should read it to save themselves time later.

Here's why I'm giving it five stars:

Chapter 1 - Covers MVC and Model 2 Background and Trivia
Chapter 2 - Covers Request/Response and Forward/Redirect Info
Chapter 3 - Good overview of the framework with the Bank example (All banking code is provided, including Ant scripts)

Chapter 4 - A complete chapter on configuring the web.xml and struts-config.xml (Some parameter are missing because of changes after book release)

Chapter 5 - A great chapter on explaining the controller of Struts

Chapter 6 - The reason to buy this book! Everything you ever wanted to know about how to build the model for Struts

Chapter 7 - Dynamic Forms Coverage (Good Coverage)
Chapter 8 - Tags (This chapter could have been better!)

Chapter 9 - The explanation of why and how to extend Struts if neccessary for any real Struts applications.

Chapter 10 - Great coverage of the declarative and programmatic exception handling

Chapter 11 - Coverage of the validator framework. Also covers how to create your own rules and to use it outside of Struts

Chapter 12 - Good I18N Coverage
Chapter 13 - Excellent chapter on EJBs and Struts (A must read!!!)

Chapter 14 - Tiles, but I've not read this chapter close enough to comment.

Chapter 15 - The best information available on Logging in a web application (A must read by all!)

Chapter 16 - Solid coverage of using Ant to package Struts. (Ant scripts are included)

Chapter 17 - Decent chapter on Performance

Overall, each chapter covers exactly what more advanced Struts users want and need.

You can't go wrong buying this book!

I have always been a fan of the intellectual debates in the New York Review of Books letters to the editor pages. This book consists of two articles by Crews and the subsequent debates surrounding them. I would have liked to see better defenses of Freud, but none of the eminent defenders of psychoanalysis is able to mount a serious challenge to Crews's devastating attacks.

This devastating book has two parts: (1) The Unknown Freud, where the reader gets a picture of Freud as a dictator, a megalomaniac and egotripper. A pope who alone knew the truth and who founded a secret commission to protect his 'church' against the heathen. He was a bad psychoanalyst (e.g. the Wolf Man case) and a venal man (e.g. the catastrophic Horace Fink case, where he tried to get his own hands on some money of the heiress).
I agree with the author that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience - statements cannot be tested and the research results cannot be verified uniformly. Although it is not totally without meaning (Karl Popper), it is not a science.
(2) the revenge of the repressed
A frontal attack on the caste of the psychoanalysts, depicted as 'religious zealots, self-help evangelists, sociopolitical ideologues, and outright charlatans who trade in the ever seductive currency of guilt and blame, while keeping the doctor's fees mounting.'
The author is particularly severe with their latest 'school' : the 'recovered memory movement', based on the rape of children by their parents (really!). This lead to false accusations and condemnations of innocent people. No wonder the author predicts an accelerating collapse of psychoanalysis as a respected institution.
A much needed and courageous book to halt a profession riding at full speed on a misty highway. And a much needed angle on Freud as a person, written in a style to slaughter the not so innocent father of psychoanalysis.
After reading this book, I agree with Peter Madawar, who called doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory "the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century".

Frederick Crews really knows how to tap that deep reservoir of hostility found in modern Freudian psychoanalysts. In 1993 and 1994 FC wrote two essays in the New York Review of Books debunking Freud in the first, and tearing to shreds the recovered memory movement in the second.

These two essays and the letters in response to them have been put into the book The Memory Wars. As someone trained in experimental psychology you can guess my own personal bias in this matter. Crews discusses Freud's botched cases; his frequent vacillation in theory formation; some of his sillier theories; and his serious interjection of personal bias into the formation of his beliefs. The main problem with the whole Freudian system is the total lack of scientific evidence supporting it. Freudian psychoanalysis is founded on anecdote and supported by anecdotes. To be fair, much current non-Freudian therapy is also based on anecdote. Indignant Freud followers write back, and their letters are indeed interesting (and often pompous).

The second half of the book takes on the recovered memory movement. It would be great to poke fun at this movement if it weren't for the fact that it has caused so much damage to all parties involved. Symptoms checklists are published with the statement if you suffer from these symptoms you may be a victim of sexual abuse. Read the list and you will find that the majority of Americans will find that they have been abused. It's all a patient seduction game with the intent to make big money. Hospitals have even set up units to treat such patients (Having worked in the psychiatric hospital industry I am well aware of the "product lines" that such facilities set up in order to fill beds). Crews does an excellent job of dissecting the memory movement, and once again we get to read the indignant responses.

Those who believe that psychological therapy should be based on sound scientific evidence will love this book. Those who have accepted Freudianism with a religious like faith will, of course, hate it. To me this whole subject is analogous to the evolution vs. creationist debate. It's science versus pseudoscience.

It`s a pleasure know more about Dr. Taylor. and his new work. In his book. "Telecommunications Demand", Dr. Taylor show in a very interesting way the link between theory and practice in applied econometrics and the demand theory.

This new book "the Future of the Telecommunications Industry..." contains a great contribution to the scientific progress about Demand Theory in Telecommmunications,I Think was developed for researchers, students and managers that have a medium knowledge about the telecom market. Whatever the skill of the book isn`t to hard, specially to the practice.

It is, of course, Jackie who has the most bios written of the Kennedy women. But in the midst of her dignity and class and Ethel's forthright personality, there is Joan, now ex-wife of Sen. Ted. This 1970's-era bio is certainly aptly titled: this unKennedy-esque wife was, during most of her marriage, in the background, tormented in silence by her own insecurity and her husband's philandering and its most publicized tragedy in 1969. "Joan, the Reluctant Kennedy" delves more into that part of the woman who never quite felt a part of the clan, but does something of a disservice by glossing over the years-long battle with alcoholism, her slips and relapses and the lessons she might provide that might spare other sufferers her elongated torment. Stunningly beautiful, certainly, but Joan Kennedy was and remains a person of substance, in many respects emotionally fragile but, despite that, a fighter who broke from her general anonymity as another Kennedy wife and established her own identity in music and poetry. While this book doesn't cover the last 30 years of Mrs. Kennedy's life, it does take us up to her son's cancer surgery and her turmoils before. This bio is an admirable effort, and it's somewhat disappointing that other biographers apparently haven't deemed this lady interesting enough for an updated portrait. But this is a worthy start.

This book was extremely helpful in my research on serial murder. It is a good, concise, rendition of research, theories, and paradigms of multiple homicide. I recommend this book to anyone writing a research paper or who wants a synopsis of major research conducted on the topic of serial murder.

This book was such an enormous help to me while I gathered information for a study I am doing on serial killers. The way it is organized and divided into different types of killers was very useful and helped me get a good handle on what types of people commit serial crimes and their personal characteristics. Also helpful is the info on different theories people have had on serial murderers. I also liked that it was to the point and without a lot of unnecessary information. Well written, easy to read (and quick to read!) and full of very useful information, this book is not a sensationalist look at this subculture but a well-researched, well-balanced review of serial killers written by a psychologist with many many books to his name. Extremely helpful and very interesting indeed.

It has been said that this book has no new information to offer the reader. Personally I find such remarks to be self serving and inconsistent. I believe this book stands out due to the presentation of the content. David Lester does and excellent job assembling the facts and putting them together in an easy to read format. I recommend this book to all individuals interested in learning more about the complex mind of the Serial Killer....