The experienced actor David I. Davies gives readings of 30 soliloquies and scenes from Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Travis Dickerson's resonant music enhances the dramatizations. In addition to all of Hamlet's major soliloquies, Davies does a variety of scenes following the story line of the play and the cast of significant characters. Besides Hamlet, there's Horatio, Polonius, Claudius, and Ophelia. With the sharp expressiveness of Davies' readings, the listener can easily follow the development of the play and the inter-action of the characters.

Davies gives a reading which is true to the original language, yet modern in tone and enunciation. Though the readings are faithful to Shakespeare's language, Davies' pacing and pitch is modern-so the listener follows the dialog as easily as if he or she were listening to persons talking on a TV program, for example. The high technical quality of the recording and the tape also contributes to the favorable listening experience. Because Davies' readings make the play so accessible, "Hamlet One Voice" could be used for classroom or individual student study of the play; although anyone interested in the play or exceptionally controlled and elucidating readings of literature would find this work rewarding.

Henry Berry, reviewer
The Small Press Book Review

Google is one of the (if not the foremost) most well-known search engines on the 'Net and this book of 100 "Google Hacks" makes anyone's forays into searching on Google much easier and fun. Among the hacks listed in Chapter 1 include "getting around Google's 10 Word Search Limit," Mixing Syntaxes, Date-Range Searching, Using Full-Word Wildcards, Tracking Stocks, and searching article archives. Perfect for "non-geeky types like me. But wait, there's much more! Chapter 2 discusses Google's Special Services and Collections, like the Google Directory, newsgroups and images. There's a chapter explaining the Google Web API and another chapter listing hacks for Google Web API programs. Chapter 7 lists a few hacks (ie. "pranks") you can pull on your friends if you're in a playful mood.

The authors have put the usual excellent and thorough job into this book that I've known to love and appreciate about all O'Reilly books. Not only do they take the time to thoroughly explain Google and topics related to Google, they also with a number of hacks show code examples, making it easy to implement them.

Hacks (and hackers, not crackers) in recent times have gotten a bad name as another reviewer pointed out. The 100 hacks this book lists are ones that are of benefit to all who use Google as their primary search engine.

REVIEW: GOOGLE HACKS: 100 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TIPS $ TOOLS

by Jocelyn Paine

My brain seems to turn off when I'm exposed to the advanced terminology, much less faced with wading through the web. I've not been as intimidated by the search engine Google, though, because it seems to facilitate exploring the millions (billions?) of choices now available on the World Wide Web. I've always felt I'm not utilizing it enough. So I was very glad to see "Google Hacks, 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools," by Tara Calishain & Rael Dornfest, published by O'Reilly & Associates ... Only recently did I learn that 'google' is a pun on the mathematical term: googol, a one followed by a hundred zeros. There isn't anything that large in the universe, so it is a mythical term, but it aptly symbolizes the magnitude of information available on the Web.

I believe that all good reference books have extensive Indexes. The one for "Google Hacks" leads me to a whole new world of Google. I find out that there's something called Google API that users like me access, but for the brave of heart and reliable of fingers there's code available for 'scraping' beyond the surface of the usual pages. Whew! This is way above my head, but I'm fascinated by the possibilities. The authors also responsibly define what is and what is not allowable according to Google's terms of agreement and what can lead to being banned from Google! A handy thermometer reference classifies each hack into beginner, moderate and expert categories.

Just leafing through the table of contents makes it clear to me that there is lots I don't use in Google. I liked the arrangement of the book, very much like a 'Dummies' reference book. The writing is very clear, non technical and well explained, with step-by-step guidelines, and clever and humerous to boot. A lot of the book is devoted to actually creating a page for Google, which I have no aspirations to do, but who knows what's in my future? Highly recommended for the novice, like me, or the advanced computer geek. Now we don't know any of those, do we?

It has been quite a while since I have come across a book I'd label 'essential.' The last for non-programming computer users was Robin Williams' 'The Mac Is Not A Typewriter' which I bought for a number of new Macintosh users. 'Google Hacks' by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest and published by O'Reilly will appeal to an even wider audience, I can imagine buying this for friends who haven't cottoned on to 'net searching at all and friends who complain "Google returns too many sites." People who are afraid to code shouldn't be put off by the "Hacks" in the title: O'Reilly have obviously taken a wider meaning of "hack" than just a neat piece of code. This book is a marvelous compendium of tips and tricks for Google, ranging from simple ways of getting the search results you want, through using Google's newer services such as phone books and image search, all the way to advanced ways of using scrapers and the Google API.

The book demonstrates 100 hacks, of which close to half are useful for everyone -- newbie, programmer and non-programmer alike. The first 35 hacks, in chapters one and two, will educate you about the intricacies of getting the best out of searching both Google's main web catalog and the newer 'Special Services and Collections.' This is the part of the book that should be essential reading for Google users -- in the two days I've had this book these have proved invaluable. The rest are for those who are either looking for extremely advanced search tips, increasing their web site's Google page rank, or programming an application to use the Google data -- all topics well covered in this volume.

What's Good In This Book

To start, it is well written, well laid out with a good contents section, good index, and some appropriate introductory material before getting down to the first hack. Each of the hacks are numbered and a single hack will often cross-reference other hacks that add information relevant to it. The hacks in each chapter nicely add on each other in both complexity and function.

The hacks themselves seem to cover every area of Google that you might want. They range from the downright frivolous (there is a chapter "Google Pranks and Games") to serious ways of improving your search results and excellent examples of good ways to use the Google API.

Most of the code fragments are in Perl, and among the hacks are ways of getting the job done without over extensive use of extra modules such as XML Parsers and SOAP::Lite (including a hack that uses regular expressions to parse the XML).

What's Bad In This Book

It's hard to find anything bad to say, apart from some frustration that a couple of the hacks that interested me used ASP or VB rather than a more portable language.

Oh, another minor quibble, the allied web site O'Reilly Hacks Series has been slow and has none of the code in the book or any of the URLs mentioned listed anywhere -- it seems more geared towards marketing the books than helping the readers.