Instead of writing a review I am citing an error that I observed in reading the book. On page 141, Mr. Davis states that Bob Marley had a daughter named Kimane. He had a son named Kymani, who is now a singer and recording artist.

This is a very original book about the Tuff Gong. It traces Bob's evolvement as an infant-child, boy, pupil, "street rebel", struggling youngman, father, "lover", musician, poet, Rastafarian and beloved Freedon-Fighter we all know. It is a moving, evocative book. It starts almost like a mellow tale describing the humble, natural surroundings of the deep Jamaican interior into which Bob was born.

It almost immediately rises to a pre-climax of the hardships of Trenchtown, with Bob not only struggling to survive, but also hesitantly nourishing his dream of being a BIG musician, his tackle with the Rastafarian faith and his immediate deep conviction, his frequent "travels"; e.g. to visit his mother in Deleware, USA or his short stay in Sweden full of stress. To me, these are the formative stages of the "Tuff Gong International" and these travels overseas broadened his perspective, both as a musician and as a man, especially a highly sensitive man as Bob.

The book further on describes how Bob's talent and faith - in Jah and in himself - evolve into extraordinary, peerless musical craftsmanship, making Bob's music explode to the four corners of the earth ... almost like a miracle, in the twinkle of an eye! At the climax of this book, Bob is already a supertar, confident, uncompromising, mature, wiser and hard to equal, the wiry cult-hero from Trenchtown, Jamaica.

It's also interesting to observe Bob's relationship with the press, as the press was from the start of it all invariably attracted by his magnetic charm, which thing in turn really [directly or indirectly] raised him to the star of mythical and mystical prorportions that he REALLY is. Because he simply deserved it. Just at the climax of this book, Bob dies, and that's when - in retrospect - things really start looking like a tale, like an unended tale. Pathetic. Mystery. That's just when the "real universal meaning of being Bob Marley" comes to light and is understood: a mission.

Reading this book, one feels the sadness, the love, the hate, the pain, the hope, the godly determination, the fear, the doubt, the anger and the danger that escorted Bob throughout his astonishing rise to superstardom; he becomes almost a religious figure with his ever-growing numbers of fans and disciples, but much the same as his persona continues defying "classification". One can interpret him as a cult-hero, poet, prophet, revolutonary, "statesman", champion of human rights, supreme musician, or the painstaking musical craftsman who knows really well how to poetically "play about with words" in his compositions ...

... Yet, this book will show you how really simple, modest, serious, human, honest and humane Bob was and how this can be sometimes taken advantage of by others [including "friends"]. This is a very good, well-researched book and, I would say, a must for all of you Marley fans and Black Survivors out there [especially if you never read a full book about Bob!]. Peace! WE WILL FIGHT THE DEVIL!

You will enjoy this book as much as you would enjoy his music. Stephen Davis recreates Bob Marley's life from his ancestors to his final days . I really enjoy this book because Stephen Davis makes you feel like your there with him from days of dread to days of glory. I highly recommend this book to readers. Its very easy reading.

I wanted to like this book, I really did, but I couldn't get past the amateurish tone as Simon retreads that well trod path that amounts to the sixties generation stations of the cross--wealthy childhood, discovering drugs and sex at college, dropping out and living off your parents on a commune, plugging into Eastern philosophies and, finally, capitalizing on "the good old days". I found the photographs mundane and the essays almost unbearable as Simon chronicles his constant drug taking and drifting from place to place. As another reviewer wrote, I don't think we would have seen this book printed if not for his name and his celebrity sister.

It's been said that if you remember the '60's you probably weren't really there. It's a good thing Peter had a camera because he probably would have been wondering himself what those days were like. Parts of his world, beautifully recorded, jar our memories. Whether these memories are painful or delightful, they are part of our collective story. Many '60's communes didn't allow photographs, so these may be rarer than one assumes. The book is worth looking at and reading.

Peter Simon is a talented photojournalist, and this book is the story of his life, with a definite emphasis on the 60's and early 70's counterculture years, which he lived to the fullest. It's all here: the protests, living on a commune, the eastern spiritual gurus, flirtations with nudism, the (impressive) series of hippy girlfriends, the rock stars (he's Carly Simon's brother).

I'm sure other members of his generation will find the book very nostalgic. As for me, it's almost enough to make we wish I'd been born 10 or 15 years sooner. I went to college during the early years of the Reagan administration. The 60's obviously weren't a very happy time, but it would be hard to imagine someone of my generation putting out a book like this: who would care?

The later chapters of the book are an odd lot of whatever he was shooting during those years of his life. Therefore we have some baseball coverage, some photos of landscapes and his celebrity friends on Martha's Vineyard and some coverage of Woodstock 1999. I'd judge these chapters as substantially less interesting than the early ones.

One thing this book does illustrate is the importance of connections in getting a book of photography published. I'm not saying it's not a worthy project: it certainly is. But a lot of worthy projects are never published, and it's hard to believe his sister's celebrity and his family's connections in the publishing industry ("Simon" is the "Simon" in "Simon & Schuster") weren't key factors, especially for a virtually unknown photographer.

This book is great reading, mostly if you were apart of the rock revolution of the 60's and 70's. It is interesting to see the heritage of some of my favorite rock icons that came through the John Mayall bands into those like Fleetwood Mac. Mick is very introspective to a fault in this book, however he does humanize a lot of what was going on during those crazy years.

I fully expected to read all the "soap-opera-ish" accounts of the turbulent Nicks-Buckingham early years (you do get plenty of this), but I didn't realize the original Fleetwood Mac had such an interesting early history! I've heard all the stories about this account not being 100% factual, but, even if it's not entirely accurate, it's very definetly worth the read. Fleetwood's self-depricating humor and honest (to a fault) dialouge make this one of the best Rock books that I've read...highly recommended.

I had to wait a year and a half to get this book (it was already out of print). but boy, was it worthwhile! An insiders view of the often turbulent career of one of the greatest bands ever! Mick Fleetwood tells it all with an open heart. The book smells sincerity and the drummer gives us one of the best biographies I ever saw, telling all the good or bad facts he saw during his 25 plus years in the band. Unlyke meny other books about rock bands, mr. Fleetwood doe not try to hide anything about the rock life he gone through. I could not stop reading it until I finished it. A very touching book. As a human being and musician mr. Fleetwood has got my respect. Long Live Fleetwood Mac!

As a prevous reviewer stated, this book does indeed cover all the basics on how to create Windows-based Java applications, including all the dialogs, frames, and controls you'd want to use. (Note: becasue this is a J++ book, it DOES focus on WFC and windows-specific applications, and only touches on the platform-independent AWT packages) My main problem is with the organization of the book. When topics such as hash tables and the Debug classes is covered, the surfaces are only scratched, and a lot of detailed information is left out. (The Debug class section is particularly poor and lacking in explanation). This is all true in other sections where some controls are covered and others are not. Some important topics are brought up in an off-hand way in seemingly unrelated sections, which, for me, breaks up the flow of the book and confuses things. (for example, bringing up the topic of the java.lang.reflection package and ennumerations in the middle of the ListBox explanations).

Code samples are great, but this book depends on you actually READING the code, and follows the code with a breakdown of what happened in the code. Although this method of writing works, it makes it a bit tedious on the reader.

Although a lot of these comments sound bad, however, it is a useful book. You just really need to focus when you are reading the material. Make sure you read a good "learn java in XX days" first if you haven't already learned the basics of Java - quite a bit of general knowledge is assumed.

I think this is a good book for starting Visual J++ programming. It covers pretty much all of the major programming aspects. The author did a good job. I also found it easy to follow and appreciated that most of the programs I have worked (except one, that I still don't know what it does) are executing fine. Since I am coding a Java wrapper for custom DLL access, I wish there were more J/Direct examples. But overall, I would highly recommend this book to people who would like to start on Visual J++

This book is better than online support. I was able to accomplish both idle event processing and custom dynamic link libraries from the examples presented in this book. It is by far the best Visual J++ book written.

A fascinating story and worthy tribute to Joseph Bazalgette, an underappreciated Victorina-era engineer responsible not only for designing and overseeing the construction of London's huge sanitary sewer system, but also the construction of Victoria, Chelsea and Albert Embankments, forever changing the face and character of central London. We take so much of our modern cities for granted, not realizing that entire rivers are flowing under the streets, blissfully unaware of the level of vision and committment required to create an infrastructure that provides health and convenience.

The writing style is breezy and lucid, although the author has a distracting habit of repetition. Certain factoids, such as "the embankments reclaimed 52 acres of land" are repeated over and over again, and several favorite quotes are repeated at least 3 times.

I won't ever look at a modern city the same way.

While the title implies the book's focus will be London's "Great Stink" of 1858, it is in fact a short biography of the eminent Victorian civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Less remembered than his fellow engineers Isambard Brunel or Robert Stephenson, Bazalgette was the Chief Engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works for some 30 years.

During his tenure, he oversaw the construction of the great intercepting sewers of London which effectively removed the recurring threat of cholera from the city even before that disease's transmission mechanism was fully understood. In addition, the great Embankments along the Thames were designed and built by Bazalgette which make the modern waterfront as we know it today. He also built three bridges still standing across the Thames and designed many of the modern thoroughfares of London.

This book focuses on the long political battles waged in Parliament, the press, and within the City itself to solve the massive problem of human waste disposal in the world's largest western metropolis of the day. Although ostensibly about a civil engineer, there is not much engineering in the book - making it highly accessible to the layperson. Copious contemporary illustrations out of "Punch" and the "Illustrated London News" along with lengthy quotations from "The Times" make the Victorians' view of this smelly problem come to life. It's fortunate that this is not a scratch-and-sniff book.

The main chapters include those devoted to the invention of the water closet (a sewage nightmare), cholera and sanitation, and the building of the embankments. Throughout the book, small sidebars give potted biographies of key players and interested parties of the day such as Dickens, W.H. Smith, Gladstone, Dr. John Snow, and others. These are great little tidbits on the people featured in the main narrative and they are liberally sprinkled with caricatures from "Spy".

The book does touch on Bazalgette's early endorsement and use of Portland cement as a technical innovation as well as the quality assurance testing techniques that he enforced during his projects. So engineer, take heart! There are interesting bits for you as well.

If dark places under the heart of the metropolis is your area of interest, see also "London Under London" by Richard Trench & Ellis Hillman for sewers, the Tube, and more subterranean passages. And if you simply must have olfactory re-enforcement to imagine the past, try "Victorian Vapours" by Mary J. Dobson.

Halliday's book tells the story of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works (London's first metropolitan government) from 1856 to 1889.

His greatest achievement was building for London a sanitation system of unprecedented scale and complexity. Throughout history, the main cause of death has been the contamination of drinking water by sewage. In particular, cholera spread when the faeces of sufferers contaminated drinking water: cholera epidemics in London killed 6,536 people in 1831-32, 14,137 in 1848-49, and 10,738 in 1853-54.

In the long hot summer of 1858, the stench from rotting sewage in the Thames drove MPs from Westminster. The 'Great Stink' forced them, belatedly, to act. Bazalgette was charged with building a system to prevent sewage getting into Londoners' drinking water, which he did. The 1866 cholera epidemic killed 5,596 people in the East End, the sole part of London that had not yet been protected by Bazalgette's intercepting system. After the system was completed, cholera would never again kill Londoners. Bazalgette had turned the Thames from the filthiest to the cleanest metropolitan river in the world and added some twenty years to Londoners' lives.

But this was not Bazalgette's only success. He constructed the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, where he introduced the use of Portland cement. He laid out Shaftesbury Avenue, Northumberland Avenue, Charing Cross Road, the Embankment Gardens, Battersea Park and Clapham Common. He built the bridges at Hammersmith, Putney and Battersea. He introduced the Woolwich Free Ferry and designed the Blackwall Tunnel.

In 1889, the London County Council replaced the Board: Bazalgette's successes had proven the value of local government for great cities. Roy Porter wrote that Bazalgette stands with Wren and Nash 'as one of London's noblest builders'. John Doxat wrote, "this superb and farsighted engineer probably did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian public official."

This isn't a bad book, but it's 20 years out of date. It was first published in 1976 and the reprint in 1992 doesn't add anything except a postcript saying all the the developments in reggae since it was first written are all rubbish. Reggae Bloodlines gives a good snapshot of reggae in the seventies, but it has been superseded by more up to date and comprehensive books like Reggae, Rasta, Revolution, The Reggae Rough Guide, and Reggae Routes : The Story of Jamaican Music.

Anyone with an interest in the Reggae scene in the 70's will enjoy this book. I liked the photos an interviews.

I red this book when I was a child. still my most favorite book! This is the reggae guide which was written by photographer in the real time of 'Roots Rock Reggae'. You will feel like you're traveling Jamaica and talking with Bob Marly. You will learn a lot of things about Reggae history.

This book contains 13 articles written by different scholars on various topics related to the resurrection. A few of the articles also include brief responses from other scholars. This book doesn't seem to flow as well as other books I've read with a similar format involving various authors. The articles I enjoyed the most were those by Stephen Davis, William Alston, Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and Alan Padgett.

Although some may consider it highly speculative, Stephen Davis' topic was very interesting. Its basic thesis was as follows: If we assume that Jesus really was raised from the dead and appeared to other people, then what kind of "seeing" was involved by those to whom Jesus appeared? Craig's article was a strong critique of John Dominic Crossan's reconstruction of the events surrounding Jesus' death and (non) burial. Padgett wrote about the need for religious historians to recognize the impossibility of "scientifically proving" the resurrection, and the necessary component of faith for any belief in it.

While this book contains much helpful material, I felt it lacked cohesiveness. After finishing one article, the next one might be on an entirely unrelated topic. If you can get past this shortcoming, you will find something of value. If I had the option, I'd give this book 3.5 stars.

THE RESURRECTION brings together a group of scholars who portray the theological underpinnings of the Resurrection of Jesus. In addition, the various contributors establish that the three uncontested facts surrounding the Resurrection controversy (the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and the inexplicable origin of the Christian faith) favor the Resurrection hypothesis over and above modern-day liberal pedantics about unsupported presuppositions precluding miracles. The serious student of the Resurrection (if one already possesses a working knowledge of the Resurrection debate) will find this fascinating work an important element in attacking contemporary criticism of history's most fantastic truth: Jesus is risen.

This is a campaign setting book based largely on German and French geography and culture. Most of the names of the characters and places are pretty good, but some of them are directly lifted from actual places (example: "The Kingdom of Maine"). There are a few good plots here and there and it's definitely worth buying, especially compared to other campaign setting books out there (i.e. Forgotten Realms). It has a more earthy feel to it and there are some good ideas to pick up here and there. However, they could have done a better job at editing as there are many typos and awkward sentences. I like most of the drawings as they have a more realistic look to them than what you see in the D&D 3rd edition books. A good buy overall.

I'm an atheist and I'm very interested in philosophy and religion. I purchased this book so that I would have a better idea how theists use arguments to bolster their faith. This book is satisfactory, although it could be much better. Stephen Davis, the author, sometimes writes unnecessarily complicated sentences which only serves to confuse the reader. For the most part, however, he is rather clear. He gives a rather in depth look into the most popular proofs for the existence of God and examines the objections to them. This book was an interesting read, but a basic philosophical background will probably be necessary in order for a person to fully understand the arguments which Davis examines. The only other complaint I have about the book is Davis's major (and unjustified) leaps of logic. He sometimes examines a theistic proof and then concludes that it proves the existence of God, but he fails to consider the most basic objections to these very proofs. It almost seems as if he is ignoring these objections. Otherwise, it was a fairly enjoyable read.

Davis offers a largely sympathetic overview of arguments for the existence of god and common objections to them. The book is good as far as it goes, but Davis has an unfortunate tendency to lean heavily on personal intuition when the issues become the most difficult, and hence the most interesting. This is disappointing, because Davis is obviously intelligent enough to have done much more. Had he sought more carefully to identify the reasons underlying his intuitions, the book would surely have been a five-star effort. I enjoyed the book, and do not at all regret having spent time reading it, but I hoped for much more.

I first came across the work of Stephen T Davis a couple of years ago reading his `Logic and the Nature of God' (published 1983). Whilst the target readership is clearly different (the first being professional academic and this the interested theology/philosophy student) the improvement in readability is immense. I would recommend this book to anyone undertaking an introductory Philosophy of Religion/Philosophical Theology course. The book would probably be difficult work for someone with no theology or philosophy background although certainly not impossible. One of the big advantages of this book is that the chapters can be read as stand alone introductions to the various theistic indicators (more commonly referred to as proofs).

The book begins after a brief outline of what is a theistic proof with the a priori ontological argument. In addition there are chapters on the Cosmological, Design, Pascalian wager and argument(s) from religious experience as well as some other more (historically) minor arguments. In my mind this is where Davis is most useful. Interspersed between these chapters the important topics of `Theistic Proofs and Religious Realism' and `Theistic Proofs and Foundationalism' are covered. Whilst as a reference work this is fine the arbitrary location of these chapters can make the book jump around somewhat for someone reading from cover to cover. For instance the chapter on foundationalism is placed after that on the Cosmological argument. However, the Cosmological argument is as much helped by a strong foundationalist epistemology as any other. I have no doubt that Davis would agree with this, however, the layout of the book does not make this clear. It would surely have made more sense to deal with these two topics prior to all the a posteroiri arguments. It is with this in mind that "God, Reason and Theistic Proofs" has been given three stars. However, as a first point of call (especially as preparatory reading) for Philosophy of Religion classes or research into the individual generic theistic indicators this book would receive five stars as it is an excellent resource in this area of natural theology.