'Based upon principles developed by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, this new English translation restores the poetics of the Hebrew original--the echoes, allusions, alliterations, and word-plays that rhetorically underscore its meaning and are intrinsic to a text meant to be read aloud and heard.' The underlying premise of most translations of the Bible have been to clarify the meaning of the text. While this is certainly not overlooked here, it can be the case that in the pursuit of textual clarity, the ability to make it audibly intelligible gets lost -- a lot of passages from the New Revised Standard Version, for instance, are so precise in construction that they defy oral expression.

Fox says in his Translator's Preface: 'I have presented the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice.' Careful attention has been given to rhythm and sound. Too many English translations overlook the auditory quality of the words, and while striving to capture the idea of the text, they miss the crucial 'hearing cues' that an oral rendering would give the listener.

To this end, the text is printed as if it were in blank verse (save where a poetic style was already present and could be carried forward). Proper nouns (the names of persons and places) retain their Hebraic forms; odd, though, that the title of the book is The Five Books of Moses rather than The Five Books of Moshe. Also, a principle of the 'leading-word' is employed here. A good example follows:

The New English Bible translated Genesis 32.21-22 as:

for he thought, 'I will appease him with the present I have sent on ahead, and afterwards, when I come into his presence, he will perhaps receive me kindly.' So Jacob's present went on ahead of him...

Here, one would get the idea that the 'present' is the key word. But, in Hebrew, it isn't. Fox's translation reads thusly:

For he said to himself:
I will wipe (the anger from) his face
with the gift that goes ahead of my face
afterward, when I see his face,
perhaps he will lift up my face!
The gift crossed over ahead of his face...

A very different sense of meaning, cadence, and purpose comes out from this translation.

Fox is heavily indebted to the work of Buber and Rosenzweig (who worked on a German translation similar in character to this English translation) in the early part of this century. Fox dismisses the idea that this is simply an English variant of their German masterpiece, but does acknowledge great inspiration and methodological similarities. 'Buber and Rosenzweig translated the Bible out of the deep conviction that language has the power to bridge worlds and to redeem human beings. They both, separately and together, fought to restore the power of ancient words and to speak modern ones with wholeness and genuineness.'

Fox begins each of the five books with an essay discussing historical context, textual contents, themes and structures, and other important items. Fox continues a running commentary of the text on pages opposite the Biblical text, and has extensive notes. This is a work of care and precision, and very useful for Biblical research.

Worthwhile for scholars, Bible enthusiasts, and occasional readers, this book is an interesting addition to any collection, and a vital piece for research and exegesis of the Torah.

Hard to put down, I found "The Relentless Pursuit of Everett Pick" to be thoroughly enjoyable - full of gritty characters, action, and misadventures. Everett Pick is a schoolteacher falsely accused of a crime he didn't commit. Faced with sure conviction, he's forced to flee across the American Midwest to the Badlands and the Black Hills, only to face troubles he never dreamed of.

Be warned: Everett Pick is not your standard hero! In fact, at first he seems a pitiful loser when he wakes up and discovers that his beautiful, but deadly girlfriend, Mary Fae, is attempting to kill him with a shovel because he's planning to leave her to return to his ex-wife, Juliet. Escaping with his life and not much else, the broke Everett drives 600 miles to his ex-wife's home in Black Hills dressed only in his underwear.

Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be better off in Juliet's hands. An advocate of a New Age Religion, Juliet worships the mystical "Ascended Beings" and becomes more and more out of touch with reality as the story unfolds. Her sole purpose is to attract followers to worship the Ascended, no matter what the costs to herself and those around her.

Ev Pick undertakes a series of misadventures from being shot in the leg and falling down a canyon while avoiding and interacting with various characters in the Black Hills town of Rapid City. Examples include the wife-beating militia leader, Vernon Sarvis and the town's preacher, Moses Brubaker, who seems to have committed all of the 7 Deadly Sins of life (especially Gluttony and Greed!)

Despite all his misfortunes, Ev displays courage and compassion while under siege from the militia members, the FBI, the sheriff, his ex-wife, and a murderous computer genius. You glimpse the tenderness that Everett can exhibit when he becomes attached to the doomed Lorena, the 18-year-old pregnant wife of the heartless Vern Sarvis.

An unlikely partnership forms between Everett and the local Sheriff, Lonny Gunderson, who comes a close second to Everett for surviving mishaps such as a treacherous deputy and militia members armed to the teeth. Together, Ev and Lonny discover a dark conspiracy unfolding in Black Hills that threatens the life of everyone living there... but will they be too late to uncover the truth?

While reading the book, I kept wanting to know what else could possibly happen to Everett and how or if he would survive his next mishap. I learned that despite all his faults, Everett Pick was a true hero in every sense, regardless of my original opinion. If you enjoy reading Stephen King, you'll love Steven Fisher's book.

I have only one warning... this book is filled with coarse language so I don't recommend it for young readers.

Review by Eva Almeida, eBooks N' Bytes Reviews
ebooksnbytes.com

I despise the term "page turner" but Relentless Pursuit is such a book. The characters are vividly portrayed, Vern in particular. Vern (the antagonist) is the total and utter repersentation of what mankind can become if unchecked, what is evil in all of us. Everett, or plain Ev, the Jesus-like figure of the book. Poor Ev weathers all, doubts, fears, yet triumphs in his ability to accept fate.

The Relentless Pursuit of Everett Pick is quite possibly one of the best books from a new author I have ever had the privilage to read.

it draws you into its spiral... I couldn't put it down.

if ev pick has a middle name it must be "bohica" (bend over, here it comes again!)

Does this signal that Kurt was right: Grunge is dead?

Well, perhaps dead but not yet interred into the earth.

As a lifelong resident of "the whitest state in the Union," whose contacts with members of other races have never been like those of native-born Southerners, I found this memoir a fascinating read. Ever since I've known people of color (which didn't happen until I was a young adult), I've interacted with them as equals. College classmates, colleagues at professional conventions, next door neighbors, fellow parishioners at my church. One of my own books lists my very black former pastor in its acknowledgements, for his kindness and helpfulness during more than one life crisis. So, while Mr. Beal's book is by no means entirely about race relations (past or present), his comments on that theme - the experience of being a Southern man during a turbulent and dangerous era - truly intrigued and enlightened me.

However, that's only part of why I can recommend "Southern Winds" to my fellow readers who enjoy a well-written memoir. Mr. Beal's years as a columnist shine through his reminiscences of boyhood and young manhood. He knows how to tell a story, and he's included a very suitable mix of humorous, sad, and thought-provoking anecdotes in this, his first book. His stated goal is to share with his readers the culture that shaped him, and he has managed to do exactly that.

This is a truly a book written from the heart, with touching honesty. Whether or not you agree with everything Mr. Beal has to say, you will be richer for reading his words and coming to know the characters who have peopled his life. I certainly am!

Rockets Like Rain is a classic memoir which should be required reading for middle and high school students. It would truly help them understand history.

That soldier is Dale Reich and his story, ROCKETS LIKE RAIN, reads like a letter home written by a young and lonely and frightened recruit. The year is 1969 and the place is Vietnam where death has no "moratorium". It is always in the air -- a malevolent presence, one whose spectral face a soldier might not even glimpse before the falling of its axe. Vietnam, we are reminded, was a place where death could come as easily in the form of friendly fire as from bullets fired purposely, or randomly, by the enemy.

From reading Reich's vivid account, told movingly in simple and unadorned language, one gains an understanding that people, caught in the maelstrom of a war, devoid of direction or mature leadership, can be warped beyond recognition. Vietnam, Reich tells us, was a place where every soldier's individual craziness had room to grow, in moist, fertile soil, into full blown madness. (Note: Dale Reich was a co-editor of the official newspaper of the 11th Infantry Brigade of the Americal division, the one which produced the My Lai Massacre.)

One also learns that the individual soldier could also exercise reason and caution, and even strive to be removed from action in the killing fields. It was Reich's struggle to resist the insanity that makes one realize that not every new and inexperienced soldier is automatically a killing machine.

Though painful to read, ROCKETS LIKE RAIN delivers a powerful message and a necessary reminder to those of us who are currently counting statistics about Afghanistan, and who think we may, with the passage of time, be able to put our nightmares about the carnage of war safely aside. It reminds us forcefully that war -- any war -- however conducted or concluded, lives on in the memories and lives of our veterans, and that those memories deserve a respectful forum.

I am grateful to Dale Reich to be so reminded.

If that is the case, then you owe it to yourself to buy this book. I've been using MSVC for five years now, and I thought I new a lot of the tips and tricks, but Mr. McKay is like a god...

In addition there is a lot of useful hints and tips on debugging any type of program (not even necessarily Windows programs.) A good book with good ideas for lots of people.

My only regrets are:

A) This book did not come out last year. B) A large portion of this stands to be out of date with the coming of Visual Studio.NET (this is just a fear I have, I haven't taken a look at the Beta yet, so I don't know.)

This is one nerd book I am happy to have purchased and read (other books I'm happy to have stumbled upon and read are "Effective C++" and "Essential COM", if that gives you a feeling for other books of a similar quality in my mind.)

After reading the first few chapters of this book, I knew it was a winner.This book shows ways to find bugs in different kinds of C++ programs MFC,COM etc.

The most important however is the chapter on memory bugs(a real pain)

If you need to hunt down bugs, get this book and your monitor is less likely to end up smashed from your frustrations.

This book also points the reader to a lot of other books which should make a better programmer of anyone who bothers to buy them.

But the emperors of the scientific establishment have never dealt kindly with the boys who can't see their robes, as Cooke points out with several examples. (The Hungarian doctor who demonstrated that deaths from childbirth fever could be eliminated if doctors washed their hands was hounded by his colleages to suicide.) Dr. Folkman's heresy was the observation that tumors can't grow without stimulating healthy tissues to supply new blood vessels.

Fortunately for all of us, Dr. Folkman's vision has been matched by his persistence in pursuing it. In following Dr. Folkman's path from his boyhood in Ohio as the son of a rabbi, to Harvard where he gained his self-confidence, to the Navy research lab where his angiogenesis hypothesis first formed, and back to Boston as a pediatric surgeon-scientist, Cooke makes what might have been a difficult and technical story into an epic adventure.

In keeping with the fashion that writing a biography in chronological order is boring and passe, Cooke instead follows parallel thematic threads in Dr. Folkman's storied career. I personally found the resulting forward and backward jumps in time distracting, but not insurmountable.

It would have been enough if this were merely a story of scientific progress and the triumph of a new idea over entrenched dogma, but it is also the story of a man whose vision is matched by his devotion to his patients. It should be required reading for all prospective medical students.

Now angiogenesis-based therapies for cancer, atherosclerosis, blindness and arthritis are on the verge of exploding on the scene and Dr. Folkman's lab at Children's Hospital Boston is ground-zero. He and the generation of doctors and researchers that he has helped to train are revolutionizing huge swaths of medicine. When it happens it will seem like it was overnight, but those of us who have read Robert Cooke's book will know it was a lifetime in the making.

Dr. Folkman's War contains many valuable insights including how to: Raise children to be outstanding people; be an astute observer about nature to unlock new lessons; pioneer in a new field of science; and be persistent about something important. When the history of medicine in the twentieth century is written, Dr. Judah Folkman will be considered one of the most important figures. This book is the most accessible and complete source of information about his remarkable life and accomplishments.

Dr. Folkman's research to date "has found applications in twenty-six diseases as varied as cancer, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, psoriasis, arthritis, and endometriosis." "Ordinarily, researchers working in any of these fields do not communicate with each other."

Angiogenesis looks at the way that capillaries are formed in response to the body's biochemistry to help and harm health. Tumors depend on this action to get the blood supply they need to grow. Wounds also rely on a similar mechanism to grow scar tissue.

I have been following Dr. Folkman's career for over twenty-five years, and heard him speak about angiogenesis just a little over two years ago. Because I felt I was well-informed, I almost skipped this book. That would have been a major mistake on my part. Dr. Folkman's War contained much new and interesting information that helped me to better understand the lessons of Dr. Folkman's life, as well as the future implications of angiogenesis.

Unknown to me, Dr. Folkman had also played a role as an innovator in implantable pacemakers, time-released drug implants, and specialized types of heart surgery before he began his serious assault on angiogenesis.

The discoveries had their beginning in 1961 when he was a draftee in a Navy lab in Bethesda, Maryland. He noticed that tumors could not grow unless they first recruited their own capillaries to bring an increased blood supply. "Over time, he convinced himself that there had to be some way to block the growth of those blood vessels." He was right, but it took a long time before he knew any of the answers.

In brief opening comments about the book, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, M.D. and Sc.D. observed how this new science evolved. "In the 1970s, laboratory scientists didn't believe any of it." " . . . [T]he critics' objections were hushed for good in 1989." "In the 1990s, the criticisms came chiefly from the clinical side, and the pharmaceutical companies didn't want anything to do with angiogenesis."

The story is a very heart-warming one. Dr. Folkman's father was a rabbi who asked each member of the family each night what she or he had learned that day. He also constantly implored his son to "Be a credit to your people." His father clearly thought that Dr. Folkman would also become a rabbi. Having announced his attention to become a physician, his father told him, "You can be a rabbi-like doctor." This injunction was one he took to heart, often seeking out his father's counsel on how to console the families of his patients.

His first taste of how close mortality is to all of us was when his first two children inherited cystic fibrosis. The younger of the two died, and the older one needed lots of special care to deal with infections. This probably made him a better doctor, by helping him see things more from the patients' points of view.

Space constraints keep me from discussing the book's description of how angiogenesis developed, but if you like stories about trail-blazing research, you will be amply rewarded. The key hurdles are described, along with the blind alleys that were followed. Anyone reading this will see how important it is to add new skills to the study of any new subject.

I was particularly interested in the way that press reports tended to harm the progress of angiogenesis, either by annoying other scientists, attracting hucksters, or delaying key deals with potential partners. We often think about freedom of speech being helpful, but here the case is a mixed one.

My only disappointment with the book is that it does not provide as much clinical data about the drugs under testing now as has been made public. That material would have made for fascinating reading. There are also natural substances that can cause a tumor to shrink, and clinical studies have been very successful in growing and shrinking tumors for some time.

I suspect that some member of your family will live a longer, healthier life due to future treatments soon to be available using angiogenesis. This book is a great way to learn more about the subject now, so you can encourage exploration of these experimental therapies where possibly appropriate. If anyone in your family now has cancer, this book is must reading for you!

Dr. Folkman summarized the book nicely as follows: "Success can often arrive dressed as failure." "If your idea succeeds everybody says you're persistent. If it doesn't succceed, you're stubborn."

May we all live longer and healthier lives due to the emerging medical treatments using angiogenesis . . . that were helped by Dr. Folkman's persistence!