It is always somewhat disappointing to have to buy yet another sourcebook just to complete your RPG system. This one is no exception and you really can't consider running a serious Babylon Project game without having this in hand.

On the upside, it is in full color, just like the main rulebook, and is full of the same deep descriptions that give a clear sense of how it "feels" to be part of Earthforce.

The book is organized in a logical fashion similar to the rulebook comes complete with information on at least one ship from every major race (except Vorlon) and a quick system for ship to ship combat. This includes two pages of full color cardboard cut-outs of ship markers.

You will also find information not only about Earthforce's structure, but a full cast of important characters in Earthforce.

While I cannot list their URL, as per Amazon's review policy, the publishers of _the_Babylon_Project_ (Chameleon-Eclectic) have a wonderful intro to! the system in general on their website.

*They also include a vital addendum to the first printing of this book*, and other useful PDF's.

While it would be nice to have more specific geographical information, (in both this sourcebook and the rulebook) my only major complaint is that this isn't so much as sourcebook as a integral part of the system, and it should be sold as such.

Either way, the book is *still* one you really can't do without.

Lots of useful info and background, particularly useful if you are trying to run a campaign on the magnificent world Babylon 5 created for all of their fans.

It is a pity all the game supplements are so hard to find, I would love if someone reprinted them.

This sourcebook is very important if you have any EF personell as characters. Furthermore, it adds more equipment, skills and charactaristics. More importantly, it includes the Starship combat system for the Babylon Project. I like this system, although I have not had a chance to play it yet. It is fast, easy to understand and tactics are important. Moreover, it is one of the very few starship combat systems I have seen where ships obey the Newtonian Laws of Motion (except gravity drive ships, of course). The weapons chart was accidentally omitted from the book, but it can be downloaded from Chameleon Electric's web site and it was included in the Gamemaster's Screen, below.

I'm usually able to learn every other program on my own, but I struggled to figure out Access 97 without help. This book came to my rescue. The tutorials are well done and cover almost every aspect of the program. Great beginner book.

I purchased this text book for a college course, Intro to Programming using MS Access 97 and VBA. I found the text to be an easy read with lots of realistic sample applications and excellent tutorials. Tutorials are available to download from publishers web page,HOWEVER, only the first third of the tutorials are available from the web page. You'll need to get the remaining tutorials from an instructor.

Text provides excellent instruction of MS Access functionality, while briefly touching SQL and VBA. You'll need additional resources to learn them. Layout of the book makes quick referencing difficult.

Overall, an excellent book !!!

This book was purchased as a college text. Of all of the MS Access books I have read, this one is by far the best. It is very easy to understand. The only drawbacks are that you need data disks which are not all redily available (even on their web site) and the book isn't comprehensive, it's a beginners guide. After you finish it, you are left hanging, where do I go from here? All in all, I would still recommend it as the absolute best beginners book for MS Access.

This bok is great book for starters! I really do recomend it for starters. Other than that its an ok book. You can master the book in 3-4 days, and a magic book should last much much much longer. I do however recomend this book for people who are intrested in starting card magic.

This is not an excellent book, but it's not a bad book either. It's a good book: it contains tricks for you who doesn't know sleight of hand and for you who knows it. The self-working tricks contained here are not dumb, they do have that great climax too. You'll also find some tricks that require gimmicked decks, such as the Stripper Deck, but most of them only require a normal deck and/or usual props such as a rubber band. If you look for some classic tricks but not the one's shown on TV, you'll be happy to own this book.

This book has a wealth of information on card handling and technique. There are many top notch card effects including some different and offbeat tricks. Charles Jordan was definetely a card genius and you will see why in the way his card magic is done. A must have!

I felt that the first three writers were the strongest. Mintzberg promotes an idea that leader is just a role in his advocated all mighty manager. Zaleznik brings this down with his idea that managers and leaders are different kind of people and talk about managerial mystique. But maybe best advice how to solve present leadership dilemma comes from Kotter, who says that companies should pick up talented individuals and then put them to grow into leaders through tough challenges.

Gives an insightful view of a manager's job. It enunciates traits and behaviors of leaders and managers very well, and explains how it is important for a manager to have both traits. The material triggers a manager to look within to understand one's leadership and managerial styles. If one wishes to change or develop leadership and managerial skills this material is a great beginning.
It also points out that organizations and academic institutions are good at developing organizational specialists but not at training managers. The author thinks that these institutions should provide management programs that also focus on developing leadership and managerial skills. But to do that it's important to understand what managers and leaders really do.
Overall a very good read for a traditional manager to be introspective and effective.

Excellent book with eight fantastically different views on Leadership. Describes fundamental differences between leadership and Management and brings forth thought process which can help professionals in all fields. Contents are 1) The managers Job (folclore and fact), 2) What leaders really do, 3)managers and leaders (are they different), 4) The discipline of building Character, 5) the ways CEO's lead (5 different ways gathered from study of 160 CEO's),6)The human side of management, 7) the work of leadership, 8) whatever happened to the take-charge manager, also contains brief background about the contributors. Each chapter is from a different contributor

An excellent book that introduces us to Marketing concepts with the help of various real-life examples. I didn't feel like I was reading a textbook for my class at all. Rather, I felt like I was reading an interesting magazine. I would definately recommend this book. It is awesome!

I am using it for my thesis on the Music Industry and I find it helpful. 4 P's are so well explained.

This comprehensive revision of the last edition shows real improvements. Two new chapters are included on Competitive Intelligence and One-to-One Marketing. Both are welcome additions. The Internet chapter is on-line since it would be futile to try and publish on paper about a subject that changes daily. There are severeal references to internet subjects and even some of these do not exist anymore. The books design has been modernized and the cases and real-world stories are very up-to-date. I use this text to teach a Marketing Certificate program at UCSB Extension to International students and they find it very understandable and stimulating.

This is a very good biography of an overlooked great American thinker. Mr. Brent does a good job of recounting the life of Peirce without getting bogged down in the details of Peirce's philosophy which is well documented in several other books. The book also attempts to analyze Peirce's behavoir and why he failed as an academic, something that desperately needed to be done. As Peirce's reputation inevitatably increases, this biography will become a classic reference to this very interesting American.

This book contains a great deal of information on the life of a sadly-neglected philosopher; one of the most brilliant Americans of the 19th century. Dr. Brent has a wonderful, at times even poetic, writing style, and he has "lived" with Peirce so long that he has excellent insight into the man behind the philosophy. Struggling through Peirce in a class? This book may not make his philosophy "easy"--but it will make him more human.

We seem to be at an unfortunate stage of music history writing. The approach of many books, including this one, is the antithesis of the hero worship books written by the shelf-full not too many decades ago. Do we really need this style of book as an antidote? To me, it seems to belabor the obvious that composers, even the very greatest, such as Brahms, Mahler, and Stravinsky, should be mere mortals after all.

Why is it important at all that we point out moments or even decades of pettiness, vainglory, or difficult family relations? How exactly is that supposed to help us understand the art? Why not write a book about a fellow named Bob who lives down your down the street and his ordinary to miserable life?

Of course, we don't write about Bob down the street because he is ordinary and he isn't Stravinsky. Haven't we long ago realized that even Stravinsky the composer is something other than Stravinsky the husband, father, or businessman. Of course extraordinary people have much about them that is quite ordinary.

Some feel that knowing the artist as a human being helps us understand his art. Maybe on the margins it could, but only children believe that a composer was necessarily sad when writing a sad piece or happy when writing a happy piece and so on. Nothing Mr. Joseph tells us about the composition of The Flood helps us understand how it comes out of a Stravinsky. (Even if the author is trying to put forward that in this case it DIDN'T come out of Stravinsky).

Don't get me wrong, this book by Charles Joseph isn't bad. Really, it has much to recommend it and I am glad that I read it and hope you do too. But I was frustrated by the mixing in of well known stories and photographs into a book that claimed to be revealing new things based upon new access to Stravinsky's papers and artifacts in Basel. It isn't that there isn't anything new or semi-new, it is that it isn't set apart from the ho-hum there's that old chestnut again regurgitation of Stravinsky tales.

It is like going to a dinner party and listening across the table to a very knowledgeable guest who tells a few enthralling tales about a very interesting subject, but then spoils the enchantment by going on too long by telling a few too many tales that have no spark or wit about them.

Joseph also doesn't follow up on things that ARE really interesting. For example, when he discusses the actual piano music performance scores that Stravinsky used and the interesting fingerings the composer used as a performer. But we don't get a picture of even one page of those piano scores nor do we get even a hint as to why Stravinsky's written in fingerings are telling. As a pianist of sorts, I can surmise why Stravinsky's fingerings would be interesting, but it would be nice to get even a bit of discussion on such an interesting topic. I would have traded all of those re-printed pictures for one or two of the actual new material and one page of the marked-up piano music.

Yes, there is a 1983 text available through ProQuest that talks about Stravinsky's piano music, but Mr. Joseph indicates in the book that there were new things learned from his seeing the materials in Switzerland. In any case, this book is generally available and his 1983 book is not. Again, why reprint the nude photo of Stravinsky that is NOT original to this book and leave out something that would be valuable and a real contribution such as Stravinsky's piano fingerings?

It would be a real service if Mr. Joseph (or SOMEONE) put together an edition of the piano works with those fingerings in them. Not that pianists will necessarily use those precise fingerings, but they would certainly aid in understanding how the composer himself interpreted the piece.

Especially annoying to me was yet another tired discussion about Robert Craft. Mr. Joseph does demonstrate that Mr. Craft did play a significant role in the genesis of Stravinsky's work "The Flood". The author approaches the point of almost intimating that Craft is at least the co-composer of "The Flood", but never is bold enough to make that accusation. My guess is because for all the support and creative priming that Craft provided for Stravinsky, the evidence is that the composer did indeed compose the music himself. For heaven's sake, every composer since music began based it on some other creative spark or borrowed a theme from another work or even included suggestions from performers for whom the work was written. Composition is not done in a vacuum chamber on the dark side of the moon!

However, anyone who knows anything at all about Stravinsky's output from the fifties onward knows that Craft did us all a tremendous service. Why anyone wants to criticize Craft is beyond me. Unless someone wants to make the case that Stravinsky simply signed his name to Craft's scores and present real evidence they should either whine to people who care or thank Craft for the music he enabled Stravinsky to make in the fifties and sixties.

All in all, it easy for us in our age of sarcasm and witless irony to see the flaws of books that extol our favorite composers as heroes or as flawless paragons of humanity. My suspicion is that it won't take too many more years for people to turn their backs on the recent spate of books that take as their mission the whittling down of the tree of the great artist to a toothpick of a human. It is just too easy to write about human failings. We don't learn much at all about the art from such books and they are tiresome to read.

Finally, I am curious about the surmise that I am not a music scholar? By what definition? In europe a student is a scholar. Over here, what is the definition of a scholar? One who agrees with your points of view? I happen to have spent seven years at the University of Michigan School of Music and have a degree in music theory and several years of graduate school before my life took a different direction. But I have always played my piano and kept up on music. So, my views are not uninformed.

I found this book to be an extremely new and interesting look into the mind and personal life of Igor Stravinsky. Understanding the artist as a person helps us to understand and appreciate the art he creates.

In response to Craig Matteson... everyone is entitled to their opinon (and of course, no better place to put one's opinon but in a review). However, Mr. Matteson was off on one point (well, in my opinon, he was off on MANY points, but I'll only discuss one). Joseph has written a very thorough book entitled Stravinsky and the Piano in which he studies Stavinsky's "actual piano music performance scores" in detail - fingerings and markings included. Maybe Mr. Matteson is unaware of this book because it is only available to music scholars, which quite obviously, he is not. So it makes perfect sense to me why Joseph did not include such information in this book. A) he already wrote a book about this, and B) this book is about Stravinsky's split lives (the person vs. the public composer) - therefore the scores and fingerings are obtuse.

Stravinsky, whether you like him or not, was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Alternately deified by his collaborators (like Ballanchine, W.H. Auden, and Robert Craft), or villified as a worthless hack by Schoenberg and his accolytes, the truth lies somewhere in between those extremes. While the composer has not lacked for documentation of his life (notably his own Autobiography, and the "conversation books" edited by Robert Craft), there's still a need to balance facts with Stravinsky's own carefully constructed fictions. Few artists in any discipline have been more self-conscious of their public image than Stravinsky, and there is a real need to sort out how much of the composer's lifestory was his own invention. Joseph's well-written, meticulously researched book stops short of being a hatchet-job, but isn't afraid to display the idol's clay feet. (If fact, there's a nude photo of the composer in the book, so you'll see more than just his feet!) Joseph leaves the musicological analysis to others, and provides an engaging, provocative look at the man behind the hype. Turns out, like most human beings, he had his share of flaws as well as moments of genius.

I'm troubled that many young people in these reviews don't seem to appreciate this novel. Even when "forced" to read it in high school, I loved it. I've read it for probably the tenth time recently and I can say that every single time it's better than I remembered it. I was prompted by the character is Haruki Murakami's book Norwegian Wood who carries it with him and reads it to cheer him up. This narrator calls it the most perfect book ever written and says that you cannot find a page that's not perfect. I have to agree -- it's not just the plot, it's the beautiful writing and incredible characters and scenes that stay with you years later. Even after years, who can forget the scene when Gatsby shows Nick all his custom made shirts, or Nick describes his first vision of Daisy by comparing her posture to someone balancing something on his/her chin, or any of Gatsby's parties, or the broken nose -- you get the idea. For some reason, rereading this book reminds me of picking up a relationshp with an old friend. It's so very comforting to read the best prose you can find in English and find that certain passages are almost committed to memory. Don't miss out on this one. If you didn't like it in high school, try it again when your reading tastes mature.

This 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, set in the year 1922, is a literary classic and I can well understand why. A mere 205 pages, it's a book that has everything - story, theme, symbolism, moral drama and great characters. No wonder it's stood the test of time.

The early 1920s was a very special time in American history. The Great War was over, and it was a time of celebration. Prohibition was the law of the land and bootleggers and gamblers were making fortunes as everybody partied with illegal booze and speculated in the stock market. In retrospect, we readers know that it all came to a crashing end later, but that was after the book was published and so the book captures the era in its own time.

The narrator is Nick Carraway, a young man who, like Fitzgerald himself, was raised in the mid-west and is working in the stock market in New York City. His own financial circumstances are modest but he rents a house in Long Island next door to the flamboyant and wealthy Jay Gatsby, who throws lavish parties and whose background is shrouded in mystery. As a New Yorker myself I must say I cringed at his geography, but the rest of the book transcends these minor physical details.

Slowly, we learn of Jay Gatsby's obsessive love for the wealthy Daisy, now married to the snobbish Tom Buchanan who is having an affair with a garage owner's wife. Nick is a friend of this cast of characters, participating in their lives but yet standing back and observing. He's a man of his times as well as a person who understands human character and foibles. How the story plays out is a complex drama filled with passion and tragedy and including elements worthy of Shakespeare or classic Greek theater. This is more than just a good story. It's an emotional ride in expensive cars to an era filled with people we can all identify with.

I give this book by highest recommendation. It rises above a mere good read and dwells in the realm of great literature.

I haven't read Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' in almost two years. I picked it up again, to-day, though, and realized the truth of the notion that one learns something new each time one returns to a book. 'The Great Gatsby' just is a novel that must be returned to periodically to appreciate it properly.

While the characters in the novel remain ultimately unknowable at their indefinite cores, Fitzgerald does a great job tying his characters to their historical setting. The protagonist of the novel, to my mind, is Nick Carraway, the narrator. The hero of his story, which frames the novel, is the legendary Jay Gatsby - a legend in his own mind. Although Carraway's narration is often heavily biased and unreliable, what emerges are the stories of a set of aimless individuals, thrown together in the summer of 1922. Daisy Buchanan is the pin that holds the novel together - by various means, she ties Nick to Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan to Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby to the Wilsons.

The novel itself deals with the shallow hypocrisies of fashionable New York society life in the early 1920's. It is almost as though Fitzgerald took the plot of Edith Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' and updated it - in the process making the characters infinitely more detestable and depriving it of all hope. Extramarital affairs rage on with only the thinnest of veils to disguise them, the nouveau-riche rise on the back of scandal and corruption, and interpersonal relationships rarely signify anything permanent that doesn't reek of conspiracy. The novel's casual allusions to beginnings and histories often cause us to reflect on the novel's historical moment - when the American Dream and Benjamin Franklin's vision of the self-made man seem to coalesce in Jay Gatsby, a Franklinian who read too much Nietzsche.

No matter how you read it, 'The Great Gatsby' is worth re-reading. M.J. Bruccoli's short, but informative preface, and C. Scribner III's afterword are included in this edition, and both set excellent contexts, literary, personal, and historical, for this classic of American literature.

I have read a lot on the subject of remote viewing, and until I read Joe's book I didn't think I was capable of actually doing it. The book has just the right balance of history, entertainment, and instruction to make you not want to put it down. Why spend thousands of dollars on instruction when everything you need is right here? Read it once, read it twice, then go out and do it! Only Joe has the integrity to sell you a book for under $15 postpaid when many are charging thousands for instruction that does not measure up to their claims.

As a student of philosophy, this book changed the way I view reality. When your reality is shaken like that many people become vulnerable to cults, which for me would be a definite worry if I learned from an instructor, rather than a book. This is a powerful skill and such power is often abused when in the wrong hands. Proceed with caution and don't become a victim, get the book!

A lot of people write books about psychic functioning, remote viewing, and related topics. McMoneagle is one of the few with the hard credentials to stand up to the toughest critics.

One of the founders of the US Gov't "psychic spying" intelligence unit, the only individual in the gov't program from its inception to its termination, one of the rare handful of people to specialize in both intelligence psi data collection and scientific research, McMoneagle has demonstrated his RV abilities live before congress, in intelligence, in the lab, and on national television (some in the USA, mostly in the UK). He's the only known soldier to win a Legion of Merit (the highest award an intell agent can win during peacetime) for psi work.

If you read Jim Schnabel's "Remote Viewers..." you may end up feeling like it is a Joe-the-Hero book -- most of the amazing tales, feats of glory, and opportunities to brag in this field come directly from the archives ! of Joe's personal sessions.

So, it's pretty interesting to hear it from Joe's point of view. MIND TREK was originally released in 1993 -- two years before the US Gov't program was declassified -- back when few had heard of the subject. When the CIA declassified the program and it got tremendous publicity in late 1995, sales skyrocketed. In 1997 a second edition of MIND TREK was printed, with the small addition of a couple of chapters on RV myths and the STAR GATE program. (As another Amazon reviewer noted, other than these two chapters and a couple minor details, there is no real difference between the first and second editions.)

The book MIND TREK is mostly the story of a slice of Joe's life. Beginning in 1970 when he was in the Army overseas, when a "Near-Death Experience" (NDE) radically changed his perception, the book chronicles his learning to remote view, his work with the late Bob Monroe on out-of-body experiences (OBE), some of the more interesting R! V targets he's been assigned, and things he's learned along! the way.

Down to earth like he is, it's a good read. I found the intro and first chapter a bit long, subjectively, but from Chapter 2 on I was engrossed and couldn't put it down.

Along the way, the book provides advice from an expert for people working to learn RV on their own, info about practicing and targets and proper protocol that is basic, but critical, to the official process of remote viewing.

As a reader, I really enjoyed the book.

As one struggling to work on psi abilities myself, I've found over time that it contains a lot more great advice than I realized on the first read-through.

I recommend it to anybody interested in these subjects.

This book is THE BOOK on remote viewing in my opinion. The author in his humble way, explains step by step what remote viewing is about and how to actually do it. I tried to experiement with his techniques and got very good at doing remote diagnosing for my patients. It works! I enjoyed the style, honesty, facts, and how to of this book. I recommend it highly as a good read, and great referrence for those who are interested in non-local realities. Thanks :-)

This is the second book by this author I have read, and both have been very enjoyable. When an exiled US industralist decides he wants revenge on the people who ruined him there he hires the best terrorist he can find to do the work.

"the prince of darkness" as he is known in the trade (by the few who know him at all) is an intelligent and totaly amoral character. On the law enforcemnt side in the US we have Sarah Cahill a former expert in terrorist actions in the FBI.

This book it has to be said, is full of anagrams, but then I suspect that the world of law enforcemnt is full of them now - and being somewhat of a techno-thriller they go with the genre.

One of the things I liked about this novel was that none of the main characters are invulernable. They are people with lives of their own in an extraordinary situation. Sarah is not as 'strong' as her terroist opponent - but that only makes her more believable.

I'm looking forward to more books by this author, and if you like thrillers this book is worth picking up.

I read J.F. book, HIGH CRIMES, and it was very good. So I took another chance that his previous books would be the same. This story is fresh and quick paced. Finder is the best for drama and suspense. There ae surprises at every turn. The main charcater is Sarah Cahill, whose investigation turns into a desparate pursuit of a highly sophisticated and charismatic terrorist, known only by the code name Zero. Zero's identity is unknown. And get this, the Zero character knows Cahill intimately...very intimately.I could tell you how this happen but it would spoil the smile you woukld get when you find out how it happen in your reading of this book.

This is a fasten-your-seat-belt suspense and a guaranteed page-turner. You will kick your later if you don't read this. If you want to wait for a better review of this book to make up your mind, it is your choice...but I would not !!! Happy reading.

I recommend High Crimes and Extraordianry Powerrs; also as well as all my other reviews I have done. They are still worth a look.

TRIPP

This book is a lot of fun. I was reading along and thinking it may not be bad to have this happen to my place of work. This fast-paced book and the speed of the story helps to increase the tension and suspense. I hate to sound like a dust jacket, but this book really is an action-packed thriller. You have prison breaks, terrorists, low down scummy business tycoons, the CIA, and a good smattering of Joe everyday cops. An interesting and exciting mix that keeps the book fast paced. I have read other books by this author and he is getting better by the book. More of his books will make there way to the big screen if he keeps up his history of quality writing.