The cover gallery alone makes this short (and I do mean SHORT) volume worth the purchase. Although not all of the covers really fit thematically with Bruce Jones' story, they are entertaining and enthralling in their own right.

Now to the story...Bruce Jones continues his run on the Hulk with a continuation of his idea of Bruce Banner on the run. This is, of course, nothing new for the Hulk (or for any serialized entertainment, for that matter - see The Fugitive). The television series was essentially the same idea and John Byrne tried to write something similar when he (VERY unsuccessfully)wrote Hulk stories several years back. In spite of their familiarity, however, Jones imbues his plots with something new and fresh. Certainly his bent toward the horrific helps, as Hulk moved far away from this notion during the terrific (but decidedly super-heroic) Peter David days. It also helps that Jones creates in Banner a sort of Everyman character - one who says little but feels much.

The art does not live up to the same standard as the story. Lee Weeks is a fine penciller, but his work here is bland and banal. It does serve the story, but it does little else. Though many have gripes about John Romita Jr.'s style, I found myself greatly missing his take on these characters in the second story arc.

Bottom Line: The story and cover art is worth the price of admission. A great collection for fans and budding fans.

Carrying on from Volume 1, Jones shows us what he can do with his run on the Hulk which is judging by the accolades its recieving, quite phenomenal. Making Banner a fugitive with all hidden forces chasing him , and every concievable conspiracy hinted at for a secret organization wanting the Hulk's serum for clandestine uses, is working very well. However if someone were to pick up a single issue from Jones run and read it, they would be someone lost entirely in a veeeeery loooooooong story arc which is past 15 issues and counting....to the day I wrote this. it pays dividends to read Volume 1 and then come to this as all loose ends are tied up, and more is revealed.

The Art in this Volume is subpar , not comparable with Romita's use of fluidness and panel dynamics of using visual storytelling cinematically. It is the same style though but the actions appear rigid and its lost a bit of the style Romita brought to the Volume 1.

However as a continuing plotline and Story, this does not fail to impress at all. A must buy. with Vol 1 preceding this.

This trade collects The Incredible Hulk Vol II issues 40-43. Bruce Jones, who I believe is a horror novelist, takes the Hulk and makes it an interesting fugitive story again. . This is the second story arc done by Bruce Jones. Bruce Banner is on the run framed for the murder of a boy named Ricky Meyer. He stops by a convenience store in a small mountain town. A crazed gunman takes the store hostage, and a disgraced Denver SWAT negotiator is on the scene to talk him down. FBI Special Agent Pratt shows up to take over the situation, but is he really in the FBI or part of a secret organization determined to hunt down the Hulk? Story has desperate people, redemption, and many references to the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I hope this collection includes the covers done by Kaare Andrews which were awesome. Oh and teh art is done by Lee Weeks, not by JR Jr.

Whatever you're looking for, this is not the book for you. I see that two beginners have very high opinions about this book, and I guess that they have found it easy to use. The problem is that the form of Welsh used in the book does not exit. I am not a beginner, I've lived in Wales, I speak Welsh, I watch TV in Welsh, etc. etc. In short, I know the Welsh language quite well. Written Welsh is a very archaic language, and we can still read texts written in Welsh 800AD, while ordinary English-speakers can't read Beowulf except in translation. Spoken Welsh is however not so archaic, so the difference between written and spoken Welsh in considerable. Now, Teach Yourself Welsh uses a form invented to be a bridge between the written and spoken language, but fails utterly. If you use this book you will be unable to understand written texts in Welsh, and if you try to speak.. Well, most people will understand you, but I can assure you that you will sound funny. For example, the written Welsh for "I am" is "Yr wyf", while the spoken form is "Dw I". In this book you will learn to say "Rydw I", a form which has never been used in writing nor in speech.

Welsh is a wonderful language, and posseses some of the oldest stories in Europe, among them the tales of King Arthur, Merlin etc. It is definitely worth learning this language, which is truth is quite easy, but this is not the book to use. I strongly recommend "Colloquial Welsh" by Gareth King, which gives the beginner a good command of spoken Welsh, and also gives the outlines of the written language.

As a new Welsh Learner, I have purchased several programs. Although they are all very good, I found the layout of this book and cassette easier to get to a good basic grasp of pronunciation and phrasing. I really appreciated how the 'speed' of the recordings starts at a slower pace, and then speeds up as the course continues. This course seemed to be focused on the Southern dialects as its default.

For a beginner in studying Welsh, I found this book extremely helpful. There are clear lessons and comprehensive examples that allow you to understand the grammar and pronunciation of the language. Excercises are also included that help you practice your grasp of the language. A wonderful start for the beginner in Welsh!

The first volume in a series of group training development games. Although very basic in instruction and content, this book does provide a number of very good activities designed for team building and team learning experiences. If you are familiar with other works by J. William Pfeiffer, this book is a must for your training and development library.

Quality group exercises that apply to a variety of group sizes, needs and learning experiences. Exercises easily adaptable to various learning outcomes.

I am always wary of books that begin with the accolade of 'The Complete Idiot's Guide' as it suggests that those who buy such books, are, indeed complete idiots.

Not believing myself to be in this category but being in search of ways to boost morale and productivity and teamwork I bought this book after having flicked through and found the contents to be short and well illustrated with anecdotes, humour and other such features to make this appealing to even the most reluctant readers.

This book certainly has all of those things and at a basic level it does a useful job in highlighting a number of features which help in enhancing self-esteem. The book is clearly well meaning but misses it's target by a long way.

My understanding of what this book is meant to be is as a self-study workbook. To some extent it is but really does not go far enough to help those who suffer from lack of self-esteem. Let me give one very crucial example. The author cites S.W.O.T. analysis, the first being Strengths, the second being weakness. The reader is asked to list his or her greatest strengths and serious weaknesses. However, there is no guidance given as to how someone should determine those, and, given that those who lack self-esteem do not feel good about themselves to begin with, they will find it hard to list strengths and will feel that they have more than three weaknesses.

The book does serve as an introduction to the problem and does point the way to some exercises that can be done to assist in enhancing self-esteem. For anyone serious about tackling this problem this is not the book for them.

...or of course I could just be a complete idiot and have missed the point of this book alltogether. Hmmm

I found this book pretty much useless for boosting my self esteem. The advice given in the book was poor with silly, little quotes and poems. I felt that it was lacking good, hard research on low self esteem and how to improve one's self esteem. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I took away from the book to help me with that.

Dr. Warner has done an incredible job in this book of making sense out of self-esteem. He uses humor, compassion, and creativity to give the reader numerous tools for developing their own self-esteem, and for contributing to the esteem of others. This book is a great gift -- to yourself, or to someone you love.

I have read a few of Gardner's Bond books and have liked them as escapist fare, but this book is poorly plotted and the relationship between Bond and "Flicka"(?)was insipid. Can you imagine a James Bond who is called a ...well let's just say the phrase was so inappropriate for Bond that I felt like I was reading James Bond by way of Beavis and Butthead. Weak.

Bond is set against a serial killer who is assasinating celebrities in this thriller. Bond's love interest is probably the best one he's had in a novel of movie since Ian Fleming's novels.

Great story! Endearing and great escapism at its best! ***** Loved this a lot! fantastic scenes and great ending! Loved this to the max! High explosive! Octane excitement! Bond stays Irrisistable! Great plotting by a master!

Kennedy fans beware! This book will make you angry. Saying Jackie let Aristotle Onassis murder her husband and the father of her children is preposterous. January Jones is living in a fantasy world.

When I bought this book I was looking forward to spending my time in a productiv and relaxing way. Unfortunately, this book came as a big dissapointment to me, because of its superficiality and amount of trivial details. I expected much more from the author and from the book itself. Enjoy reading, anyways.

The book was okay. I always enjoy the different theories on the
the Kennedy saga of sadness. I personally do not put much faith in the theory of Ms. Jones, however, some of the facts she has stated in the book seem very truthful. I look forward to reading more of her books.

The book contains 50 personal statements and not much else. The personal statements were not relevant to me or my friends. I did buy this book and others. I think the best ones were Insider's guide to med school admissions by Toyos and Princeton Review. Read this one in a bookstore and you will see it is not worth it.

A great book for those interested in getting an overview of the admissions process and writing your personal statement. I really found this book helpful and resourceful. I recommend it!

Well-written, concise, and not condescending like so many of the books written by admissions department people. The 50 essays are alone worth the price.

This book fails to deliver on the goods it promisses. On the back of the book box, it proclaims EXAUSTIVE coverage of everything including database integration, Add-ins, SQL server, ect... . This couldn't be further from the truth, in fact the text doenst go in depth with any of these topics. With over 2,000 pages to read you'd think they would cover some ground wouldn't you? I bought the set on discount and it wasn't even worth that much. A wide variety of topics were only BRIEFLY addressed, do yourself a favor, look for VB books published by WROX, at least they care about what your reading. In the meantime, i have wasted my time and space on my bookshelf because of this text.

Its little bit Advance lavel book, but it contain huge refernce. They try to re-presnt like VB dictionary. Its not bad.

A great book for referencing!! I've reviewed over 20 VB reference guides and I still come back this one every time... even when coding in VB6. I strongly recommend it to anyone who simply needs answers immediately!

I thought that "S" was a strange book - a novel in which Updike experiments with a different (for him) format. "S" is comprised of a series of letters, mostly from and to Sarah Worth ("S"), and the transcripts of taped conversations.

Sarah Worth leaves her husband to join an ashram in Arizona, ostensibly to to find a new meaning to her life (or a better way of living). However, Sarah's past life, habits, and ways of thought prove difficult to shake off. The members of the ashram do not live up to their billing. Things begin to deteriorate rapidly.

"S" is a deeply acerbic satire. Little escapes Updike's criticism: the ashram; those Americans and Europeans who form the ashram's membership; the leaders of the ashram; the forces of conservatism that oppose the ashram; and the middle-class American female as exemplified by Sarah Worth. But I felt that Updike was moving beyond satire or comedy into contempt - as if to say that he washed his hands of the whole self-indulgent and hypocritical lot.

Another difficulty I found with "S" was that it was very predictable. There's not much in the plot to surprise, not much that you feel you haven't seen or read somewhere before. But the main problem was Updike's apparent unease with this style of epistolatory writing. At best it creaks along, only to fall apart with Updike resorting to inserted "taped conversations". As a result, it felt very contrived.

Updike has written far better novels than this.

G Rodgers

Ever since Rabbit, Run, Updike has been attracted to the idea of writing a story that feels as if it is actually happening while it is being read - rather than, as is almost inherent in the form of the novel, communicating an impression of recorded history. By way of attempting to put the idea into practice, Updike has both experimented with present-tense narration (see Leaf Season in Trust Me) and - in S. - given us his take on the venerable (if not antiquated) genre of the epistolary novel. From this point of view the fact that S. is made up solely of letters is an attractive feature of the book: one's sense of anticipation (how will events unfold?) is indeed sharpened. What makes the epistolary form work in this novel is the naturally loquacious and confiding disposition of the protagonist and author of the letters, Sarah Worth (or 'S' as she signs herself to her husband).

Sarah has in fact left her husband and gone to join a religious commune in Arizona. Through her dispatches to various friends, family and acquaintances we follow the fortunes of the community and her role within it through to its surprising (?) conclusion.

The novel has been criticised for its satirical presentation of Buddhism, yoga, etc. in the context of commune life. I'm not sure Updike would accept the charge. In fact I found quite a lot of fair-mindedness in the book - it actually left me with an improved rather than diminished opinion of what Eastern ideas are actually aspiring to - although I don't think Updike can excuse himself from drawing on certain stereotypes. But this is essentially a light, comic novel - although I don't see why it necessarily had to be - and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.

What I missed most was Updike's typically well-observed dialogue, which in this case is mostly paraphrased in retrospect by the narrator. I had a similar problem with A Month of Sundays, in some ways this book's companion volume. Updike may also have found himself missing this type of writing since half-way through he suspends the strict rules of the epistolary genre and has Sarah include a cassette recording of some tapped conversation in with one of her dispatches. This moment was a welcome relief from her up-till-then uninterrupted monologues, but its breaking the rules of the genre made me wonder about the point of the form in the first place.

Overall he's done it very well, of course, as he does almost everything very well, but I doubt he'll revisit the experiment.

S. is the story of Sarah Worth, a New England matron who flees the confines of midcentury feminine affluence to seek spiritual (and sexual) enlightenment in a religious commune. She chronicles her adventure in letters to her best friend, daughter, and estranged husband, as well as short notes to her former dentist and hairdresser, tapes of conversations with the commune's leader, and a selection of the letters she writes on behalf of the commune's business office. The story unfolds briskly and subtely, with Updike employing his satirical skill to show a woman who, in leaving her life behind, manages to take it all with her.

A benefit of the letter format is that it allows a full exploration of the narrator's voice, to excellent effect. It also suppresses Updike's tendency to rely too heavily on his (excellent) descriptive language and instroduces an element of suspense that makes the story quite absorbing.

S. has been criticized by other reviewers for its perceived mockery of Eastern religions, but I don't think this is intended. Updike has obviously done extensive research - if not into Eastern religions themselves, then at least into their Western offshoots - and presents the characters with what, for him, is considerable sympathy. Of course he mocks the narrator's blind devotion to the commune - that's part of what the book is about - but he's mocking the misdirection of her efforts, not the ideals to which she aspires.

The one element of the book that frustrated me was Updike's treatment of his narrator. Sure, it's fun to read a book about an arrogant and slightly hysterical woman who is always just slightly out of her league - a Bridget Jones for our mothers' generation. But it would perhaps be more interesting to watch a character really grow through the course of the novel and transcend, or at least recognize, her own bias. Of course that kind of revelatory change would be anathema to Updike, whose thesis - popping up, appropriately, in book after book - seems to be that life is a cycle, endlessly revolving, lush with beauty and without escape. And this book is - first and foremost, like all his books - Updike.

DC has reissued Batman: Contagion in the wake of it's mega-successful No Man's Land collections, and it serves as a good reminder of just WHY the Batman books needed to be shaken up so drastically in the first place...

Contagion revolves around an outbreak of "The Clench", a fictional Ebola offshoot, in Gotham City. Batman and company attempt to contain the spread of the Disease, while trying to track down a trio of survivors of a previous Clench outbreak, with the hope of synthesizing a cure/vaccine from their blood.

The book is very choppy, especially the first chapter, which appears to be heavily trimmed from it's original presentation in Batman: Shadow of the Bat. DC hasn't taken any steps to make their collections new-reader friendly, either, which could be a very big mistake. Longtime readers will know Oracle, Azrael, Nightwing, The Huntress, etc.; A new reader browsing this in a store would no doubt put the book right back on the shelf. The story has a few compelling moments, but for the most part it seems unnecessarily padded. Did we really need the Native American tracker? What did Biis contribute to the story? The writing is average at best; Most of the stories in Contagion were written by people who had long since overstayed their welcome on the Bat-books, such as Doug Moench & Alan Grant; The art ranges from okay to sub-par; Kelley Jones' chapter seems especially ugly thanks to poor color reproduction which mars his intricate pencils. The ultimate revelation of who is behind the spread of The Clench is sure to be a head-scratcher to new readers, since no background at all is offered to explain who these people are and what their motives are. DC really needs to get on the ball with their trade-paperback program; Preaching to the Choir is nice, but they need to try for new converts. Junk like Contagion is NOT the way to expand their readership......

In this history you can see a different Batman, one that found something he cant't fight. There was a virus and he can not trap it or take it to the justice. You can see a different Batman, not necesesary a dark one but a human,a man. I enjoyed it a lot!

I cannot believe why some people do not like "Contagion". Like Knightfall, Knightquest, KnightsEnd, Prodigal, and Cataclysm & No Man's Land, "Contagion" is an awesome book. It has Poison Ivy (drool), Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Huntress, Azrael, Catwoman, Oracle, Commissioner Gordon, the Penguin, and many other supporting characters like Alfred and Ariana.