The book is not bad, but not really as good as I expected. After having read the extraordinary book "The illussion of life", I wanted more from the same drawer. I picked the villains book.
In the beginning Frank'n'Ollie explain why they did the book, and apparently it was made on command, I couldn't help thinking about that when I read it. The chapters in the book are very short, and there is too little information about how they decided to make their characters as they turned out. Each chapter begins with an (Too long) introduction of the characters role in the film. Of course you can not expect everybody to have seen every disney film that exists, but too much space in the book is used to explain things you already know if you've seen the films.
I would have prefered to know more about how the animators felt about their characters and how they developed the personalities, for instance the thin line of making the beast in "Beauty and the Beast" looking like a beast that you could still end up having feelings for. I would like to have seen more development drawings and sketches and even some animation continuity with some good examples of change in expression of the villains as well.
Some times you read about villains that actually ain't villains. The bear in "Fox and a hound" is actually no villain because it is just following natural instincts, but how about Chief, the big old dog in the movie, nothing about him? A book that is not deep enough. but still not bad. Guess I still shouldn't have read it after just finishing "Illussion of life".

Anything by these two wonderful authors and amazing animators should be a must in anyone's collection. Yet, I am baffled that all of their books are currently out of print. I am sure one will not have trouble looking at a used bookstore for a copy of this. This book deals precisely with what the title says: The Disney Villians. In their usual classic and lucid style, the authors discuss the troubles they ran while devising a villian. One that is wicked, yet appealing to the audience. Going through their catalog of movies from Snow White to Aladdin, they discuss in detail what a villian is all about, and how the villian relates to the story, style and main character of each film. Whether one should be more realistic, or have harder edges, or what kind of mannerisms will this villian have. Highly reccomended for the animator and artist, as well as the Disney book lover as these are presented so well. For the enthuseist, which I also own, there is also a more expensive version of this book, hardcover with a slipcase, signed by each of the authors and a print of the filmstrip from Snow White.

Why did they do it? Frank and Ollie wanted to give a thorough insight into the making of believable, memorable animated characters. For all to learn from... and they did just that! Another MUST-HAVE from the makers of some of this worlds most entertaining animation.

Photograph of Fallingwater (page 46) is reversed left-right.

Maybe the most complete book on Frank Lloyd Wright but despite the numerous photos, the quality is equal to the price. Some pictures like Guggenheim Museum are quite poor. Despite this it's a good book especially for the price.

BEST single-source reference book...
Of course,excellent photography !

This along with the video cassettes are an absolutely invaluable resource for anyone serious about learning French. It is total immersion without having to go to France, and crafted in a way that is not intimidating. It is a very endearing little story about two attractive young people in Paris, and is capable of enthralling even the beginner into the story in such a way that One cannot take this course without wanting to go through it all the way to the very end (Its actually sad when it ends) not becuase of a tragedy but because of the bonding with the characters that is established throughout their fun-filled odyssey through Paris. The result, an absolutely revolutionary concept of learning the language that has not been matched since its inception!

I've tried a number of different language course in a number of different languages over the years, but this is far and away the best. It's an immersion course, which means the videos and the audio-tapes are completely in French. It helps at the start if you've done a little French before, but even if you haven't, the extra effort in the early sections pays off handsomely. The videos are an essential part of the whole package, though they seem to be fairly widely available on public TV. (Here in Australia, ABC TV shows them nationwide, continuously, as part of the Open Learning programme). I strongly recommend buying them if you can, otherwise you are going to have to tape all 52 programmes off-air - you need to watch them over and over for maximum benefit. Each episode consists of 10 minutes of the story (a charming and quirky American boy meets French girl in Paris soap opera)and twenty minutes of explanation by Professor Capretz, an equally charming and quirky instructor. The whole is interlaced with hundreds of brief extracts from French film and TV. You watch the video several times, then work through the audio tapes to improve your own speaking, pronunciation and comprehension, read the text, then do the exercises. It might sound repetitive (all language learning is), but the story does hold your interest right to the end. I did it as a two year course with Open Learning in Australia, through the University of New England, and was sorry when it ended. This is a good way to do it, but it will work fine for a self-learning course. It's fairly costly, with textbook, workbooks, study guide and audiotapes, not to mention the videos, but you won't find a better course for learning to speak French or understand it from radio, film or TV. The reading side has been strengthened in the second edition, but to get to be a fluent reader you will need extra reading outside the course.

One of my teachers ( a French national) criticised the course for cultural bias (a little upperclass and American) and he has a point, but for a rapid and enjoyable path to fluency, this course can't be beaten.

I have tried several self teaching french course books, audio tapes, etc. None of them comes close to French in Action. My french language skills have jumped several levels after I started studying this course. After having finished about half of this course, I was able to get by quite well in French during a recent trip to France. This course teaches you French and France, its culture and its people like no other.

Although all the video tapes, audio tapes, workbooks seems like a very expensive deal, there are ways to do this cheaply. The video section is broadcast year round on PBS stations, (local as well as sattelite on PBS-U). You can tape them. They are also available in community college libraries. I skipped the audio tapes since most of the excercises in the workbooks can be done without audio tapes and furthermore if you watch each video several times you have already understood the conversation. Then all that is needed is the textbook and the two workbooks. It can take a long time to complete the 52 lessons, but language learning is a long process. French in Action does make it very enjoyable.

I don't think this is a beginner level course, though. Its probably useful to do some other basic course for a couple of months before starting on this one.

Like any other recent Wrox titles, this one contains jewels and pretenders. On the bright side, quite a few of the Java and XML chapters are strong, and I particularly liked the ones on EJB, PL/SQL-Java inter-operation, and SOAP. There is also a chapter at the end on setting up the environment to run the book samples. On the not so bright side, the PL/SQL chapters are disappointing, because they cover either fundamental stuff that anyone who calls themselves an Oracle developer should know, or irrelevant technologies like OAS PL/SQL cartridge and PSP (huh?). The chapters on JDBC and connection pooling wasted 60% of the pages by talking about the basic JDBC API and showing the details of a connection pool manager class, rather than talking more about Oracle's extensions to the JDBC 2.0 standard and optional packages API. Finally, there is one glaring omission - MTS (I am talking about the Microsoft stuff here), although it does contain an informative chapter on ASP/Oracle. One more thing: this book covers Oracle8i Release 2, not the latest 3.

With everything considered, you may still want to own this title, as it is the only book under the sun that covers all (well, almost) current distributed programming technologies that interface with Oracle (both J2EE and Windows DNA). It also covers promising Oracle proprietary technologies such as interMedia, BC4J, and Portal (aka WebDB).

This is an excellent book as it covers a lot of ground in one volume. If you work in a organisation that has Oracle as the engine for their web based applications, you must have this book.
Many books cover Java or XML or SQL and the like; but this is one of the few books that delves into HOW to put all of these together to make it work! As this book is released in newer additions, I shall be buying it as soon as it is available.

To produce this book, Wrox took twenty expert Oracle developers and had each of them write about their area of expertise. The result is that whether you are a manager, a developer, or a DBA, if you are working with Oracle 8i this book should be on your desk. This book covers virtually every topic that you need to understand about the Oracle 8i development platform. It does not cover each topic completely but it provides a thorough and in most cases sufficient introduction on each topic. For a particular topic of interest you may need an additional book but to get all the information found in this book you would need ten volumes at least. The book opens with an introduction to Oracle 8i and some of its components including Net8 (Oracle's network solution) and Designer 6i (Oracle's development environment). The next section covers PL/SQL and PSP (this is similar to JSP). This is followed by an extensive section covering Java. This section covers JDBC, SQLJ, EJB, and interMedia (Oracle's powerful search tool). The last section covers XML and includes information on DOM and SAX parsers, SOAP, XSL, XSQL, and more. Extensive case studies are scattered throughout the book. Examples show how to use Oracle tools such as BC4J to develop enterprise applications. The book even includes primers on Java and XML. As a tour of all the features of Oracle 8i, this book is without competition.

I really enjoyed FALLINGWATER: A FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT COUNTRY HOUSE. These are stunning photographs of a stunning masterpiece of a house. It's such a tranquil and organic work of architecture.

I am not an architect. Therefore, I didn't pay much attention to the text, but focused on photographs. I especially enjoyed the aerial shots of Fallingwater because it gives some perspective of how isolated this treasure is.

Fallingwater, in and of itself, is a name that commands awe and respect. This book epitomizes that notion.

Simply, this is it. This is the be all, end all of texts on this masterpiece by the late F.L.W.

I have been an admirer of F.L.W. since I was in the fifth grade, and had to do a report on earthquakes and buildings. Living in S.F., I guess this was a hot topic. But, in a showing (foreshadowing?) of extremely good taste---if I do say so myself, I chose F.L.W. and the TransAmerica building. For those of you out of the loop, that's the "pyramid" building you see when looking at (virtually every) snapshot(s) of the S.F. skyline. I hadn't yet discovered Fallingwater, but I would eventually be shown the way...

This is such an incredibly beautiful house. Honestly, I could not imagine the blessing of owning that house and living there. This text, however, sets it all out.

EXCELLENT photos, both inside and out....in different seasons as well.

VERY GOOD text and dialogue. Provides a great understanding of the dream, planning, undertaking, and completion of this masterpiece.

This is an incredibly text. I cannot urge you enough to purchase this one. In short, your collection is not complete without it.

Open this book, and dream....

What first draws one to this book is the wonderful new photographs presented. This is also what I keep going back to see after reading the text. The perspective of many of the downstream shots is not exaggerated as are the older black and white ones taken in the 1930's although when I visited the house I was unable to get the same view or position. They must have been taken with a special camera. I appreciate the helicopter photos as it really shows the site, a deep ravine. The house always seemed to be up on a promontory but is set deep into the forest. The lighting on the interior is a little misleading when the shadows and light direction are altered. These photos overall are the most naturalistic that I have seen and to see all the seasons represented makes me want to goback for the others. It looks as if the insect screens were removed for most of the photos which gave the house a cleaner, more modern appearance than in person. I only wish the breaker pages, the ones with the large green background, were larger although I believe I have seen the winter view on a recent calendar by the same photographer, Heinz, great work on his part. I always wish there were more books like this on great American buildings, especially on the photogenic ones by Wright.

When Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox decided to make their own high rise disaster pic, one picked "The Tower" and the other "The Glass Inferno"; they realized they each will be making similar movies. So in a rare instance of common sense, the two studio combined resources and churned out "The Towering Inferno". Despite having the movie based on the two novels, the end result resemble more on "The Glass Inferno" rather than "The Tower." In fact, the only thing the movie retain from "The Tower" was the breeches bouy and several characters, some of which have their own counterparts in "The Glass Inferno".

If you have seen "The Towering Inferno", then you will know what the novel is about. Of course, the novel doesn't have the stupid insipid dialogue the movie was saddled with. And "The Glass Infnero" ends on a brighter note that the movie.

As a point of interest, the building is known as the "Glass Tower", 66 stories high and equipped with a scenic elevator and a promenade room. And Jennifer Jones' character, Lisolette Mueller, who "enjoyed" a spectacular death scene in the movie, survived in the novel in her own spectacular way (she climbed down the blown stariwell BY HERSELF without help and with a kid on her back).

Overall, the book is good, espcially how chapters are devoted to the fire itself; describing it as "the beast", and chronicling it from its "birth" with a cotton string as its umbilical cord, and to its death....as if the fire was a living entity in itself.

Easily the best of the two books the epic disaster movie "The Towering Inferno" was based upon !

While "The Tower" is a 125 storie building located near the World Trade Center in N.Y.C., the "Glass Tower" is a 66 storie building located in San Francisco (which is where the fictional
137 storie Glass Tower is located in "The Towering Inferno").

"Glass Tower" has much more action, and especially a much more dramatic ending than "The Tower".

"Glass Tower" spends much more time focusing on the Fire Department's fire-fighting and rescue efforts of the people trapped on the top floor than "The Tower", which wastes far too much time with the charecters worrying about who & what caused the fire. Almost no time was devoted to the fire department's efforts.

After having read both books and having watched "The Towering Inferno" many times, there is no doubt the two movie studios derived most of the screenplay from "Glass Tower".

If you want to read only one of the two books the movie was based upon, you need only read "Glass Tower" - the TRUE "Towering Inferno" !

Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. knew what they were doing when they adapted The Glass Inferno into the disaster epic, The Towering Inferno. Scortia and Robinson put together an convincing scenario in which San Francisco's tallest building goes up in flames.

There's no denying that the authors know their stuff. The characters and the action stay crisp and sharp. Even today, such a cautionary novel should give readers pause the next time they venture into the concrete caverns of our modern cities.

Though not as good, The Tower, by Richard Martin Stern, should be read in tandem with The Glass Inferno. The Towering Inferno also draws from it.

I found the cost to quality/content ratio of this book to be fairly poor. The pictures are pretty good but small and there isn't as much up to date info on the houses as I had hoped for.

Many of the houses listed were classified as private, view from street. I found little value in these listings.

You'll get more off of FLW Websites and it will cost less!

This slim volume provides color pictures, maps and addresses of more than 100 FLW building in the Chicago area. It's the perfect guide for planning a visit or just enjoying the photos and brief histories of the houses. As a field guide, it's very well done. Hence, my 4 star rating.

The author could have improved the book by providing a cross reference by his "star" ratings. Also, he has a true believers conviction that the current home owners should be grateful to provide the author full access to their family history. I hope that the author will grow more tolerant in his search for every last bit of information and remember that many of these structures were first and are still private family homes.

This book presents information not found elsewhere, new and very important information about Wright and his work in Chicago. It explains, for the very first time, the contents of Wright's contract with his employer, Louis Sullivan. It has long been held that this was an empoyment contract when it is no such thing. It is simply a loan agreement, or mortgage.

While space is indeed limited, there is more vital information about the clients and their relationships with Wright and between each other. There are many revealing things here including the true relationship between Charles E. Roberts, the key figure on the Unity Temple building committee who hired Wright for the Landmark design, and Isabel Roberts, an employee of Wright's who worked in his Oak Park Studio. You'll have to read the book to see what that relationship is.

The maps and directions are what this book is real about. They are clear and detailed, giving addional warnings where they are warrented. The GPS notations will prevent all from ever getting lost. This is the purpose of the book. All the rest is gravy and welcomed gravy at that.

Heinz seems to have always much to give. His books are meaty with new information and yet he continues to ask important questions that others cannot. He has always been an advanced thinker and his books popularity always show this. His photography has the insights of an architect, which he is.

Heinz always gives us what we need. This is a great book to use while traveling as well as a place to go for new material on a favorite subjest.

So common has the Holmes pastiche become over the past 25 years that it almost forms its own literary genre, apart from mysteries and historical novels. Veteran stage, TV and screen actor Frankie Thomas wrote a number of Holmes novels in the mid-1980s, including GOLDEN BIRD, SACRED SWORD, TREASURE TRAIN and MASQUERADE MURDERS. The series of paperback originals was cut short when the US publisher went paws-up, so that a number of Frankie's novels were never published here, although they were issued in Germany, Israel and other spots overseas where there live many Holmes fans.

Now the "lost" novels are being published in the US for the first time, and here is the first of them, in which Holmes and Watson tackle a baffling case that first seems to turn on shady international finance, then on the whereabouts of four priceless oil paintings, the "Panamanian Girls".

If Frank's take on this genre is new to you, I might mention that Frank's Holmes, although quite true to Conan Doyle's original, is more like Doc Savage and The Shadow in relying heavily on a small core of highly specialized assistants--- in this novel, one of them is the legendary safe cracker Jimmy Valentine!

I found it to be compelling reading and the turn-of-the-century English color and locales seem authentic.

It's great to have these novels in print, and I hope the other "lost" episodes will soon follow. Highly recommended for fans of the World's First Consulting Detective.

Here's a new edition of one of the difficult-to- find Holmes novels written by Frank Thomas in the early 1980s. Holmes and Watson tackle a difficult and confusing case that first seems to turn on shady international finance, later on the theft of four priceless oil paintings. If Frank's take on Sherlock is new to you, I might mention that this Sherlock, while being very true to Conan Doyle's original, is more like Doc Savage and the Shadow in depending heavily on a small team of aides, each with a unique talent.

There are some bizarre glitches in the printing of this trade paperback, including a "footnote" that appears in the midst of the text on p. 7, but actually belongs in a later chapter, perhaps Ch.10. Chapter 15 is (for no reason) in a totally different font from the other chapters. And etc. Fortunately the story moves so well, and events are so continually surprising, that the typesetting peculiarities are not at all distracting.

It's great to have this book in print again, and I hope the other Thomas Holmes novels will soon follow. They belong on everyone's shelf of Holmes pastiches. Indeed, they deserve a special place of merit.

Frank's book is interesting, insightful and even helpful for those who find their vocation in the church. However, the title of his work is very misleading. Rather than writing about the soul of the congregation, he spends his energy discussing a congregation's history and personality...which is still helpful, but not a discussion of the soul. For those looking for a book to dig more deeply into what makes their local churches tick, this volume will provide a good resource. However, those seeking a discussion of the corporate soul (as in Acts 4) should look elsewhere.

In a sea of books focusing on church growth to megachurch proportions, "The Soul of the Congregation" reminds us of the human element - the individual - that is an integral part of all churches. Dr. Frank presents episodes of real life congregations to which all pastors can relate. He provides a model for pastors and church leaders to connect their stories with those of the congregation - thus finding the soul. The pastoral voice of the book can renew disilliusioned young ministers as well as revive persons who have served many years of ministry.

Although wordy with ALOT of jumping around, this book does manage to make some very good points regarding the modern economy and where its going.

As an "elective book" for my MBA, I found it to be a bit over-the-top for an "introductory" book, however, I admit that my own shortcomings in the area of Econ. may account for this.

Hope that helps - Regards

I have used this book in a Master's level course in Business, Government and Society. It is an extremely useful text. The issues that the editors have selected are comprehensive and current. The particular authors and articles selected are spectacular. I am gratified to have found a book that so easily prompts high-level student discussion. It is fulfilling to hear students say that a book has made them think about the substance of issues rather than just accepting popular slogans. Anyone who looking for one source that explores many of the ethical issues that impact business today should pick up this book.