I'm sorry that she's dead, but I have to say after reading this book that I found Ginger Rogers to be a self-righteous prig.
To hear her tell it, every cute scene in every one of her movies was her idea. Every glamourous dress she wore was her idea. And, of course, everyone loved her.
Particularly Mommy.
Ginger is obsessed with her mother. It's like she never moved past that "I'm gonna tell my Mommy!" phase of childhood developement. She never fought a battle of her own; she just called Mommy to do it for her, so that she could stay in her dressing room drinking milkshakes and praying.
I have respect for anyone in Hollywood, past present or future, who is willing to stand up and declare that they have a religious faith. But constant harping on how God healed the boils on her husband's butt gets a little wearying. Her constant determination to tell everyone how to live, coupled with her ridiculously childish practical jokes, leave me in no doubt as to why all of her non-drinking husbands became drinkers in a hurry.
She was a great entertainer, and some bits of the book were fairly interesting, but I think I finished it because I was fascinated by her ego and disastrous marriages than because I had fun with it.

I am a great fan of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When I learned that she had written an autobiography, I wanted to read it right away. This book was so good and informative, that I read all 450 pages within a few days. In her book, she talks about her childhood, her devotion to her mother, Lela, her stage career, her romances, and her movie career. I reccomend this book to any Ginger Rogers or Astaire and Rogers fan.

According to one writer and critic 'Ginger my story' was greeted with 'critical yawns' upon it's publication in 1991. Personally I couldn't disagree more. Reading this book was a truly heartwarming experience from beggining to end. Ginger writes candidly about her upbringing, her early experiences on the vaudeville circuit, her hollywood film career (including the pitfalls of being a woman in Hollywood) and the sad story of her five marriages which all ended in divorce. Ginger tells delightful anecdotes about her encounters with other famous folk - George Gershwin, FDR, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Noel Coward, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra etc. It is wonderful to know how devoted she was to her mother Lela (to whom the book is dedicated) and the chapter where she describes how she coped with Lela's death is truly poignant. The most interesting parts for me was where she describes how christian science had helped her through life and how she had had used it to help others (she cured her third husband of warts and her fourth husband of boils!). I did feel quite sad though reading this knowing that Ginger was no longer with us (it's a shame she couldn't have used christian science to save herself from diabetes;she died from the disease in April 1995) for I would surely have written to her congratulating her for having written such a wonderful memoir.

One of the great games of history is the what-ifs: What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Burgoyne had won at Saratoga? What if the New York City traffic accident that seriously injured Winston Churchill had killed him?

This book is a documentation of myriad such what-ifs. As such, it's a good but mixed bag. The best items are genuinely poignant or thought-provoking. These include the speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon, notes that Eisenhower wrote to himself in case the Normandy Invasion was a failure, and Ulysses S. Grant declining Lincoln's invitation to join him at Ford's Theater. Less interesting ones tend to be sidelights, items that aren't all that interesting in themselves: Nixon's application to the FBI, an FBI memorandum on deporting John Lennon, and the speech Kennedy would have given in Dallas if he hadn't been shot. A few are already famous items: Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt recommending the undertaking of research into the atomic bomb and Eleanor Roosevelt's letter resigning from the DAR after it refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall.

Overall, though, it's an entertaining and thought-provoking collection, with the best section ("failed predictions") saved for last, in which the New York Times chides Robert Goddard for thinking that rockets can work in a vacuum, Scientific American (in 1909) believes the automobile is fully developed, and Popular Mechanics looks forward to the day when computers might weigh only a ton or so.

Lots of fun stuff: interesting reading and probably another good bathroom book since the sections are short.

Roger Bruns has written a very interesting book full of tidbits to entice any history buff. Whether your interest lie in the Civil War, Presidential orders, or the World Wars there will be something for everyone. For me the most interesting aspect of the book were the possible "what ifs?" of history. What would Nixon have said if the Apollo astronauts never returned from the moon? Was Kennedy trying to pull us out of Vietnam early? The other interesting items dealt with such things as Nixon's application to the FBI, Einstein's letter to the President suggesting we build an atomic bomb, and the FBI's report on John Lennon and whether or not he should be deported. The nice thing about the book is that Bruns not only provides the documents, but also offers important commentary about what was happening at the time the documents came into being. This gives the reader a much better reference point in which to appreciate the document that is being read. All in all it is a very interesting book that leaves the reader wanting more. Unfortunately, it did seem a bit short to me. If you are the type of person that is facinated by reading a telegram that warned of Pearl Harbor a year before it happened, then you will love this book.

This book, whose author works for the national archives, is an amusing collection of "Close Calls, Plan B's and Twists of Fate in America's past." Some of the items are merely drafts for press releases if D-day, Apollo 11, etc, failed disastrously. More fascinating were plans for actions not taken - Robert McNamara's meeting with Kennedy on the pre-invasion bombing of Cuba and the prosecution memorandum on indicting Nixon after his resignation. Others are little known items like Alexander Graham Bell's attempt to locate the bullet in Garfield with an induction coil that failed because the dying President was on a (then) newfangled metal spring mattress and Bell didn't know it. The great majority are amusing, some are poignant (Colonel Travis' appeal for reinforcements at the Alamo - although in the words of Chief Hendrick "if they are to fight, they are to few, if they are to die, they are too many") and H.L. Mencken's dryly humorous falsified history of the bathtub (that got out of hand when too many readers treated it as fact) is a real hoot!

At the end of "Knight of Shadows", the series had a lot of open threads (the wheel ring, Julia, Jurt etc). Unfortunately, Mr. Zelazny chose the quick and easy way to solve it, and in a miraculous way all ends well. The superb plot and storyline of the first nine parts are not continued in this part, and the only reason for buying it, is that the Amber series is not complete without it. Alas.

I have had this tape on order for months, and I was quite excited when it arrived. That excitement dwindled when I poped in the tape and found that it was not Roger Zelazny who read this story, as the printed cover stated. The story is still good, but the 'flavor' that was built up by Roger's interpretations of his characters was spoiled for me.

Worth the listening, but not worth getting excited over.

This is the tenth and the last (official?) book of the Amber Chronicles (the first one is Nine Princes in Amber). Although not everything is explained (isn't it the same in life?), it's a wonderfull ending. I wish if Zelazny was still with us he wrote another five parts.

It is a great book, the only drawback is the following: it NOT written in Metric units (a.k.a. International System). I hope that the next edition use metric units.

This book goes thru a variety of traffic engineering problems, assesing solutions and explaining in an simple way many concepts and technics used in the HCM (1994/97 updates).

Very good for begginers.....

This book is designed as a course, with exercises to do in each chapter. However, I wish I had read some of the other writer's books I have before buying this one. This makes a good second or third book once you have something that deals more directly with the dynamics of plot and it's relationship to character and setting. Especially lacking is an discussion of how audiences react to the emotional dynamics of each scene and act. McKee's "Story" is a great place to start. But Hall's book is a good place for the relative beginner who has some experience and wants to prime the pumps with a few exercises.

As Director of an International Playwrights Retreat, I have had opportunity to lead workshops in playwriting world wide. I have and value a large collection of playwriting books, and have borrowed exercises from many of them. I find Roger's opening exercise one of the best to get at the essence of what theatre is about. He has the student write a scene of action - no dialogue, no plot outline or character studies - just what we can see the character doing.

The book moves swiftly on to the next essential - conflict. By now, the reader may well have become a writer, as the book progresses through character, dialogue, writing from life or from other sources, and more - all leading to completing that first play before you even realized it.

The book is full of loads of useful exercises and examples. This at once opens worlds of possibilities to the creative mind, while providing achieveable writing results - all leading to an exploration of your own stories. It provides a context, a process, useful advice and practise . . . all in a very user friendly fashion. It's a great way to get a process started.

This book, like many in series SF, can not be read independently of the rest in the series. Its main fault is that it is frequently chaotic and can be difficult to follow, especially if it has been awhile since you read the previous stories. The protagonist, Merlin, continues his sparring with Luke, Jasra,and the Mask, and his girlfriend, Julia is back in the story, unknown to Merlin at first. Merlin's brother, Jurt, also is involved, along with multiple other extended family members.

Zelazny fans will like this, but the Amber premise is noticably tiring in this story.

This book covers a lot but if you are the practical kind who wants to know how things work and implement them fast, this is not the book for reference. Some chapters are good and are detailed and informative, while some others contain such sparse information that the atleast I was totally confused.

The authors use easy-to-understand algorithms to explain difficult concepts, and carefully selected examples that make it very a comprehensive book. For me it is an excellent textbook for beginners as well as advanced image processing people.

We've been using this book in the image processing class I'm taking. I've found it very useful. It covers a large range of topics and manages to cover the material with just enough detail.

Cut-and-paste coders may want to look elsewhere, since this book stays away from code examples. Instead it uses a lot of algorithms. I've had little trouble implementing the filtering and segmentation techniques described in the book.

Useful book, but consider the second example. Listing 2.5a: Spec() constructor in wrong place (causes multiple definition errors as is; move inside the struct) Listing 2.5b: needs #include ; references to npos should be string::npos. Listing 2.6: AVvector should be ValueExtractor::AVvector, AVmap should be ValueExtractor::AVmap. I thought this code was supposed to have been tested? When you finally fix it and compile it, you find C++ STL version: 128(text)+40(data)k, 33.2(usr)+11.0(sys)sec Plain C version: 8(text)+ 8(data)k, 7.2(usr)+ 0.8(sys)sec The plain C code is shorter and considerably simpler than listing 2.6, and runs 5.5 times faster (Alpha/OSF, cc,cxx) when reading 100 000 copies of the sample data in the book. What's more, I had to try three C++ compilers before finding one that could handle the code at all.

There are good things later in the book, but this was a very off-putting introduction.

This book is intended for those who already know C++ but also want to be exposed to the future trends of applying STL integrating with Object Oriented Database Systems and CORBA. Although STL, ODMG-93 and CORBA are covered in an introductory manner, their relationship with the process of framework design is very appropriate.

Rogers writes well and the presents his topics in an organized manner. After reading it completely, I enjoyed rereading individual chapters in a random order to glean more of his insight. I recommend the book to those programmers that want to look into the future of effectively designing their products to be used in a distibuted environment.

Possibly the Wirfs-Brock of the late '90's (approach that is likely to be emulated by high-profile experts), this book has uncanny insight for framework-based development. Especially liked the coverage of domain analysis, which provides unique reuse benefits for developers.

We've read all of Susan Rogers Cooper's delightful stories, including the six Sheriff Milt Kovak books, the (very difficult to find) two Kimmey Kruse stand-up comedian stories, and the previous six EJ Pugh mysteries. Obviously we like Cooper's great writing ability; one would swear she can turn a soccer practice carpooling chore into an event of note with her descriptive and insightful commentary on everyday life. All of her characters tend to be a little low profile, humble practitioners with an overdose of curiosity that leads to solving crimes, sometimes almost unwittingly. Unlike her sheriff, who of course was paid to catch killers, Kimmey and EJ are strictly amateurs who depend on cajoling friends and policemen into helping move along reasonably good plots.

In this story, EJ is far from her home (Texas), and is re-united with her three sisters (with spouses/partners along) in a contrived vacation in St. Johns cooked up by her mother who wants to see the girls "get along". Much of the story revolves around their childhood goings-on and/or their perceptions of each other's adult lives and situations in society. Hence, the plot is almost a little secondary to the mental and verbal meanderings in the Virgin Islands setting. There is a murder or two to solve, and even if a bit improbable in total, we're hooked enough by a few real clues mixed in with several red herrings along the way to feel some suspense. Indeed, we thought the ending fairly surprising, and hardly anticipated the ultimate culprit at all.

While we'd readily give almost all Cooper's books 4 stars, we don't think this one was one of her best -- maybe the unusual setting (although entertaining in itself in some ways) put our author off her usual game plan; and with none of the regular supporting characters to help out, we didn't know anybody here either. Still, the faithful will want to read this; and while many of her others seemed better to me, all 15 books are fun, worthwhile "reads" without demanding too much from us the reader but "enjoy". Why not ?!!

This was the first book that I've ever read by Ms. Cooper. I picked it up intially because I had been to St. John, U.S.V.I. a few times in the past, and wanted to see which sites were mentioned.

I liked this book, but I found the writing style to be a bit spare. I have no real mental image of what the protagonist and her husband look like, or whether or not I would like them if I met them. The story itself was interesting, and the sibling problems added a nice twist to the story. Actually, I probably would have liked the book better if the family relationships were the sole focus of the book (Ms. Cooper seemed to handle that well). The mystery seemed to be a secondary issue here, and the whole treatment of the crimes that were occuring seemed too lackadaisical.

Although I liked the book, I don't yet know if I care enough about the characters to read the other stories. I'll have to think about that for a while...

This is my first E.J. Pugh mystery. It was a very fast read, the mystery kept me guessing, and I liked the characters of the four sisters. The memories of E.J. and her sisters while they were growing up greatly helped in understanding the dynamics of their dysfunctional family. The mystery itself was good, clues were there, but not obvious. I will read the other books in this series with enjoyment. If you are looking for an easy fast read, this is it.

As a Cornell student, this ranks as the worst course textbook for any electrical engineering course in the department. The author does not proceed in a logical manner at all, instead preferring to "revisit" the material. The derivations are extremely sketchy, and in the end all of the problems become "plug and chug." You will not feel as if you've learned anything after going through this book.

Charles Sodini is a professor at MIT who teaches 6.012 (Microelectronic Circuits and Devices) and is the co-author of this book, which we use in his class.

The textbook is very well organized and gives very clear examples and numerous practice and design problems to play with. The derivations are easy to follow and the diagrams are well notated and complement the text.

6.012 is a one semester course at MIT covering all the topics discussed in the textbook. In addition to weekly problem sets (which are nothing more than the P problems from the textbook), the course is supplimented by a design project (similar to a design question you might find in chapter 13, but at a bigger scale), and two laboratories in device characterization (sadly, only available for MIT students). SPICE is used extensively.

Someone mentioned that the problems seem like plug-and-chug, but I think the book is trying to teach you intuition so when you handle realistic problems (such as those presented in the design project questions), you have an idea of how to approach it through rough hand-calculations and then follow up with more precise measurements in SPICE.

I have used several textbooks on integrated circuits in undergraduate classes that I teach, and I find this the best I could find. It includes an in-depth coverage of the electrostatics of semiconductor devices, with many practical examples, so students actually get to understand the physics of how transistors work. It also covers the fundamentals of microelectronic circuits at a level that is easy to grasp by junior and senior engineering students.