good but appears to be calculation errors in the software ie planetary positions are sometimes 1 minute inaccurate for faster moving planets.also the software only calculates equal house system. Otherwise Ok for beginners.

I don't know about the book, astrology is my partners thing, however the astro program installs fine, runs Ok from install, if you exit and restart and then try to access the town list you get "error 13, type mismatch" and it bombs out. Fine if you don't mind reinstalling every time you want to use it.

As the author of the book, I am responding to the review that the CD is 'buggy'. This was true of version 1, which was released only in the UK and Australia, but not of version 2 (the international version), which is bug free. Anyone who has bought version 1 can replace it free of charge by returning the CD to the publisher, whose address will be found in the accompanying book.

On a more general note the package was designed as a 'first-steps' course for beginners, and therefore avoids the more (highly) complex issues such as House systems. The program calculates planetary movements to within 1 minute of accuracy, which from most astrologers' point of view, is as accurate as you could want it!

As a course, we feel the package is unique: beginners' books offer guidelines for individual charts only. This one deals with relationships as well. I strongly recommend it... but then I would, wouldn't I!

Felix Lyle

Helmut newton. yuk! just another glossy athena, teenage poster loving fantasty's of an old man who should know better. How he ever managed to worm this tat into the art world i will never know. The equilvent of man holding kitten. yuk! avoid avoid avoid

"My women are always victorious." -- Helmut Newton

This collection of Helmut Newton's work casts a special focus on his harder edge images of women as sexually domineering and manipulative. Among the fetishes and voyeuristic images are some wonderful portraits of women, as well. The book is an interesting study in how strongly the personality of the model can be injected into a portrait, especially by the objects chosen, the setting, and the way clothes are worn. The essays do an excellent job of developing your understanding of his methods.

Before going further, please be aware that these images contain much female nudity in sexual situations and one male nude. If these images were in a motion picture, some would undoubtedly go beyond an "R" rating. Many of these images are not appropriate for children, in my view.

Many people think of Helmut Newton as a fashion photographer. These images focus instead on the timelessness of the female personality and role in "overcoming the other." "The clothes . . . only have one purpose: to insufficiently conceal the long, slender female bodies . . . [which] lack innocence." In each case, the women are "defiant."

I found his more playful images, rather than his darker side, the most rewarding. I especially liked "Sie Kommon" where the same scene is done first as dressed and then as naked. It is a stunning set of facing pages. In many other images, he appears in the photograph while taking it. Yet in other cases, the model is juxtaposed against a background object that creates a moderately sexual joke.

I graded the book down one star for overrepresenting the sexual dominance theme at the expense of Newton's other styles, since this is a "best of" book by its title. The sexual dominance images are often highly repetitive, and sometimes not particularly appealing in any way -- even as abstract compositions.

Here are my favorites in the book:

British "Vogue", London 1967 (images 3 and 4)

Tan Giudirelli for Mic-Mac, Paris 1970

French "Vogue", Paris 1975

"Sie Kommon", Dressed and Naked 1981

Jodie Foster, Hollywood 1987 (jacket cover image)

Leni Riefenstahl, near Munich 1992

Big Nude II, Paris 1980

Study for Voyeurism, Los Angeles 1989

Helmut Berger, Beverly Hills 1984

Skull and diamond necklace, Paris 1979

Andy Warhol, Paris 1974

Crocodile eating ballerina, Wuppertai 1983

After you enjoy this book, think about what you believe about women that makes these images work or not work well for you. Where do you detect "truth" and where does the image seem "made up" to you? In particular, is life this sexually tinted?

Then imagine how you would have to change these photographs in order to create feelings of love, peace, and progress. How would you benefit or not benefit from such images as compared to these?

Should the person describing the world have an agenda, or a slant . . . or simply seek to reveal the underlying overall truth that is already there?

Which one of these (if any) is Newton doing?

Overcome your stalled thinking that what you see is literally what it seems to be. This book will help you with that.

is worth a thousand words. He just has that magic!

I was happily surprised by this book. I have only heard of Irving's ghost stories, which are great and why I purchased it. As I was reading the other stories, I was surprised to be reading of distant lands and historical sites as well. Normally, that would not interest me, but Irving's imagination is profound. He can turn a run down liabrary into a living soul who speaks and interacts with us humans. He can turn an ancient palace into a love story. The only thing I had a problem with was the old school language. It did make reading a little more difficult, however I plan on reading this book again, so I'm sure the second time around will be easier and I will be able to come back and turn the 4 stars into 5.

The Sketch Book by Washington Irving is a collection of short stories from the 19th century. Many people today only know Irving as the author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving wrote a variety of stories. He has a number of different themes covered in this book, such as romance, tragedy, and traditions of the Europeans versus Americans, and terrifying, suspenseful stories like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". Irving also wrote travel pieces, works about European traditions, and romance stories. Irving uses 19th century language, so it's hard to read at times, but if you enjoy this style of writing you will enjoy this book.
Irving has some of his greatest short stories in this book such as "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", "The Specter Bridegroom", and The Christmas Quintet. These stories show different themes along with a different style of writing. The different structure of the stories helped the book move along and not be boring.
Irving varied the themes of his stories, making it more enjoyable. Each story usually had a different theme, I liked this because it wasn't the same theme over and over again, and most authors tend to do this making the book boring. Also, Irving used different structures to his stories, not all of his stories were the same length. There were also some really long stories and really short stories. Varying the structure is a key thing in my view to making a collection of short stories good. I find it easier and better to read when all the stories are different lengths. I would also highly recommend this book to anyone who has read 19th century writings and enjoyed them. This book is a great source to further understand European traditions versus American traditions. If you are interested in sociological shifts then you will enjoy this book. If you're not into 19th century readings and European traditions then this book is not for you.

There's more to Washington Irving than "Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle". Irving's life was an enthralling tale of world travel, high society, and other, bookish diversions. He would have been, judging from the biography provided at the front of the edition I read, one of the most fascinating tale tellers of his day. That comes across in the Sketchbook; but we also get an idea of the wicked, roguish sense of humor, that impeccable feeling for satire that Irving could deploy even upon those people he loved most.

The Sketchbook was written largely in England, at first as Irving was inheriting the family law business from his infirm brother. Rankling under the confines of business that can seem insufferable to the creative mind, Irving turned his full energy to writing. These sketches reflect a man passionate about many things, but who is always doctoring his reminiscences with timeless satire: Literature (The Art of Book Making and the Mutability of Literature, with, respectively, the writers of the new school being assaulted by the old favorites of western lit, and the talking book created in illustration of the fact of history's unkindness to many authors and receptivity to a few)is an abiding love to Irving, with every sketch preceded by a poem from antiquity to the works of Irving's coevals, and the stories themselves can make one believe Irving to have been downright pedantic. For what other reason would he break the flow of innumerable stories with lengthy and often only tangentially relevant allusions. Other stories,such as the delightful Christmas cycle and the numerous sketches with Shakespeare addenda, juxtapose Irving's love and ridicule of the English, especially the rural English, with their antediluvian customs (which Irving commends), and their increasing acquiescence to modern fashion (which he abhors). Ironically, the very people whom he often ridiculed as pretentious, bombastic, destructive, prejudiced, and insensitive, loved him, perhaps because, at the same time, he lauded them for their refinement and their characters so analagous to those of the American people, whom he proclaims a young people, while the British should be something like elder statesmen, big brothers if you will.

The Sketchbook is delightful reading, if you can get past the author's bookishness and often archaic language.

The story of how Geno and Guri learn the harshness as well as pleasures of life in the woods doesn't seem to ring as true as the earlier story of their father's growth and learning.Man is less menacing and an effort is made to distinguish harmful from helpful men.The characters are slightly less realisic.When Salten wrote this book(while the movie was in progress of being made)he might've just wanted to cash in and put less effort into the story.

I read this book over and over again when I was seven or eight. Wonderfully illustrated, I actually read this, the sequel, before reading the original "Bambi," and at the time, I was a bit shocked at the difference in tone between the two stories (the original was definitely dark, compared to the lightheartedness of the sequel). The story of Bambi's Children, twin fawns Geno and Gurrie, is a must-read for any young lover of nature stories.

I personally say liberskind in person at a lecture of his and was astonished by the magnitude and precision of his works, the ideas and making of his buildings give great testament to an awesome architect, BUY IT!! great buy full of information

This is a very good documentation of an extraordinary and important museum. The building itself is a critical intervention in the German cultural landscape and in the history and art history of that country. It could and should change the way we think about art museums and about the connections between art and history. Daniel Liebeskind is the architect of the Jewish Musuem in Berlin, and there, too, he is reimagining the museum building as a physical and psychic intervention. Felix Nussbaum was a German artist of the late 1920s and 1930s, before being murdered at Auschwitz. He was a figurative painter who did some very profound and moving self-portraits, which captured the pervasive fear of a Jewish artist living in hiding from the Nazis. The Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck is a difficult building for a difficult art; it is also difficult to describe, even in photographs. This book does an admirable job, and is lavishly illustrated. The text is informative but somewhat uncritical, and some floorplans would have been a great help. But at the same time, Liebeskind's own diagrams and drawings are included, and these are works of Deconstructivist architecture in and of themselves. This building should be as widely know and regarded as Frank Gehrey's Guggenheim in Bilbao.

As one of his series photo books, he keep his style. But the best book of his is the photos he took for his wife, Yoko Araki. And the most photos he took describes the common Japanese culture. As my friend told me, he became the symbol of Japanese culture.

This book kept Araki's common style, and different with his book took for his wife Yoko Araki. And he became the symbol of Japanese culture.

The author focuses on Texas-Mexicans, who enlisted in the Union and Confederate armies. No grand motives were involved. The enlistees joined for a variety of reasons: bonus money, clothing, food, escape from a ruthless peonage system, and because of a paternalistic tradition stemming from their Mexican heritage. Regardless, the Texas-Mexican committment was weak throughout the Civil War. An exception was the Benavides brothers, particularly, Santos, who was the highest ranking Texas-Mexican in either army.

While American-Mexican soldiers served in various state units - Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Vermont, et. al., this book is about the Texas-Mexicans who served along the Rio Grande River, dividing Texas and Mexico. In the course of their service, these confederate soldiers were chiefly involved in border incidents, fighting bandits, chasing rustlers, etc. It's clear Texas officials used Texas-Mexican soldiers not to fight the Union but to protect Texas land and property.

Approximately 2600 Texas-Mexicans served the South and 950 served the Union. The illiteracy rate for Texas-Mexicans was as high as 95% and their lack of English kept them in the lowest ranks throughout the war. Of the 62 men in one confederate regiment, only 3 were born in Texas. Many had been born in Mexico and ranged in age to 50 years. The Texas-Mexicans thought of their army service as a job through which they could send money to their families in Mexico - an early Bracero program.

When pay and morale deteriorated, the Texas-Mexicans deserted the confederate and union armies. They simply rode out of camps carrying clothing, arms, and riding the best horses. The desertion rate was of serious concern. In some units it ran as high as 100%, as Captain Adrian Vidal's "Independent Partisan Union Rangers" deserted in its entirety.

Prejudice against the Texas-Mexicans soldiers was overt and contributed to the desertion rate. One officer's comment is pertinent, "I consider them (Texas-Mexicans) as dishonest, cowardly, and treacherous." His feelings were supported by many Anglos in both armies. In this context, the Texas-Mexicans were given old and outdated arms and scrub horses - those not considered good enough for other army units.

The author knows the framework of his subject. Where he fails is in trying to put the results of his knowledge into a semblance of lucidity. The book is hard to read and doesn't hold a casual reader's interest. There is no explanation of the relationship of the battles described to the overall strategy of the South. Further, there are no maps with which to follow the battles narrated by the author.

Another defect is that there are no accounts of the daily lives of the Texas-Mexican soldiers: how they behaved under fire, what they ate, what they thought, how they spent their leisure time, and so forth. The book is also cluttered with footnote references as if the author believed 271 footnotes bestowed literary merit on 120 pages of text. The index is rudimentary and of limited value to the reader. In the author's defense, he obviously did a lot of research. However, no writer can enlighten a subject when the subject is presented with little form and substance.

The military events in the Civil War numbered 10,455 which doesn't include naval actions or countless other scrapes and clashes that didn't find their way into official records. This book adds nothing to the history of the "Vaquero" and does a disservice to Texas-Mexicans by denigrating their will to survive despite the foolishness foisted on them by the Anglos.

One irony that escapes the author is that the war between the states may have ended slavery in the United States but the Texas-Mexicans who fought in the Civil War continued in peonage well into the 20th century. They lived as they did before the war, clustered in small villages along the muddy waters of the Rio Grande, many in poverty, and many others suppressed economically and politically.

More than 60,000 books, monographs, pamphlets, et. al., have been written about the Civil War in all its aspects. This book adds little value to that vast body of work.

The book Vaqueros in Blue and Gray provides an insightfully resource of the contributions made by Hispanics to both the United States of America (USA) and the Confederate States of America (CSA) during the American Civil War. From an Anglo standpoint, I feel that this book better helps Civil War researchers better understand the Civil War and the contributions made by Mexicans and others with surnames like Sanchez, Martinez, and Moreno to both the CSA and USA.

As the title indicates, the Army's Command & General Staff College requires students to read Makers of Modern Strategy in the core history class. Professors can make best use of this book as a supplement. As other reviewers have noted, the chapters are disjointed with each other. Taken separately, however, many of the chapters help the history student or enthusiast to develop a depth of understanding on a particular subject. Authors such as John Shy, Douglas Porch, Michael Howard, and Condoleeza Rice, just to name a few, explore many of the strategic issues involved with the evolution of military thought.

From Machiavelli and Clausewitz to strategies of world wars and colonial wars, Makers of Modern Strategy adds value to any serious study of warfare. The high quality academic research and thought that underlies many of the articles is worth the price of the book. Highly recommended.

One of the essentials, a good starting point for the study of military history and strategy.

Although I agree with the reviewer preceeding me that this might not be as strong of a book as was the masterpiece which preceeded it (by Earle), it is still a strong book and does (generally) what it sets out to do: to provide an accounting of major developments in military thought (i.e. western military thought) from the Renassance to the modern age.

As a text or as a reference, this is still a powerful and useful book. Each of the chapters discusses a major figure's thought in a fashion that can be dealt with easily in a sitting: for those people who don't want to sit and sort through Jomini (though everyone reading this should sit down with Clausewitz! ) or Douhet, to see their rights and wrongs....

I like this book. I bought my copy for $8.00 in NYC and have had it with me through a number of moves since....

This may be a good book on military history. I am not a military historian, so I cannot attest to how sound Markham's research into that subject is. Just know what you are buying. There is almost nothing here about Napoleon as a person, not compared to most other biographies. And the social context which gave rise to Napoleon is not really explored here. I find the first two chapters of the book that deal with Napoleon's genealogy and his early years interesting and well-written. After that the book got too dense and the writing style rather pedestrian. Everything beyond the first chapter of the book is written for a specialist (a scholar who focuses on the 19th century or on military history). At the time of the publication the book received such glowing reviews that I cannot help but wonder what I missed here.

Felix Markham's "Napoleon" is a triumph. It's really a whirlwind history if you consider that within the first 100 pages you've seen Napoleon rise from his fairly humble Corsican origins to First Consul. The pace of the book was definetly something that I enjoyed! Markham details the rise to power, the political intrigues as well as the battles and campaigns that have in so many ways defined Napoleon. Napoleon's decline, exile and the rehabilitation of the Napoleonic legend in France are also well covered.

The strength of the book is that it's really well written. It's enjoyable to read, very clear and concise. While the biography may be criticized as being pro-Napoleon, I didn't feel he was unduly so, in fact his description of Napoleon as an enigma seems quite accurate and is probably one of the reasons that Napoleon continues to be controversial and of interest. As for the layout, I disliked having the maps at the end of the book, but that is of course a very minor issue.

This is definetly a good introduction for anyone interested in learning more about Napoleon.

Felix Markham's work is quite short- a mere 304 pages. This is obviously not nearly long enough to give a full accounting of the life of Napoleon, one of the most extraordinary men in all of history. Still, for those readers who may not know much about Napoleon, this book is an excellent introduction. Being broad rather than deep, it covers most aspects of Napoleon's life.

If you want a full and deep study of Napoleon's life, read the works of Vincent Cronin or Andre Castelot. If you want a brief overview, Markham's book would serve very well.

This book is copyright 1997. There is nothing in this book that has not been superceded. Even the code "samples" (which are few) have nothing to do with current extranet development. Pass this book by. Save your money.

Found to be a great intro to the business and technical aspects of the Extranet and how they may be beneficial to a company's operations.

A lovely treatise on a technical topic, made easy for the beginner. This book was enlightening. Recommended for all.