Oren is in the 7th grade and does not do well in school. He has two sisters who are bright students and out shine him in all subjects until Oren finds the secret to ridding their house of a ghost. His history project leads him to treasure left behind by the ghost. This is Oren's year to shine.

This book seems to make fun of the Marquis de Sade more than anything else. I justify that statement by referring the reviewer to the puerile drawings and statements that are found throughout this book. To focus on de Sade's pornography is to misunderstand what it is all about. However, this book does give a brief insight into the heart of de Sade's work. Yet for the little it offers, it distracts too much by the author and illustrator trying to be witty, which they completely fail to do (which is a trend with this whole series of books). If you want an insight into de Sade's work or a retracing of the events in his life, pick up a more academic book like a thoroughly researched biography, which exists. The only reason I bought this book is for posterities sake because you cannot find it in a bookstore. Read de Sade's actual stories first, then get an intelligent, "grown-up" version of literary criticism. Do not rely on this book to give you anything other than a headache from its cheap porn-based drawings.

I read this book in preparation for directing a stage production of "Quills", a play based on the Marquis de Sade. Overall, It was worth the money. I had to go a lot further with my studies, but this book was a good primer, because it condensed his life into a quick read. If you just want an opening impression of the man and the myth, I would recommend this book. If you want a more critical analysis of his work you will need to look elsewhere.

I've just completed this book. I do feel it was extremely helpful in providing me with an overall introduction to Sade, and also in helping me to determine whether or not I wish to pursue the man and his writings.

While I consider myself an eclectic freethinker, I don't go in for something "just because" it may be vastly unusual or "off the wall." In short, Sade's sexuality isn't my cup of tea. He seems to presume that his sexuality was easily anyone's cup of tea, given that the characters portrayed in his novels seem to either instantly like to be humiliated and subjected to pain, or that they don't mind one way or the other (yeah, right). Stuart Hood, the author of this book, points out that Sade's descriptions of sexual encounters are "cold and mechanical." Sexuality for many people may be simple fulfillment of lust (nothing wrong with that, btw), but for many others as well there must be a component of affection, tenderness, and warmth (I'm in the latter category). The most peculiar aspect of Sade's sexual attitudes are the seeming misanthropy of it all; it's as if his characters are absolutely hateful and cold schemers, who set about projecting their self-loathing onto others. How would these stories have been viewed if it were animals subjected to these sorts of situations instead of young human females and males?

Most disturbing to me is Sade's justification of murder. If done in a SELF-DEFENSIVE situation, murder can be justified. But Sade seems to have thought that "just plain" murder was okay, as it serves as part of Nature's destructive aspect. While I acknowledge destruction as being part and parcel of the way in which the universe operates (it is the necessary opposite complement of creation), I think Sade confuses Natural Selection with Artificial Selection. In other words, if a lightning bolt strikes a person and kills him, that's Natural Selection. But the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks and murders on the WTC and Pentagon were Artificial Selection -- premeditated murder by humans who made the plan to do it. There is a difference here.

On the other hand, Sade was said to have been horrified by the massacres of the early 1790s, relative to the French political upset at the time. He seemed to decry the senseless butchery, and even assisted in sparing his hated in-laws from the guillotine. If he believed any sort of murder whatsoever was simply part of Nature, one has to wonder why he was disturbed by all the killing around him.

Sade did, at one point, make a stand for female sexual freedom via one of his male novel characters. He asserted a woman's body is hers to enjoy as she likes, and that she needn't be a "slave to her family." On the other hand, most of the victims portrayed in his novels were helpless females. Go figure. I think his early abandonment by his mother was a major element at play in this man's psyche.

This is an interesting book, and I do recommend it. Sade is the most strangely complex person I've ever read about. I hope this review has been helpful for you.

Fight Censorship!

Has this ever happened to you... There's this new technology or programming language that you're dying to learn, but there are no books. Finally, someone writes a book, you get the book from the bookseller (Amazon), you open the book, and you thumb through the pages. Well, that's the way I felt about learning Microsoft IL for .NET. I really was keen about learning .NET's "assembly language" because throughout my career I found that having low level knowledge about how a system is put together is very, very useful. Now, I'm not suggesting that you stop everything you're doing and run out to learn CIL programming. However, I believe that if you want to be a serious .NET professional, learning CIL should definitely be on your To-Do list.

So what about Bock's Book: "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET"? In a word - disappointing. Bock spends most of the book's first chapter entitled "Language Interoperability" on detailed discussion of programs written in a variety of languages. He's trying to make the point that the CLR allows programs written in different languages to freely interoperate. Duh? Why spend the better part of the book's opening talking about everything but CIL. There's even an Oberon (?) programming sample here.
The second and third chapters on ILASM Directives, and, CIL Opcodes, respectively, read like my weekend shopping lists. While it is true that programming books have to regurgitate all the nasty details of the programming language, the good books tell its readers how to internalize the information and describe useful ways of summarizing the information in one's mind. That is, the authors of the better books have figured out some rhyme and reason to the language and they share these insights with their readers. On the other hand, this is what I found in these two most important chapters of Bock's book: the more I read, the more questions I had. I wound up spending significant time on the NET trying to resolve questions that were raised in the material in these two chapters. Clearly, the author did not anticipate these questions.
The fourth chapter, "ILASM and CIL in Practice" is a decent discussion of a typical sample program in IL. It demonstrates some of the IL constructs and programming concerns discussed in the previous chapters. Chapter 6 is interesting. Here the author talks about and contrasts the IL generated by various rogramming languages. Some of the VB.NET and C# exposés were eye-opening, but then Bock goes back to Oberon again. The author ends off the book in chapters 7 and 8 with some very long and tedious samples. I got nothing from this. Chapter 9, the last in the book, is a two-pager on "CIL Tips".

So why do I give this book 3 stars?
1) The book includes Chapter 5, a well-written and interesting discussion about CIL Debugging.
2) Right now, Bock's book is one of three books that talks about CIL. It is the only book that is targeted directly at programming. Although John Gough's "Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime" is an excellent book, it is very specialized and targets (would-be) compiler authors. I didn't read the third book in the IL arena, Serge Lidin's "Inside Microsoft .NET IL Assembler", but I did thumb through it several times (you know what little that is worth): this book strikes me as being very difficult.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
If you need to learn IL Programming right now, buy Bock's book - read the second half of chapter 1, and read Chapters 2-5, maybe Chapter 6. If you have the time, money, and inclination, then buy and read Gough's book. You'll need a lot of time for Gough, but you will definitely learn.

If learning IL is not that pressing right now, I would wait to see if someone else releases a better book.

I read this book to my 1 year old and it is her favorite book!! The bright colors and Sesame Street characters are fun to look at, and the words are easy to understand. It's an all-around great book for young kids!

This book would be OK for kids who are just learning about subtraction (say, in kindergarten or early in first grade). The math is too easy (take away 1 or 2 cookies on each page and count how many are left) for anyone older than that. Sure, it's kind of fun the first time to see how the words that Riding Hood and the different characters say change when you offer them one versus two cookies, but for kids who are used to playing educational computer games that offer many more choices, it quickly becomes boring.

Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood TV series (aired under the title "Robin Hood" in the US) is one of the best filmed versions of the legend ever. Many of Carpenter's ideas -- most notably the Arab Merry Man -- have been borrowed by later filmmakers. Unfortunately, his series of books are really just juvenile novelizations of the TV series. They don't add anything to the shows, and I think Carpenter's writing works best on the screen. Still, if you can't get the episodes on video, this book will give you a taste of the TV series that Robin Hood historians call one of the most influential 20th century versions of the legend.

I found Dyer's book on Hood to be very slanted and also boring. Dyer paints a rosy picture of Hood and pretty much states throughout the book that Hood did nothing wrong as a general. Another annoying thing about the book is that often times Dyer gets off Hood and begins to write about Lee, Longstreet, or someone else Hood served under. When writing about battles, Dyer often writes of the battle as a whole rather than what Hood's brigade or division was doing during the battle. This makes the book feel less of a bio of Hood and more of a book about battles that Hood was at. All in all, Dyer doesn't focus on Hood, the text is usually pretty boring, and he looks as if he set out to make Hood look like a genius. If you are interested in Hood I would recommend you skip this book and look into Richard McMurry's John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence.