Life. What is the meaning and purpose of life? This book managed to answer this question with one sentence.
Cairo is an ordinary teenager living in the world of reality. She goes through her 16th year with the memory of an incident of a blender and strawberries. Using this one incident, the whole randomness of life is slowly revealed to us. Through many happenings, Cairo realizes that nothing can be helped, nothing is predestined. Whatever happens just happens, and there is no way to change the past.
This is a delirious and light read, but if you think about it afterwards, it's one of those "iceburg" books. There's so much more beneath the surface. Dig deeper. I won't keep you here any longer, go READ.

I listened to the unabridged audio tape version of this book narrated by Michael Page. It's one of those deals where you listen to each tape entirely on the left channel, then play the whole tape again on the right channel to get the next part of the story. Which is kind of awkward, since you forget which channel you were on if you also use your stereo for music; but these editions are probably the least expensive (by the hour) audio tapes you can buy.

I think Dickens' tendency toward exhaustive descriptions works a lot better when you're listening to it in the car than when you're reading it in print. I might never have had the patience to read the actual book while sitting in a chair, but listening to it in the car was pretty entertaining. Colorful characters, humor, suspense, unexpected plot twists; I can picture a lot of it in my mind even now. A recommended story.

There are 60 illustrations, excellent paintings, with the accompanying text that inspired it. The colours are very well down, and each painting is brilliantly done in terms of publication. There are nine artists represented. These are:

Inger Edelfeldt: 7 paintings

Tony Galuidi: 2 paintings

Roger Garland: 10 paintings

Robert Goldsmith: 2 paintings

Michael Hague: 7 paintings

John Howe:10 paintings

Alan Lee: 10 paintings

Ted Nasmith: 10 paintings

Caro Emery Phenix: 2 paintings

My personal favorite is John Howe. He brings out a lot of dark imagery. I don't know why, but Hague's stuff just does not appeal to me. I have seen him do Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress, and some other stuff, and I just don't like his style (also saw his illustrations for WIZARD OF OX). His are of THE HOBBIT. Galuidi has almost a computer generated quality, and his work is especially intriguing, although there are only 2 of his paintings in this collection. Lee is good. All in all, this is a fair book, collecting the paintings of artisits brining about their own vision of Tolkien's classic saga. Over all, a four star book (bumped up one star because of Howe's supreme quality).

This is a collection of 50+ paintings based on various works by Tolkien, which fans of Tolkien will no doubt enjoy. It may be of speial interest to those who watched the movies (and who hasn't, who read Tolkien...) as you can clearly see how some of these paintings are replicated in Jackson's movies; it takes but a moment to catch it in the film, but if you see the pictures enough you'll recognize it.

The quality of the paintings are uneven, and each one has its favorite. Like many people, I find Hague lacking, but also Edelfeldt, who isn't bad but whose style is not unique enough in my opinion.

My favorites, on the other hand, are Howe, Garland, Nasmith, Lee and Galuidi. Garland, my favorite, has a unique and glowing, almost 'mystical' style that does the book justice. Howe's pictures are also intriguing and beautiful, and feel true to the book (and thankfully, he seems to dominate the book in terms of the number of contributions). Nasmith has some splendid landscape pictures, though his vision of the characters leave something to be desired (especially of a fat, distorted Boromir!) Galuidi's sci-fi, computerized style may not appeal to some, but I find them interesting. Finally, Lee's soft watercolors are very appealing, and his vision of the characters is near-perfect (especially Galadriel and Gandalf).

"Tolkien's World" is a very handsome book: large, hardcover, sleeve-cover, fine print and paper. It consists on a serie of paintings divided by books (The Hobbit, LOTR, Silmarillion, etc.) printed in the largest scale possible and with great definition. Beside the picture there is the passage of the book which inspired the painting. In the end there are one-page texts about or written by each of the artists, explaining their influences and relation with Tolkien works. My favorite artist is, without a doubt, Ted Nasmith, that draws very realistic pictures. Second place is John Howe, with his dark and intriguin style. All in all, a pretty nice book. I was very satisfied with it and it helped me to figure the places and events of LOTR. Be aware that there's a book that is kind of a sequel to this one: "Realms of Tolkien: Images of Middle-Earth", which I'm planning to get. It is written on its purchasing info that the author is Ted Nasmith, so is the cover authory. Lucky me.

Michael Harrington's Socialism: Past and Future is yet another example of Socialists' misconception of the common man. Many socialist writers, namely Marx and Engels, assume that the reader knows about socialism already, and has studied basic economics. This assumption was an integral part of the text. The book uses the vocabulary of a college text-book, refering to writers that nobody knows or cares about. This book, however, is not as poorly written as some of the older socialist texts. Another disease common to socialist texts is avoidance of certain issues, like the Third World, advancing technology, and basic human greed, but this book is different. Chapters are spent on subjects that Marx neglected, making this book better than the average of socialist books. Michael Harrington died of cancer shortly before the fall of the USSR. He predicts the fall of the communist powers in Asia, and most of his prophecies have come true, or are coming true.! The early chapters show the reader the world from the eyes of a socialist, and by the later chapters, the reader seeks knowledge of socialist theory and practice. Two things, that are, sadly, delivered abstractly, over many chapters.

At the end of the century, the late Michael Harrington's works remain the definitive works on socialism for the American Left. Socialism: Past & Future is his last book, and offers a clear picture of not only what democratic socialists believe, but also how socialists propose to deal with the problems of today's society.

I find this book to be often illuminating in its details, but rather disappointing in its theoretical standpoint.

The author's overarching claim, that genius is not "born" but emerges through a set of interactions with its environment, is not as interesting as it sounds. Rather than offering a clear theory of how conflict or symbiosis with one's surroundings can ferment genius, his theory seems to have a mainly a negative, polemical thrust. The enemy he is fighting is the notion that genius is some sort of magical, superhuman power that separates geniuses absolutely from the rest of us. But few interesting thinkers on the topic of genius have held such a shallow and exaggerated position, with the result that the author seems to be swinging at phantoms in his criticisms.

My other complaint is that the book is too heavily biased towards a kind of academically empirical, smugly scientistic view of what "explanation" means. He continuall makes points by saying things like "Research suggests that this is not the case." Too often, he bows in the direction of uncited "research" that supposedly supports his claims, while failing to do the hard work of making his case on a cconceptual level.

Given all of this, I was pleasantly surprised at his actual skills as a biographer. His case histories (such as Darwin and Faraday) show a disarming finesse and attention to subtle differences in the psychology of various geniuses. Although, as I have mentioned, the tone of his theoretical discussions tends to be smugly empiricist, the actual details of the case studies suggest a shrewd observer of human affairs. His bold contradiction of Darwin's own self-assessment of his development bespeaks a man who is able to keep his eye on the ball and not be sidetracked by mere words.

Despite his (plausible) hostility to the idea that geniuses are born ready-made, he also avoids the practice of bending evidence in his favor in an easy way. For example, one might expect someone of Howe's orientation to take a "sociology of science" viewpoint, and argue that Darwin's later great success was _entirely_ the result of chance factors in his environment that might easily have brought others besides Darwin to a position of historical greatness. Refreshingly, he takes the opposite course, arguing that one _could_ and even _should_ have been able to identify the young (pre-Beagle) Darwin as destined to succeed to a greater degree than many of his peers. His portrait of a fiery Darwin hiding behind the long-established mask of a disoriented young slacker is a brilliant one. So too is his observation about the different situations faced by Darwin amidst privilege and Faraday amidst severe privation. His account of how this difference played out in their scientific temperaments is compelling.

Another particularly moving passage relates to the author's idea that every genius creates for him/herself a shell to protect their private life, and most interestingly of all that there are _different ways_ of doing this successfully. Whereas Darwin accomplished it with a mask of indolence and Faraday with a refusal to mix private and professional matters or to pay attention to the political crises of his day, Picasso did it by shamelessly using oher people. There are many roads to Mecca.

Finally, the author does explicitly announce his strategy of focusing on geniuses from one major historical period (the 19th century) so as to be able to look at specimens from similar social conditions. Related to this strategy is the fact that virtually all of his examples are British-- which the author does _not_ address, as far as I can recall. But I would have been curious to hear some speculations as to whether the conditions by which British geniuses emerge are different from those of the Continent or North America or the Islamic world. Perhaps that would be the subejct for a different book, but I would have liked to know whether Howe has any ideas about this topic.

Overall, I didn't get much from the theoretical aspect of this book, but it's a gold mine of anecdotes and psychological speculations on a wide range of specific geniuses.

This is a great book in every sense. He is basically saying that the geniuses of the world have achieved their accomplishments through sheer hard work, persistence, and countless hour commitments. And therefore, genius is within all of our reaches, if we only apply the same principles that they did. I have seen what he is talking about played out in real life. For example, when I was working as an engineer, I had to share an office with a man who was known in the company as a genius, with astonishing achievements. He has since gone on to achieve national recognition for his work, and there is no end in sight. Therefore, I was astonished, when I was sharing an office with him, about how little he knew about some things, and how many mistakes he made even about engineering. In fact, I corrected him, and pointed things out to him on many occasions. After he left the company, I even redid some of his work, and everyone agreed it was an improvment. Seeing that side of him, I never thought he was born with some unexplained gift that caused him to be labeled genius by those who didn't see behind the scenes. He did what he did through sheer hard work. In fact, he is the hardest working person I have ever met. He would come into work at 5 in the morning. He would often work between 12 to 20 hours. He would work weekends. When he wasn't doing the direct work at hand, he would go home and read on background material for several hours. He was constantly studying. Hence, the finished product Genius. In this case, his genius came from a mind carefully, and very painstackingly trained through sheer hard work.
Now one point I would disagree with the author is that he says there are no born differences in people. I think there are individual differences in brain capacity between people, since the brain is an inherited organ just like any other. However, there a tons of people in the world who could potentially be an Einstein or Darwin, and very few actually do.
Further evidence for the author's claim is evident if we examine Chinese and Japanese cultures. They operate under the assumption in their schools that work is much more important than natural ability. As a result, about 60 to 70% of their students achieve in school, what our few 5% of 'geniuses' achieve. Their work takes their students a lot further than our kids go, and it will eventually catch up with us. I think this is a great book, which gives hope to so many people to achieve their potential. I know it has given me hope.

This book looks at the question of whether or not there is any such thing as genius. Are there innate, genetically programmed abilities whose possession makes one person smarter than another? Was Mozart qualitatively different from the rest of us poor mortals who were not composing piano concerti by the time we were four years old?

Dr. Howe (I presume) argues that there may very well be some innate genetic quality that makes Mozarts different from the rest of us, but it is difficult if not impossible to define. He argues that what leads to exceptional intellectual accomplishment as adults is primarily focus, dedication, and lots and lots of practice. He backs up his claim with abundant carefully reasoned, cautiously qualified and fairly presented evidence that is a pleasure to read.

Anyone like me who has repeatedly seen good, smart, capable people discouraged from pursuing intellectual studies because they were considered "not smart enough" owes it to themselves and those people to read this book. This is a MARVELLOUS book

Howe's book certainly reaches rather different conclusions to other recent authors (e.g., Brody, Cooper, Jensen, Macintosh). He rejects the reductionist notion that individual differences performance on ability tests is attributable to any internal feature of the individual (e.g., those associated with the structure and function of the nervous system).

But is Howe right? The discussion of the heritability of IQ, for example, considers ONLY the data from separated identical twins. Howe raises a number of methodological issues post-hoc, and suggests (without producing data) that these invalidate the generally-accepted finding that general ability has a substantial genetic component. The naive reader would not realise that adoption studies and family studies do not suffer from the well-known methodological objections that Howe raises - but that they (like the separated twin studies) also indicate a very substantial genetic component.

If intelligence has a substantial genetic component, does it correlate with other biological variables? Most authors conclude that it does, but Howe believes that the correlation between intelligence and biological variables (e.g., reaction time, inspection time, alpha activity) is too small to be of interest. Which other branch of psychology would choose to ignore correlations in the order of 0.4 - 0.5?

There are other concerns too: for example, the lack of discussion of a hierarchical model, and the lack of discussion of Hunter's work on the predictive power of ability tests.

In summary, not all of Howe's conclusions seem to be well supported by evidence or logic.

Professor Howe provokes thought about the assumptions we make in relation to IQ & what 'having a high IQ' really means. READ IT!!

I found this book to be disappointing. Like so many other programming books it supposedly starts off at a pace for a beginner. However, it spends too much time on basic syntax, which I assume most programmers are familiar with, or are familiar with other programming languages and could make the adjustment quickly to basic C++.

It does give a few important introductory points on the new managed classes, to its credit. However one-half of the way through the book the author begins to leave C++ and give "glimpses" of the .Net features of C++, which are much too vast to cover even simplistically in such a small space. The topics quickly became so far from what I wanted to learn about C++ that it was hard to believe they were covered in the same book as the simplistic syntax lessons at the beginning. I came away from this book more confused as to what I could do with C++ .Net than before I read it.

I don't know who this book is intended for, but it is definitely not for those wanting an tutorial on core .Net C++ without the excessive syntax explanations that fill the first half of so many programming books.

Poorly written and not text book quality. Many code errors incorporated into text. If this is the best that Microsoft has to offer, it will seriously impeed their marketing efforts of .Net to academic institutions and student population.

As a Microsoft Press author I can tell you from a point of knowledge that the other review stating that MS wants you to only buy Petzold's book for .NET programming is absolutely wrong. Each MS Press book has its niche. This book, for example, is absolutely the best "from the ground up" managed extensions book available. If you're already experienced with MC++ (as it's often referred), I would recommend Sam Gentile's fine book. But for beginners this is the first book to purchase.

I absolutely love the tutorial style used in these books and the authors did a great job of not fluffing things, but keeping the flow going with a continual stream of topics aimed to build one atop the other.

This is definitely a recommended buy from someone who normally doesn't recommend books.

Tom Archer
Author, Inside C#