This book has it all: drama, humor, philosophy, and history. The author is an unprepossessing, very clever, unsung hero, who makes humane, practical, difficult decisions daily and keeps his nerve under the Nazi occupation of Hungary. The number of lives he saves can never be properly tallied. You will find yourself alternately holding your breath and then cheering.

I lived in Budapest for several years and became fascinated by the stories of those brave souls who survived there through the trials of the last century. This recently translated memoire is one of the best. Mr. Soros is able to convey convincingly his experiences in Budapest during the last years of WWII. Like the best memoires, it offers a window into the mind and thoughts of the author in a way which rings true and resonates with the reader. For those who are interested by the human experience in this period of history, this is a must read.

"Life is beautiful - and full of variety and adventure. But luck must be on your side." So begins a remarkable memoir of Jewish life under the Nazis in Hungary, _Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary_ (Arcade) by Tivadar Soros. Soros was a thoroughly remarkable man who certainly had variety and adventure in his life, and his share of luck. There are many accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust, and Soros certainly does not minimize the death and terror that he witnessed. Unlike many such accounts, however, this is a story of optimism and triumph. Soros and all his family survived.

His memoir begins in 1944 when the Nazis occupied Germany. Soros realized that "Since we can't stand up to Hitler's fury, we must hide from it." He and his family hid, but since they had to be seen in order to take care of daily needs, they took on the aspects of Christians. This involved his forming close relationships with a series of forgers, and once he took care of his immediate family's documents, he took care of other relatives, and then friends, and clients. "If anyone asked for my help, one of my principles in life was never to say no - if only to avoid diminishing their faith in human beings." Amidst narrow escapes and harrowing close calls, Soros kept a sense of humor which frequently emerges on these pages. As a "Christian," Soros was able to obtain cigarettes when those were denied to Jews, and since he didn't smoke, he would leave them at a watchmaker's, so that people with stars could get some. He went to the watchmaker to get his watch fixed, and asked the price. "How can you ask such a thing? It's on the house," the watchmaker said, and then whispered to the woman working beside him, "This is the Christian gentleman who brings us the cigarettes, you know." Soros says, "At least the Jews got to see that there were still a few decent Christians." Much of the humor is tinged with humane sadness; according to one of his sons, Soros used to say, "It is amazing how well people can bear the suffering of others."

This wonderful memoir has been in print before. Soros, that practical idealist, as an Esperantist wrote the original in Esperanto in 1965, three years before his death. In libraries of Esperantists the book has been an outstanding volume from the literature the planned language has produced. It is here translated by Humphrey Tonkin, a linguist whose name is familiar to all American Esperantists. It includes brief, loving memoirs by his sons, one of whom, George, has become one of the world's richest and most influential people. If there is room on your shelves for history with hope, written by a thoroughly humane and lovable man, this book is perfect.

THE LAYOUT IS VERY CONSISTANT AND THE CONTENT MADE EASY TO READ AND UNDERSTAND EVEN FOR BEGINNERS STUDYING AT GCSE A'LEVEL. THE KEY AREAS: THE NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGY, COGNITIVE, SOCIAL, COMPARATIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES AS STATED ON THE BACK PAGE. PLEASE DO NOT OVERLOOK OR NEGLECT THE AGEING,ADOLESCENCE AND ADULTHOOD, SEX AND GENDER,PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, AND TREATMENTS AND THERAPIES.THEY ARE INVALUABLE TOPICS.

Using this book to supplement studies in psychology at advanced level courses makes understanding key concepts easy. However, some high foluted language often makes the text confusing.

I wanted to share the wonderful experience of watching the metamorphous of frog eggs with my daughter. After the eggs hatched, I realized I needed more than my verbal explanation for my 4 year old -- how do these "little fish" turn into "frogs" Mommy? I ordered 3 books and this one was the best! It combines a wonderful story of a little girl asking her grandmother questions with sketches and real photographs. I am ordering more copies for friends and next year will share a copy of the book along with some frog eggs. PS - For great tadpoles, never use tap water. Rain water or pond water will provide the best environment. And the tadpoles *love* fresh spinach.

When one takes the initial steps of such an exotic trip as the middle east, a guide is needed to educate yourself on everything. Even the experienced traveler will find their trips to Europe did little to prepare them for the Middle East. This is why this guide does so much for the independant, and is so invaluable. Lonely planet has a history of helping people travel on a meagre budget, however gives a warm and caring introduction as to why indulging yourself occasionaly in the more expensive treasures can make your vaction. The authors expell the myths of all around violence in the region and firmly warns you where not to go. The religion and customs sections are so informative that I found myself prepared for the basics of Islamic life and ready to learn more. This book inspired me to take the unbeaten path and to still take in the wonderful tourist draws. Ive browsed through the two other major guides on the middle east, they dont compare to the thorough down to earth writing that Lonely Planet produces. Occasionaly, there could be more entries on Long Distance Travel (getting there and away) and there could have been more mention of the smaller budget tours that are offered in the region, however I still contend that this is the best pick for Middle East travel guides for all traveler of all Budgets.

This is a beautifuly done book which truly captures the exquisite works of Ms. Bogart. This is a real collectible. I have collected some of her figures which I love to display and am saddened that they have been discontinued. I hope more will be done featuring her works (i.e. crosstitch books,prints suitable for framing, etc.) If anyone is aware of anything of this sort, please advise. Thanks.

While the idea behind the Friends of Ed series is admirable and useful - that is, to cover the broad and expansive areas of Flash development that are not so well documented elsewhere - the books so far have been spoiled by the inconsistent quality of their ActionScript.

Too often, I get the feeling that authors that have been invited to contribute have simply re-worked a pre-existing project - and this all too often includes (the usual) hacks and workarounds which all of us use when faced with deadlines. Bits and pieces of Flash4 ActionScript creep in every now and again - and occassionally the authors seem to be entirely unaware of new methods introduced in Flash5 that make their workarounds obsolete (the onClipEvent for loaded data is one example - see Chapt 9 of this book to learn how to do it the *old* way).

Furthermore, the tutorials often lack focus - as though the editors can't decide where to pitch the level of instruction: so that some hard-core ActionScript is often mixed-in with superfluous detail about how to build the interface for the tutorial example.

Anyway, my advice if you really want to *learn* ActionScript for yourself - and also avoid the mistakes, hacks and workarounds that plague the Friends of Ed books - put Phillip Kerman's excellent "ActionScripting in Flash" together with Colin Moock's "ActionScript: The Definitive Guide" on your desk - you'll never look back.

If you are a newbie,......their are other alternatives that will get your feet wet, but if you are a practicing Flash developer and have a firm understanding of ActionScript...this book will inspire you to build real dynamic Flash apps. It touches on Flash Javascript methods, Flash and textfiles and goes into server side middleware solutions like, CGI,Perl and PHP. It also introduces you to database integration. This book gives you real world solutions, which maybe a bit elementary, but overall it lays the foundation for you. I found this book to be inspiring and to be the book which pushed me to learn CGI,PERL,PHP and MySQL. If your looking to build real dynamic/interactive Flash applications or websites this is the book.

I've bought numerous books on Flash and the Dynamic Scripting that can be intermingled with Flash.... Flash 5 ActionScript F/X and Design, Flash 4 Creative Web Animation, and different Wrox books on ASP, ASP databases, and ADO. This book ties ALL of them together. It explains motion scripting for beginners, and then it shows how to import variables from ASP, PHP, Perl, and Cold Fusion. These 1000+ pages contain EVERYTHING you want to know about Flash, it it with out a doubt, THE BEST FLASH BOOK EVER CREATED!!!! It even branches out Flash to other programs like Dreamweaver UltraDev and Generator, it explains how to display information from databases using Flash Turbine. If you read this book, you will be a master at Flash.

I bought this book for my trip to Kenya Uganda and Tanzania. I thought that I might want to travel to Ethiopia or down to Zambia and Zimbabwe....this guide is much too condensed to be helpful, and most travelers I met hated this guide and would borrow or end up buying the LP East Africa guide. You would be much better off buying a regional guide rather then this monster. Just the weight of the book alone isn't worth carrying around with you. I actually ended up ripping this book to shreads and keeping only about ten pages of it then buying the more in depth East Africa Guide.

Don't get me wrong, I love the lonely planet guides. Just not this one. I can whole heartedly recomment the East Africa guide and the Trekking East Africa guide.

This book, "Africa on a Shoestring, 9th Ed" has a broad coverage; although its chapters are not as detailed as many tourists would expect them to be.
Again, this book would have been of better psychic value, had its authors showed confidence in the sections they dealt with. Its 'information' became a wet blanket for me. Many readers who intend to visit African countries are likey to be discouraged by its relentless pessimistic approach. Its outlook is more critical than 'touristical'. The general impression is this: "something good may not come out of Africa". That is shameful! The term "bush-taxi", which was used over and over again, in lieu of a more cordial 'local-taxi' sounds offensive.
I think that if written (or revised) without assumptive bias, this book would be of better quality and value to its users.

Africa is large, and it's hard or impossible to concentrate so much information and advice into one book. Yet, Lonely Planet - as always - managed to do this with great muster. Unless you have time and money to buy the many LP guides to single regions and countries of Africa, this is the book you want before you even plan of visiting the black continent !

I am sorry I bought this book. It is not a terrible book, and it came recommended, but it was disappointing. I wanted something different than the usual books, but simply put, the more widely known guide books are better and more helpful.

...and less on campaigning, it could have been an excellent guide. Alas, alas. It would be unreasonable to expect neutrality and even-handed approach from Lonely Planet (although they almost manage it sometimes; the best I've seen was Canary Islands, by the way). Israel guidebook is one example where they feel their political opinion is so valuable that it has to be offered on almost every page.

I am no Middle East expert and I do not know who is right and who is wrong in the conflict - but in any event, I do not want my guidebook to preach to me. I buy guidebooks for travel, accommodation, eating and sightseeing information - and this part is only so-so. The guide has some helpful info (for example, about passport stamps and about beating the bureaucratic system - or at least minimizing its impact). The book has not been researched sufficiently and choices of hotels, for example, often feel they have been picked at random.

There is one thing you realize after reading about a dozen Lonely Planet guides: a very large part of the book is actually cut and pasted from one book to another. When you are paying for a Lonely Planet guide, you are paying for much less particular destination information than you imagine: there are pages and pages of generalities of no practical relevance. Why insult intelligence of a reader with gems such as "pack as little as possible but take everything you need"? I can think of no other reason but to artificially increase the volume of the book so it seems a better value for money.

As usual, information about "Getting there" is very, very poor. Same tired "advice" about buying tickets from discount travel agents (and you thought about buying them from your dry-cleaners, didn't you?), same behind-the-times feeling when it comes to internet (although now there is a reluctantly compiled list of travel sites, which conveniently excludes some of the biggest and the most helpful on-line travel agents, to which the authors are presumably opposed on ideological grounds).

Where sightseeing is concerned, the guide lack focus, descriptions are uninspired and don't feel particularly tempting.

There are many other guides to Israel, take your pick - but Lonely Planet is best left on the shelf, unless of course you want to have a full collection.

Like most of the Lonely Planet books with which I am familiar, this one has a lot of good facts that are very useful for the traveler. The information on passport stamps, for example, is very handy if you plan on traveling in other countries in the Middle East.

However, I have to disagree with avalonwitch and agree with alfassa; the pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israeli; pick your poison) bias in this book is very strong and pervasive. Right from the beginning, one notices things such as the fact that B.C. and A.D. are used, rather than the Jewish or Muslim equivalents (or the widely-accepted B.C.E. and C.E.) There's a sidebar swipe at the Mossad, for example, that concentrates on their "bungles" (of which there are, of course, some) rather than such successes as the detection of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the successful capture of Nazi war-criminals, and so on. This attitude is all through the book.

That said, there's some good stuff here. I just wish Lonely Planet's editors could have been more even-handed. After all, while Israel has certainly done some things that are pretty awful (e.g., Lebannon), the Palestinians aren't exactly free of blame, either (e.g., strapping bombs to themselves and going to discos to blow themselves up). An even-handed approach would have made this another excellent Lonely Planets guidebook.

This book is so biased against anything Jewish in Jerusalem that it borders on an anti-semitic screed. It waxes hysterical about ultra-orthodox Jews and neighborhoods. In real life, these are the safest places in the city, and offer some of the most interesting sights and shops. Beautiful churches and mosques are described in detail, but the one decorative Jewish place of worship, the Great Synagogue, is dismissed with a single statement: that its construction was a waste of money!

The relentless axe-grinding leads to some dubious advice. Readers are told to patronize Arab taxis and hotels to make up for their loss of business during the intifada. That's an awful lot like the Jews of Germany being billed for the cleanup after Kristallnacht.

Ordinary misinformation makes this guide next to useless. The Botanical Gardens are not free, entrance is about $10--and well worth it. Descriptions of Jewish ritual are skewed and include some real howlers. I wonder if their source was pulling their leg.

In addition, while I'd always thought that it's impossible to take a bad picture in the Holy City, this guide is peppered with the most boring photography I've ever seen. Any kid with a disposable camera could have done better.

This fascinating city, eternal and enticing in all its aspects, is here visited in a summary but useful way. The Capital of David's Kingdom and seat of the Temple, as well as Jesus' place of crucifixion and Mohammed's ascent to Heaven, Jerusalem is also a laboratory of modernity. From the holy places to the most fashionable night clubs, this guide leads you to discovering the immortal city, one of the most complex and intriguing in the world. The book includes excursions to Betlehem, Jericho, Masada and the Dead Sea. Good value.

The information in this slim volume is taken directly from the Lonely Planet Guide to Israel, and the coverage in the latter guide is better for the day trips North and South that you'll want to take. Buying both is a complete waste of money, and I'd really recommend getting the LPG Israel even if you don't plan to stray far from Jerusalem.