I took last summer my two daugthers, age 6 and 9 to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They loved it and each one choose her favorita artist. The younger one, Isabel, loved Picasso. Who doesn't?. My older daughter, Camila loved the american artist Jackson Pollock, she sat in front of his masterpiece One, admiring all that aparently no-sense. Its beautiful, she told me, and I sure can do that. She's not very good in art class and she felt identified with this painter's work. Wanting to explain his art I found a wonderful book, part of a series written by Mike Venezia about the great artists. In the case of Jackson Pollock, the author mixing words, comics and paintings explains in a fun way the wonders of the work of this artist. Pollock was the brother of a painter and went to study art as his brother did in New York, he tought he wasn't very good at it. But working and studyng with contemporary painters helped to create his personal style making him one of America's biggest contemporary artist. Try explaining that to your kid, don't bother. Mike Venezia will do the job.

This is the story of the most famous and outspoken member of the Great Yankee Teams of The Late 1970's. This book will take you from Reggie's childhood to his days with the Oakland A's, The Baltimore Orioles, The Yankees, and the California (now Anaheim ) Angels. You will read his version about his quotes to the press, his relationship with Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner. A must for all Yankee Fans.

VBA is one of those tools I long knew I should be proficient in but never got around to learning. That is, not until I found this book. It makes it easy for a financial professional to quickly come up to speed and start coding VBA within spreadsheets. The fact that the focus is on financial applications means that you learn coding techniques that will be useful on the job. I highly recommend the book!

This book serves as a good source for anyone who is interested in making a career in Financial Engineering. There are many worked examples that facilitate understanding of the theory. This also provides the basics for a person who wants to build benchmarks in Excel for financial modeling.
The numerical methods applied with the help of Excel are useful to understand the various facets of Financial Engineering.
The salient aspects are
- provides the VBA introduction along with the features of Excel
- Equities Risk management and portfolio optimization
- Option pricing using Binomial trees and Black Scholes formula applied in Excel
- Bond option Valuation Formula using the Vasicek, Cox Ingersoll and Ross using the assumptions of Risk neutral process are easily worked out and the examples elucidate the readers understanding
- Interest rate models, valuation of Bond options using the different approaches are done well.

This book was a godsend. My stochastic calculus background is very strong, and I'm a good modeller/programmer, too. Nonetheless, there are a lot of practical and well-presented tips in this book that have made my life a lot more pleasant. I stopped spinning my wheels, and I'm having fun again. I highly recommend this book!

I also highly recommend Tavakoli's "Credit Derivatives" (Second Edition) for product descriptions and performance characteristics.

Even without SQUADRON SUPREME, his excellent runs on CAPTAIN AMERICA and QUASAR speak for themselves. But this is one of his finest hours.

This limited series is not the first appearance of the Squadron Supreme; they had shown up in several issues of THE AVENGERS, parodying DC's trademark heroes and "proving" that the Avengers would beat them.

But it was the late, great Mr. Gruenwald who took them and placed them in a superb mini-series that combined comedy, drama, and action with moral arguments.

Even to this day, the questions remain. Who was right--Hyperion or Nighthawk? Where EITHER of them right? And so forth.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gruenwald. After writing this, you've earned it.

Other reviews have mostly summed it up. This story is superb. Mr. Gruenwald is underappreciated genuis. It's unfortunate he, and the Squadron, haven't been appreciated sooner. And, that Mr. Gruenwald didn't get to see his most cherished creation enjoy the recognition and popularity it deserves. The exciting and innovative concepts and ground-breaking devices aside, I enjoyed the heck out of the Hyperion character. With Superman being one of the premier characters of the superhero genre, and practically a pop-culture institution today, it seems odd that unlike other hit characters, he has never seriously been emulated. But it is that very popularity that prevented it. He is so recognizable, writers were just too afraid of being "copycats". Leave it to Gruenwald to have the courage to create his own version of a classic(as well as the rest of JLA), and instill it with it's own identity, and his own unique vision. Not unlike an "ElseWorlds" story, there is much familiar, and much strikingly different. Powers and origin parallel. But Hyperion, like the other Squadron characters, has his own unique quirks, hang-ups, dreams, and ambitions. The story takes the "What-If?" concept to extremes, as Hyperion and the Squadron say and do the things their "original" counterparts wouldn't even think. Fans of Superman and/or JLA should love this, as will any fans of good comic story telling. Don't pass on this one, if you miss it the second time, you may regret it.

I recently bought and read the collection after having read the original limited series back in the 1980s. The late Mr. Gruenwald's storytelling skills and love for the old JLA series continue to shine. I loved some of MG's takes on the classic heroes. How would Superman change his outlook if he abandoned his Clark Kent persona? How would the Golden Age Wonder Woman act if she outlived Steve Trevor and lost her Amazon homeland? Would Batman be more effective on the streets or the White House? We see all kinds of fantastic technology in comics, but what would happen if it was unleashed on the real world? Before Kingdom Come, he had the courage to present the ramifications of great power taking on greater responsibility at the expense of free will. Unlike KC, SS does not get bogged down in dark tones and endless fights, while it still allows the reader to empathize, as well as root for, the Squadron even though they have gone beyond their lawful duty. One wonders what comics would have looked like today if Squadron Supreme had been the big influence instead of Watchmen.

The important thing to note about this sourcebook/rpg is that while it perfectly maintains the feel of the Hellboy comic, it is still a Steve Jackson game. So what's wrong with that? Nothing really, it's just that the game is a version of GURPSlite slightly modified to better represent characters present in Mignola's world. This isn't necessarilly a problem, but it makes the game feel a lot less original and more like a reframing of prior works. The book also frequently references other GURPS books--not as a corequisite just for suppliment, but none the less it makes the book feel somewhat incomplete as a 'stand-alone' game.
As earlier mentioned the feel of the book is PERFECT--the whole sourcebook feels like a BPRD report, and the Hellboy story and comic included in the 200 page sourcebook help give those unfamiliar with Mignola's work an idea of what Hellboy is like. Bios on almost every important character/villian/supernatural and a great timeline help to familiarize players with the Hellboy world. Also included is a section on how to run the game in the Hellboy fashion to help adventures more closely resemble those found in the comics. This book is really for hardcore fans of the series and not someone looking for a new innovative RPS, because as a system it is just a retelling of the GURPSLite rules. The book has a great dark sense of humor and feels as though it were a Hellboy comic, because of this it is a very enjoyable read and the loads of Hellboy information make it a great sourcebook for the Hellboy world.

This true account of the spree murders perpetrated by Mike Wayne Jackson in Indianapolis in 1986 gives the reader more than just a typical "true crime" story. It seems as if Wilkinson divided the telling of this tragedy into three parts: the murders, the search for Jackson, and the day- to-day stories of the victims following the murders. The stories of each person involved in the crime (including Jackson's mother, the first victim's widow, etc.) are each written extremely well, and each helps us to understand the crime better, as all of the people that were involved in this crime are trying to do.

As stated in an earlier review, this book's scope is too narrow. Its focus on weapons is distracting; if you're trying to recreate an 18th century environment, you need to know about more than muskets. When did people start using the Franklin Stove? How available was printed material? How did people get around? How did they climb mountains, how did their ships work, how accessible was glass?

This is a handy book about weapons up through the 20th century, but not much else.

If you buy this book hoping it will be about high tech things for GURPS, you will be disappointed. It should be called GURPS guns or something. It is basically the history of firearms, with a few things about explosives and other sundry pieces of information thrown in. It is really quite interesting and well researched. However, it only goes up to modern times, and much of the text is devoted to ancient cannon, guns and so forth.

There are a few peices of information that could be useful to a campaign in here, but mostly it is just background material, and is more geared towards being interesting reading than essential game rules. If you like this kind of GURPS book, you would probably give it more stars than I did.

Worst book I have ever read. I thought I would get Samons book too and got this instead. It is awful. Why isn't my other review here? I also felt tricked. The glowing reviews are anonymous. How lame. I do not recommend this book to anybody.

I am looking for the real book and got sent to this one and that is bad. The real book by Samon is very hilarious and that is the one I have bought for a long time for Valentine's Day. This book is not funny and I do not like being tricked. I can tell from the other reader comment here that this whole thing is a gimmick because they wrote their own reviews. This all very bad. Where is Samon's Dates From Hell book?

This book is filled with humorous stories concerning bad dates

I don't give many one-star reviews... Nicols misses no opportunity to endow his characters with bad breath, crusty nostrils, dirty teeth and any other repulsive characteristic imaginable, all of it described in loving detail. They wander through a nightmarish world of violence, poverty and sickness, both suffering and inflicting suffering on others, all told in a psuedo-literary style that is intended to signal us that something Frightfully Important is being related. Don't bother with it.

You know what this comes across as? It's as if Mr. Nicol read Cormac McCarthy's tremendous work and thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and set out to rewrite it in a new setting. His scenes, language and style seem lifted straight from McCarthy's pages, but he can't even come close to capturing the essence of regeneration through violence. That's not to say that such was Nicol's goal, because a goal is not apparent. This is a work of drivel that proceeds in jerks and spasms, and offers nothing to the literary world. Well, there is ONE good thing about it, and that is its length. Even at 200 pages, though, it's hard to get through. Why waste precious days reading this when there's so much else out there?

I am not sure why I picked this one up at the library, not sure why I started it, and am really not sure why I finished it. I am a "OPS Junkie" (other people's syntax) and that is really the only thing that kinda-sorta kept me hooked I suppose. Call me stupid or dull, but I just did not "get" half of what the author was attempting???? I always hate to give a low rating to any book, because I know what effort goes into writing anything, and even with the really bad ones, I sort of feel sorry for the author, but in this case, it was almost as if the author went out of his way to be vague, gross, etc. Perhaps the author made too much of an effort to the Artsie. I am not real sure where the publisher was while all this was going on.

An attempt to cash in on the Simpson trial, this book is an embarrassment for all concerned. Just how bad it is cannot be conveyed in a mere 1000 words, so you'll simply have to read it yourself -- but maybe that's too high a price to pay. Read the summary provided by Dove Publishing. It's as though they are trying to expose the jurors as the cerebral cripples they are. Couldn't they find one coherent line in what must have been hours of mind-numbing recordings with the "authors"? While reading the book, keep in mind that this is _their_ side of the story; it is told in a manner most sympathetic to the jurors. Still, they come off as spit-drooling morons. The mind reels at the thought of someone hostile to Cooley, Bess, and Jackson having written this. As for Tom Byrnes (he garners "as told to" credit for this mess) and editor Mike Walker, don't hate them... pity them. Then again, perhaps Byrne and Walker have intended this as an indictment of our judicial system, where the search for impartial jurors has evolved into a quest for those who never read newspapers, news magazines, or even watch television more challenging than "Jackass." If this is the case, their success is complete beyond any possible expectations they might have had.

Upon first hearing the not-guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, I was sure it was because at least some of the Simpson jurors had some self-serving, self-righteous agenda. However, after reading this pathetic, to the point of being comical attempt, to justify their verdict, I have changed my mind... Not only was their so-called "analysis" of the evidence completely devoid of any truly intelligent thought, it contained leaps of logic so vast, Evil Knevil would have been too scared to jump it. For example, one juror said she had doubts O.J. did it because only a "little" blood from the victims was found in Simpsons bronco.If he was truly innocent, then why is ANY of the victims blood in his car! Throughout the trial Johnny Cochran continuously lied or distorted the truth. During the defence for instance, in an attempt to show police "contaminating" the crime scene, Cochran shows a still picture of a policeman "carelessly" walking through a bloody path. Contamination,right? Well, no. Upon simple cross-examination, we find out that only AFTER the crime scene had been processed and all blood evidence been collected did this officer then walk through this bloody path. Was there any mention of this in this book? Of course not. When Cochran tried to show an attempt by police to "plant" evidence, he showed a videotape of Simpsons bedroom depicting the ABSENCE of bloody socks that the police claimed were there. Planting of evidence you say? Again, upon cross-examination the person who shot the videotape testifies that he was there to videotape the premises for insurance purposes only. And that he was told by police NOT to go into the bedroom until AFTER they collected whatever was in there, including,of course, those bloody socks! Did any of these hapless jurors make note of this?...In fact, rare is it, that you will find consecutive coherent sentences, such is the collective wisdom shown here. So, the question is, would I recommend this book to others? To that question, my answer is surprisingly, a resounding YES!...Because while on one hand, this book was so tedious to read,what with its complete utter lack of knowledge and insight of the subject matter, I still found it facinating to delve into the minds of people who have such little powers of deduction...

This is a pathetic and weak attempt written by the OJ Simpson jurors to excuse the outrageous and incorrect verdict that they arrived at after only three hours of deliberation. It demonstrates the unfortunate fact that even the jurors, who were supposed to be impartial, were clearly biased against the prosecution from day one of the trial, and their IQ's match an anorexic's dress size! Discounting all the other evidence, the DNA alone should have convicted SImpson, since it doesn't inject fraudulent issues into a trial, isn't overwhelmed by its own celebrity, and has no ulterior motives or hidden agenda, yet it was damningly and inexplicably ignored. And I was amazed to read the statement of one of the jurors in a post trial interview that the DNA evidence carried no weight with her! The DNA evidence was as irrefutably tied to the Simpson case as Santa Claus is to Christmas. I wonder how these jurors can live with themselves, knowing that Simpson is a murderer, and deciding that these murders should go unpunished. How could they attend a post trial victory party, hosted by that slime Johnnie Cochran, knowing that because of Simpson, Ron and Nicole are forever lost to their families? Do they ever think of Ron and Nicole at all? Do they think about their last moments alive? I do. Does the particularly gruesome crime scene picture of Nicole, lying folded in the foetal position, her head haloed by a large pool of blood, which looks like blotches of red paint splashed randomly onto an artist's canvas, haunt them at all?