I ordered this book for three reasons: Since I taught a course in college-level nutrition, I am appalled at how terrible the diets of too many of us really are. Plus I am something of a fitness nut. Finally I am also a "foodie" who enjoys cooking and eating delicious "gourmet quality" meals that also incorporate first-rate nutrition.

This is the diet book that the USA has been waiting for but too few persons seem to know about it -- yet. It is scientifically accurate and the conclusions of the authors are sound. It is proof that eating for improved health and fitness need not be boring. Indeed, the day after I received the book, I prepared the mango/black bean salad to rave reviews and no leftovers.

The message is not new: We need to increase the fruits, veggies, and whole grain foods in our diet, and to decrease red meats, sodium, and sweets. Although the target audience is those with hypertension, nearly everyone can benefit from accepting the book's challenge to try the DASH diet for two weeks -- and for a lifetime. The fact that the authors go beyond the science and present imaginative, delicious recipes and menus is a definite strength of the book.

A salute to the authors for this timely book!

Dr. Thomas Moore's DASH Diet For Hypertension poses a drug-free, scientifically proven method of reducing blood pressure and is based on two large clinical trials documenting dietary approaches to controlling hypertension. A team of doctors explores how the DASH diet system works, from choices in fruits, vegetables and low-fat diary products to the right serving portion and the influence of exercise.

I was given the opportunity to catalog Dr. Gentry's herbarium collection at the Desert Botanical Garden in 1987-88. I haven't seen the new edition mentioned here, but read the original work at the time I was cataloging his herbarium specimens. Through it, I was able to share his experience as an explorer in the spirit of John Wesley Powell, someone who knew that the American southwest is best delineated by watersheds, not along false lat/long lines. I met Dr. Gentry a couple of times, and remember the occasions well. Last time I saw him, when I was cataloging his collection, I overheard a conversation between him and a consultant for the Fort McDowell Indian Community. The consultant was asking about desert-adapted crop plants. Dr. Gentry went into great detail describing many desert plants suited to agriculture - tepary beans, jojoba, Lippia (Mexican oregano), agave, chiltepines, gum arabic, etc. I learned a lot just by eavesdropping. The consultant listened, but did not hear the words. He recommended that the Fort McDowell people plant cotton. Not because it was best suited to desert agriculture - far from that. They planted cotton because it needs vast quantities of water. They did not want the best desert-adapted crops. What they wanted, instead, was the best crop for wasting water, so that they could establish valid rights to the water. Worse, I watched them clear off vast acreages of mesquite forests to make room for the water-wasting cotton crop. The Hopi call this koyaanisqatsi. This book should help folks in southwestern north America realize that we have a bounteous resource, if we can only learn to use it.

Located in a transition zone between the Sonoran Desert and the tropics,this region is well known for its biodiversity, thanks to a 1942 study by botanist Howard Scott Gentry. Revision of his classic work began before his death in 1993. For researchers, this is a must-read book. It provides a clear overview of botanical studies of the Rio Mayo, a contemporary view of the vegatation, excerpts from the original text and an annotated list of plants.

beautiful, compelling...a great study of one of the most interesting rebel artists of our time. everyone should know who howard finster is!

Fans of the odd and eccentric will find Howard Finster's Paradise Garden fascinating and entertaining. The quality and selection of photographs of the garden is fantastic, and Finster's statments regarding the vision behind his creation are intriguing. This book is definitely worth examining for its unusual scope and content.

This compilation presents an extensive photographic record of the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki with accompanying text. Published on the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it shows the horrendous aftermath of the bombing through reprints of digitally restored negatives from pictures taken just a few days after the critical juncture in history. The photos are accompanied by bilingual text in Japanese and English, including an interview with the photographer, a work of fiction, and extensive biographical and chronological materials. The graphic contents may not be suitable for certain readers.

-From the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

I really enjoyed this book as I am a big fan of both college football and college basketball. It has the stories behind the nicknames of most of the major schools and some of the smaller ones as well. I thought it was well written and extremely interesting. I have also loaned it to many friends after they have seen it at my house and they enjoyed it as well.

Gap Digital has done it again. One minute you'll be laughing and the next you'll be crying (make sure you have a box of tissues handy).

Every installment keeps getting better! You'll be laughing one minite and crying the next.

Once again, the guys at Gap digital have amazed me! This is the eighth season in the Left Behind dramatic audio series, and is it action packed or what? Nicolae Carpathia has come back from the dead, and he's possessed by Satan himself. He begins administering the mark of the beast to see who's with him and who's against him. The Trib Force must jerney to Grece to rescue believers captured by Global Community forces. Mean while, the Trib Force begins planning for its most dangerous mission yet. Thanks, Gap Digital, for another award winner. Can't wait for season nine, Desecration.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

This is an enjoyable collection of Mark Jenkins' articles for various outdoor magazines. Jenkins shows an often morbid tilt to his writing and covers his death-defying adventures in many different types of extreme sports. The best articles here include "Hitching" about the lost art of hitch-hiking, "Ego Trip" about how an adventurer can make stupid decisions even if the quest is successful, and "From the Mouths of Babes" concerning the pursuit of extreme outdoor sports with little kids. Also enjoyable are Jenkins' tales of his dozens of severe injuries and his exploits with his equally danger-prone father and brothers. This collection is a little thin but it's quite an enjoyable look into the heart of adventure and why people do it.

This was a very cool and exciting book to read. I have never read any of Jenkins's columns but I was intrigued by the premise of the book when listening to him on a radio interview. Jenkins sounds like the guy I want to be, but without the guts. He attacks life....he attacks nature, but he's turned his sojourns all over the world into a sort of an art form.

The book is a collection of adventures and I like the fact that he threw in other different stories in there including an encounter with a thief and parallel storytelling over a number of years.

I realized that it wasn't actually the adventures I enjoyed, but rather the memories and experiences he had while undertaking these adventures. Just like the cliche: "It's not about the destination, but about the journey."

The pace of the book is good and it does not get repetitive so please check this one out.

If you are expecting a rip roaring adventure tale when you pick up this book, perhaps something like Capstick's "Death in the Long Grass", you are in for a gentle surpise. This not the thrill-a-paragraph replete with death, near death and glory. Rather Jenkins seems to explore the parts of the adventure that the adventure seeker loves. Not the adreniline, but the friends, the travel, the beauty, the joy of the outdoors. By the second half of the book, you get to the adventure and daring, but even then with a lightness of touch that made me relish it even more. As a former skydiver who lost his younger brother to the sport,I almost stopped reading the book on the chapter where he and his brothers go jumping together as a lark, but in the end it was done so deftly that I had to smile. Writing that can overcome that kind of obstacle is rare and to be treasured.

I've known people like Mark Jenkins and his buddy Mike Moe my whole life - so many in fact that I sometimes wondered what was wrong with me that kept me from "adventuring". For me, the beauty of the book was the ability of the author to articulate the basis for his choices, adventures, out-look on life. The conflict between the two sets of paddlers was the defining element of this book for me - many people ostensibly are headed in the same direction, but they do so with different goals in mind. If you have a friend that shares those goals, so much the better. Jenkins does a good job of explaining his motivations and goals and I never got the sense that he would second-guess mine. Hence, this is one adventure tale that I could read and not feel bad admitting to myself that it was something I would never do.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, 1963-65. Jenkin's adventure along the Niger (before it reaches Nigeria) reminds me very much of those two years. I was never as adventurous as Mr. Jenkins and friends, but the highs and lows of his trip echo my modest African travel. Nigeria is now a dangerous place to visit, and Jenkins fleetingly encounters similar West African threats. He finds a formerly prosperous town in decay, also a Nigeria problem. He also meets wonderful, helpful Africans, as I did. The book interleaves three stories: the struggles of early Europeans to reach Timbuktu; post-high-school adventures of Jenkins and friend Mike in Europe and North Africa; their recent trek to the Niger's headwaters and kayak trip along some of it. I would never attempt the trip Jenkins took, but I'm glad he did and told me about it. The color photos are great; I'd like more. I enjoyed To Timbuktu so much I re-read it immediately, something I've not done before. I recommended it to all my Peace Corps cronies and bought copies for friends. It may appeal most to "guys," because it is about our occasional need for adventure, and to people who've visited West Africa.

To Timbuktu combines the three things necessary for a great travel book: adventure, history, and humor. The central theme of the book is Jenkins search for the source of the Niger River, but that is merely the rack from which Jenkins explores issues such as friendship, humanity, and cultural differences. That said this book is not dense or slow. In fact it is an extremely quick read. Jenkins writing is sometimes boastful and sometimes self-effacing, but always efficient and entertaining.

Some people here have criticized the "machoism" in this book. Maybe I fail to understand, but if they have problems with him carrying a gun or dancing with "100 naked women", I submit that their criticisms are quibblesome. Carrying a gun may or may not be necessary, but it is beyond a minor part in the book. As for the naked women, my question is: Is it true? If so, why not write it. At heart though, these criticisms miss the greater part of the book which is the interaction between people (Jenkins w/ his fellow travelers, the travelers w/ their guide, previous explorers w/ the indigenous population). It is here where To Timbuktu shines.

If their criticism goes deeper then I believe that they fail to understand what travel literature is all about. It is about the quest. The quest to do something you are not quite sure that you can accomplish. The quest to learn about those different than you. If this is "machoism" I hope it lives in us all. To criticize it is to deny the validity of all grasps for greater knowledge about ourself and others. Maybe these people would rather read about my travels from refrigerator to couch to restroom to bed, but I don't think that would make a very interesting travelogue and, while it may be revealing about me, I doubt that it would tell us much about the diverse peoples of the world.

Getting off my soapbox, I can sum up, in short, by saying that this book turned me into a connoisseur of travel literature and I am thankful for the experience.

Just how did I manage to finish "The Mark," the 8th book in this interminable series, you may ask? By major PAGE SKIPPING, that's how! This past weekend, not an idle one by any means, I "read" books 5 through 8 of this series. It's easy when you skip the long sermons, and the inane dialogue and wait until some kind of action happens.

That said, I do keep reading the books, though thanks to the American library system, I have not had to shell out a dime for the privilege. Though thin on substance, the first books did have enough meat to be occasionally satisfying. That hardly seems true of the last books, which seem to have hit some sort of time dilation mode where one book can spend hundreds of pages chronicling a few dull days.

What's wrong with these books? For one, outrageous premises. Knowing the level of rabidity of American gun enthusiasts, who could imagine US citizens (militias excluded) eagerly acceding to the removal of 90% of our weaponry? We're a paranoid bunch! We spend more money on arms than the next ten countries combined, and we are still afraid of being outmatched. Yet in Left Behind, we give it all away --- to the UN, of all groups! It's not that this is an impossible scenario, but Lahaye and Jenkins don't even bother to acknowledge the problem.

And wouldn't it be interesting if L&J were more up front with which of our planet's 6 billion souls would not make the cut into the 1 billion who are saved? Why not fess up that practically all Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims would land in hell? How about having Tsion put that in his pipe and smoke it? Did the Muslim children get raptured? Do Christians who were left behind still continue to their pathetic church attendance, not realizing that they are the "wrong" kind of Christians? And how about the wholesale, unimaginative ripoff of the Bible, as when Tsion has a dream that is taken straight out of Revelation 12? Couldn't the mark of the Beast have been something more original than the tired, old computer implanted scenario? And how about a little work convincing the reader that implanting the mark in hand or forehead wouldn't be a colossal tip-off, even to the biblically illiterate?

This entire series is bloated, lazy and offensive. I have been skimming along, hoping for imaginative treatment of the Apocalypse. Yet now that I am 8 books into the series, I'm afraid that even skipping the dreary parts is becoming an exercise in futility. It's really a feat to make the end of the world seem so tedious.

By the way, it's awful to see the supposedly Christian heroes of this series act in such an ungospel manner. Except for the imbecilic Hattie Durham, there is barely a whit of caring for the throngs of the damned. Steele realizes that Carpathia is about to vaporize a whole city, and all he worries about is that his own family makes it out. Steele nurses vengeance against the Antichrist without even an editorial tsk-tsk from the authors. I guess "turn the other cheek" went out the window after the Rapture.

Hint to L&J: read a little less of Revelation and a lot more of the Gospels!

'The Mark,' book #8 of the 'Left Behind series' the Beast Rules the World. His Excellency Global Community Leader Nicolae Carpathia is resurrected and indwelt by the devil himself. The Beast tigthens his grip on the world. The Tribulation Force (Rayford, Buck, Bruce and Chloe) now undercover outlaws spread the truth about the AntiChrist. Can they help save millions from being branded with "the mark" that will seal their eternal doom? It is written in Revelation 14: 6-13. It is this time, that Jesus predicted in Matthew 24:14, the gospel would be preached throughout the world for a witness to all nations; and then shall the end come [Matthew 24:15-35].

After reading "Conquest of Paradise" by Britt Gillette, I was instantly turned on to biblical end times literature, and I quickly began reading the Left Behind series. From book one, I was totally hooked, and I've read up through book eight in less than a couple of weeks.

In "The Mark", LaHaye and Jenkins continue their unique view of the prophesied end-times. Having been assassinated in book six, and indwelled by the devil in book seven, antichrist Nicolae Carpathia counterfeits the resurrection when he rises from the dead after three days. The world stands in awe and begins to worship Carpathia as a god, giving birth to a new religion known as "Carpathianism"! Followers of Nicolae must be branded with a loyalty mark on their right hand or forehead, and those who refuse it are put to death. "The Mark" is one of the more gripping and edge-of-your-seat thrillers in the series. It will cause you to empathize with the characters, questioning whether you would accept the mark given similar circumstances.

I can't wait to find out what happens next. I look forward to reading books eight through twelve, and I encourage other Left Behind fans to pick up "Conquest of Paradise: An End-Times Nano-Thriller" as additional reading. That book got me interested in this series, and what a great book! What "Left Behind" lacks in realism, "Conquest of Paradise" adds in abundance. The prose is much more advanced and the international politics are identical to the current world scene and the war on terror. Peppered with biblical verses, "Conquest of Paradise" will turn even the most hardened skeptics into believers, or at least it will make them think twice. It's one lovers of end-times fiction shouldn't miss.

Book nine, "Desecration" continues the adventures of the Tribulation Force, and deals with the antichrist's desecration of the Jewish Temple long ago foretold by Jesus and the Old and New Testament prophets. Can't wait to read the rest!