Finally, here is a workbook on a complex subject with usable introductory software on a CD ROM. The workbook takes one through the necessary steps to set up a water body problem. After doing this, I felt confident enough to try a real water body application. For the latter it would have been useful to have a listing of some common data base sources. With the application set up I kept trying more and more complex problem including the complete water quality modeling.

There are some limitations as with any workbook. It would have been useful if the different water quality model input parameter tables were discussed at the beginning of their application chapters. Also, it would have been useful if there was a more extensive GUI, however, having all the input data in a simple tabular format is still useful.

The feature of putting the set-up and applications up front with the theory chapters at the end, rather than mixing them together is very helpful.

I will be recommending that this workbook be used in a senior level environmental sciences course for which I am trying to get more of a quantitative underpinning.

This book gives a nice, organized view of Columbus' achievements. I especially liked how the book made the point that Columbus did not land in what is now the United States, but rather on the island of San Salvador. There are lots of illustrations, and the vocabulary is simple enough that younger students would be able to comprehend the information.

Too often the words written about the career of John Coltrane lapse into idolatry or overanalysis. Biographies by J.C. Thomas and Cuthbert Simpkins lack a sense of critical judgment, while Bill Cole's work is fine for the musician but difficult for the lay listener. Frank Kofsky's "Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music," meanwhile, attempted to put Coltrane's music in a political framework he never intended.

Eric Nisenson's "Ascension," refreshingly, focuses on Coltrane's music, attempting to understand not only where it came from but also the extent of its influence on jazz since the saxophonist's death in 1967. Nisenson is clearly a fan of the music, but to his credit, his admiration does not cloud his critical judgment.

One important accomplishment of Nisenson's book is to establish a context for Coltrane's creativity and his late-life forays into free jazz. He revisits Coltrane's early life in North Carolina, where he grew up in relatively comfortable surroundings, exposed to the music of the church and of his father, a tailor and amateur musician. Nisenson also emphasizes Coltrane's early apprenticeships with Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, Cleanhead Vinson and his time in Philadelphia, a hothouse of jazz playing that produced many an important contemporary, including Lee Morgan, Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath.

In addition, Nisenson thoroughly explores Coltrane's important time with Miles Davis, during which he mastered not only his chordal approach but also the modal approach to music and improvisation that Miles took on with "Kind of Blue." And he thoroughly documents Trane's later interest in the Eastern, African and other world music, which strongly influenced many of his albums as a leader.

In fact, Nisenson's attention to the searching quality of Coltrane's mind and his music generates the key theme of the book: that the saxophonist's greatness was derived not only from his musical mastery but from his unceasing search for new modes of expression. It was this search, Nisenson argues, that ultimately led Coltrane to embrace the avant-garde experiments undertaken by younger musicians such as Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders in the last few years of his life.

Nisenson does not downplay the courage required of Coltrane to push the limits of his music long after his fame had been established, and he could have played it safe, but neither does he shy away from being critical of some of the musician's later cacophonous efforts.

The sole criticism I have of the book is that it seems to reach the conclusion that since Coltrane, Miles and Ornette Coleman, there has been little in the way of true creativity on the jazz scene. A response would require another review, but suffice it to say that I disagree; that the current jazz scene may be more fragmented, and undoubtedly many musicians are playing it safe, but also that there are many young and older jazz musicians making very creative music on small labels.

That aside, this is a very worthwhile read for long-time listeners of Coltrane or for those coming to his music for the first time.

An excellent introduction for newcomers to Coltrane. Highly readable and sustains the reader's interest. No, it isn't perfect - I was amazed the author could discuss Weather Report and make no mention whatsoever of Jaco Pastorius, for one example. But if you want to know something of Coltrane, his music and his times I highly recommend this book.

I'm what I guess, a Trane enthusiast who gobbles up anything to read with the name Coltrane in it, always less critical with what I've read, perhaps only allowing for disappointment. I have always found Nisenson's books enjoyable to read, as you will find this one. His information, passion and experience connecting stories only furthered my understanding of John Coltrane's ability to affect so many, in so many ways explanable and unexplanable! Buy It! You won't be disappointed!

In this novel, as in reality, oil is becoming scarce, so this gives incentive to an international race to put a solar energy satellite into geostationary orbit to beam energy down to earth. This may actually happen someday, but mabe not, if it does it is decades off, at least.

I found the character development to be sketchy at best, with the plot amateurish at times. The ending was abrupt, with the whole novel being a bit too brief. It was not a page turner for me, however I have read worse science fiction than this. According to the cover on this book one of the authors, Eric Kotani, is a pseudonym for a world-class astrophysicist, so there is some actual science included here so not all is lost, it is informative to some extent, but for me it just did'nt have the 'fire' other science fiction I have read did.

I was first drawn to "Legacy" because of the premise of the solar power farming using satellites, a concept that inspired me 20 years ago to give up a dead end life style and go back to school. It was a senior project done by the Aerospace school at the University of Michigan named "Project Rodan", I believe.

The character development is wonderful with believable business and government senarios. The wheeling and dealing at the highest level reminds me of the Heinlein novels where money was secondary and vision and persistance win out over deceit and treachary.

My only complaint is that there seem to be a few chapters missing. These team of characters are too good to leave hanging out there... especially when a "first contact" may be eminent.

I thought this book was brilliant, John Maddox Roberts is a class writer anyway ( having read ALL of his SPQR series), and although I liked the SPQR series ( save the last book "Ships of Kleopatra") more, this is still a brilliant read !

This is a good start for parents and students looking to generate that initial list of candidate colleges. The Princeton Review balances the normal statistics with author and student narrative logically grouped by category. This provides a good feel, however subjective, for what you should find on the critical personal campus visit. Especially helpful are student ratings of professor interest and accessibility as well as summaries on the quality of life. Students rate their school as "what's hot" and "what's not" on such criteria as dorms, politics, Greeks, alcohol, food, registration, etc.

This book helped us get past the "view book hype", and prepare specific, sometimes pointed qustions to asked administrators and staff during campus visits with our son. It pays to be an informed and aggressive consumer. The guide gives equal attention to the "usual suspects" -- Harvard, Rice, Stanford, Duke -- as well as emerging or "quiet quality" schools like Truman State, Valparaiso, Santa Clara and James Madison. On the down side, some student annecdotes are stale (repeated from last year's edition) and predictable (love the faculty, loathe the adminstration). It would also be helpful to have found information on schools with programs for the learning disabled. Overall, Princeton gets a narrow nod over Fiske because of its format and organization. It's fun to read, informative, and arms you with insight to take to campus.

Searching for the right college is an overwhelming task. The Princeton Review guide is the best of several books we purchased because it is well organized and because it includes (sometimes uncomfortably) frank comments from students--not the admissions office spin on the school. Each of the featured colleges has a two-page spread in the book. Basic statistics are listed in sidebars on either side of the spread, so if your high school student accumulated only 1,100 on the SATs you can eliminate certain schools right away. If you prefer small schools, the stats show you school populations (with a demographic breakdown) so you can stay away from the large institutions where professors barely see the undergrads. Across the top of the page you find the address, telephone and fax nubmers and Web address. Tuition costs are easy to find in the sidebars. Some schools you're interested in won't be in this book, but most will, although there appears to be a clear East Coast bias. The editors are very honest about the process they go through to determine which of the 3,500 colleges and universities make the cut. Some are eliminated simply because they would not allow Princeton Review editors to interview students. What are they hiding? If you buy only one book to help you find the right college, this should be the one.

Last year I wrote an extensive review of the various college guides. Our daughter was then in eleventh grade and just beginning her serious consideration of colleges. Now she has heard from all her schools (accepted at 8, waiting list at 1, rejected at 1) and an update seems appropriate.

The Princeton Review guide is probably the best condensed book for a quick overview. They have improved their format slightly from 1999, though most of the text of their descriptions is the same. However they do give a flavor for the political orientation, difficulty getting in index, academic prestige, student to faculty ratio, and quality of campus life.

The Fiske guide is also useful, though my own view is that he tries to say only nice things about each school.

The ISI Guide to Choosing the Right College has definite strengths and weaknesses. The strength or weakness depends on your philosophical orientation. It takes a center right political view and a traditional academic view. It therefore praises schools with a core curriculum and a minimum of political correctness and criticizes institutions which have few or no required courses and a left leaning tendency. However, they make their views fully explicit, so the reader can adjust according to their preferences. The greatest strength is that it names actual professors and lists their courses. Thus these can be avoided or sought after as the student sees fit. Most other guides stick to generalities and avoid specifics.

Again I strongly endorse Marty Nemko's You're Gonna Love This College Guide. See my full review for details. The strength of this book is that it gets the student to think in terms of big versus small, urban versus rural, highly competitive versus high quality without cut-throat competition, etc. It really helped our daughter know what to think about on her tour of colleges.

A few more tips. We found it extremely helpful to look at colleges during spring break of eleventh grade, and again in the fall of twelfth. The essays are VERY important. We are sure that our daughter got in to two excellent schools on the strength of her essays -- and indeed an admission officer from one of those schools specifically told her that after she was accepted. And do whatever you can to get an interview. We have no scientific proof, but it is simply human nature to feel more enthusiastic about a real person whom you have met than a mere bunch of papers. The schools our daughter got in to were all ones where she interviewed. The waiting list school was one where she did not interview. Draw your own conclusions.

Good luck. We'll revisit all of this when our next child starts the process in a couple of years.

This book lacks it all....depth, character development, writing style, creativity, and did not hold my interest past page one. The author(s) have a done a poor job (again). A definite non-read!

A dreary, depressing tale with no redeeming aspects. The characters are poorly drawn with the most unrealistic child figure since Macbeth's son (Shakespeare). A sad, sad story poorly written. The other two are so much better.

This book has it all....depth, character development, writing style, creativity. It is another great offering from its creative and incredible authors.

The character of John is intriguing and the research behind this super series is flawless.

I love this series and can hardly wait for the next one!

Don't miss this!

This pleasant little primer on alchemy was first published in 1957, by a respected British historian of chemistry. His view on alchemy is summarized by his quotation of Socrates on the Pre-Socratics (even then known only through fragments): he agreed with what he could understand and, as for what he couldn't, he could only guess that perhaps they were right. So our author is not overly judgemental about the early alchemists, mistaken as they must be the philosopher's stone and ignorant of the fundamentals of modern scientific chemistry. The book is very uneven: only 8 pages on Greek alchemy (including barely 2 pages on Zosimos) but 65 pages on Islamic alchemy--a fact that reflects his decided slant toward the more modern, scientific alchemists. The most interesting and useful sections concern his biographies, especially a whole chapter on Paracelsus and a chapter each on Scottish and French alchemists. Especially interesting is his story about Alexander Seton (p.223-232) who, like a true Merlin or Taoist wizard, quietly toured Europe having unbelievers transform gold from lead with his secret powder, never touching the preparations himself. Still, our author concludes that the innumerable accounts by reliable eyewitnesses were all, somehow, fakes--a conclusion he reaches after "rejecting as we must the hypothesis that Seton effected genuine transmutations" [p. 232]. That should give you a taste of this opus. You will need to look elsewhere for psychological (Jung) or hermetic (Goddard, Evola) perspectives on alchemy. Nevertheless, this is a decent historical overview of the field and not a bad place to start.

This book is on alchemical history and contains biografical material of the most renowned alchemists. The book contains several images. There are also some chemical procedures described. This is a book by a very cunning historian, but he doesn't know anything about the psychological implications of alchemy.

Mats Winther

The book covers various aspects of the middle game: tactics and combinations, the pieces, pawns, strategy and planning. I didn't find it helpful.

First of all, this book isn't easy to use. Littlewood rarely gives complete games, so it requires a lot of setting up of positions to follow his examples.

Secondly, Littlewood's examples don't seem to really target the points he's trying to make. At one point, in a 4-5 page section on the Queen, he asks us not to over-estimate her power. Fair enough, but he has to give us 3-4 examples of Queenless positions to prove this. He even provides a full game in which the Queens go off the board early, but do we really need this to understand his point? Why didn't he use the game to illustrate something else? This is just one example; I could go on. Throughout the book, Littlewood's examples seem interchangeable because he never really focuses on what's salient about each. Its like he just says, "make moves like this, and you'll win."

It is possible that a stronger player (I'm only about 1300 USCF) would like this book, but I've heard it recommended for novices, and Littlewood even provides "hints for beginners" at the end of each chapter....

This is a great book, and, no offense, but the other reviewer is clueless. This has been reprinted and is an enormously helpful work for the intermediate level player. Check it out in a bookstore.

Must read for any game developer. Exposes the secret history of one of the best things Microsoft has done in the last ten years (DirectX) - a technology that has truly made life better for everyone, itself, game developers and especially customers. DirectX is the very definition of "Not Re-Inventing the wheel"

Yes the book is a little disjointed in places, but if you are familiar with the industry you'll find a lot that rings true in here. If you've read "Microsoft Secrets" which details the order then read this book which details the chaos.

My only real criticism is that the book is told solely from the perspective of the renegades and doesn't go into as much depth as I'd like on the part of the poor managers who had to "herd these cats".

If for no other reason, buy this book for the some of the funny anecdotes. I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading this.

Bottom Line: Not a classic but still a darn good read.

This book is a fascinating read, especially for anyone in the fast-growing and ultra-competitive computer game industry. If you've ever used DirectX, you owe it to yourself to buy this book.

It's all here: the creation of the wildly successful DirectX software platform; the humiliating WinG fiasco; Alex St. John's outrageous publicity stunts to promote DirectX (including the crisis with the cancelled alien spacecraft, or when he convinced several game industry executives to streak through Seattle GameWorks); the obnoxious coders who began the OpenGL wars; and St. John's raucous but ultimately career-limiting final letter to Gates & Co.

Although the book reads at times like an Alex St. John biography, the book's mix of wild stunts, software eccentrics, and high technology is enough to keep any reader thoroughly entertained.

Perhaps the most astonishing and terrifying revelation of all is how long it took Microsoft to take the multi-billion-dollar computer game industry seriously, even after the conception of DirectX . . . a mistake the company surely won't make again.

Michael Drummond takes us on an unbiased look inside Microsoft, not from the perspective of its battles with competitors, but its own internal political structure. Unlike the many books on the "browser" wars, or the anti-trust battles, this one shows the development of two products - DirectX and Chrome. DirectX changed how games were made, giving Windows a leg up as a game platform. Chrome was the cutting edge technology that Microsoft hoped would jazz up the Internet and compell people to view it exclusively on Wintel machines. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in computers and technology. It was a refreshing change of pace from the other books trying to analyse the Microsoft mystique.

Forgot to add, author/contributor Eric Schiller is nothing more than a mouthpiece for Dogmatic ideas. He wouldn't know an original chess idea if it came up and bit him on his you know what. His mentality is the sort that attacked Aron Nimzowitsch's ideas before Nimzo proved his critics wrong. Take anything that Schiller or his associates say with a grain of salt.

An entertaining book, yet lacking any real refutations to irregular openings for the average to club player. Irregular openings are played for a reason, for shock value. Of course highly ranked players usually defeat such openings, not because the opening itself is inferior (in most cases) but because the player facing these openings is quite simply the better player. I have seen highly ranked players use irregular openings with success against players supposedly booked up on how to combat them. If IM Michael Basman and Deep Blue can win with 'garbage' like the Grob against other Masters, then obviously it's not as bad as it's reputation. This book is merely a starting point for ideas on how to combat such openings. If a particular opening is causing you difficulties, get your best software program out and research the problem yourself. If anything, this book shows players who use irregular openings the possible defences/attacks they can expect, which will just confuse the issue even further. I give this book a 3 star rating, which i consider neutral, because it actually helps *both* the player facing these openings and the player who uses them.

This is a good book. It's fun, interesting, and sometimes enthralling. The book can be hard to put down.

This does not enable you to beat offbeat openings. That requires years of experience. There is no magic pill. A better player will usually beat you from an inferior position. A master will beat you even if he gives you odds (a free move or a missing piece). This book helps you to compete with players at your own level who are tyring to get an easy victory by surprising you.

Most openings have only about half-a-column of information. Some have several pages, with one or two complete games for illustration. This is not the place to learn a repertoire. It's a place to gain some confidence that you can equalize early.

It's also a place to get some ideas. Why not throw an offbeat opening at your friends now and then? "All openings are playable by non-masters," sayeth a wise man. Have some fun. Create some very strange-looking positions.

As long as you aren't hoping to win in the opening, but only to get through it, this is a very good book.

And it is the ONLY book by Schiller about which the opposite could not be said. Most of his books are riddled with errors, outlined with deceptively useless disorganization, ladden with overwhelming quantities of data, and marred with occasionally suspicious analysis. This book is the opposite in every way. Some people give the credit to Watson's contribution to the annotations, but I think Schiller simply spent more time on this one. His other books show hints of utility but fail in the details.

The point is this: Don't let Schiller's other books deter you from buying this one. It really is a decent book. 3 1/2 stars.