Interviews are a very rare genre in literary criticism. However, Salusinszky created an astounding gathering of the top critics in the U.S. The book is not based necessarily on individual interviews, because the points of view of one critic about the others are included. This, of course, allows a clear, direct source on the opinions that Said has on Bloom or Lentricchia on Hartman. A must have for anybody looking for a comprehensive and personal approach to contemporary critics.

Could it be that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote TREASURE ISLAND based on a true story, and the characters really existed? Is it true that an aging pirate, Long John Silver, manipulated John Paul Jones and other patriots of the American Revolution into recovering treasure from a small island in the Caribbean? These are but a few of the questions I was asking myself after I finished reading Commander Roger Johnson's well crafted adventure novel, DEAD MAN'S CHEST. As a writer, I know how tough it is to spin a yarn of factual fiction, and do it in a way that makes every page believable. Mr. Johnston has done it in spades - and everything rings true - from the sailing lore to the historical backdrop. It is a saga bigger than life and destined to be made into a major motion picture. Move over C. S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian and Dan Parkinson - there is a new author on the scene writing in the same tradition. We can only hope Commander Johnson will continue to tell us more about the characters he has so skillfully brought back to life in this truly entertaining novel. If you enjoy factual fiction with a nautical theme, you will not be able to put this one down.

I just finished reading DEAD MAN'S CHEST, and I can honestly say it is one of the best two or three books I have ever read. It is the remarkable story of how one man, Long John Silver, was able to manipulate both pirates and patriots in order to aquire the Treasure of Dead Man's Chest; the other two-thirds of the treasure John Flint burried on Treasure Island. The action takes place between November 1773 and June 1775, the same twenty months in which the naval hero John Paul Jones disappeared from the history books. He was a foreigner and had a warrant on his head, yet he did something so remarkable for the American Colonies that he was awarded one of the first naval commissions in the Continental Navy. DEAD MAN'S CHEST reveals for the first time exactly what he did, woven together with other historical events and with just enough fiction to give this amazing novel a hook to keep my undivided interest. I give DEAD MAN'S CHEST five stars!

I just finished reading Dead Man's Chest by Commander Roger Johnson and was thrilled with each page. I'm not much of a fiction reader, but once I read the two page preface, I was hooked. Commander Johnson has put together a marvelous story of adventure, mixed with love, intrigue, and how Long John Silver manipulated hundreds of pirates and Colonial patriots into doing his bidding to find and take back the treasure of Dead Man's Chest. I was especially taken with the 1777 transcript of the Royal Navy Admiralty Court of Inquiry that formed the foundation of this amazing epic adventure. I recommend Dead Man's Chest to everyone who likes a great yarn, and truly hope this important literary work makes it to the big screen.

The high-tech stock collapse has led to a lot of agonized soul searching from burned investors in the past year. How in the world did all those dot-com pet stores get funded? How did Cisco ever get a $500 billion dollar market cap, and how did so many other companies get valued at tens of billions of dollars with no profits and little sales?

Well, one problem was that too many people read this book.

Don't get me wrong--Geoffrey Moore is definitely a heavyweight business thinker. His earlier books were tremendously helpful in explaining the strange, non-intuitive ways in which high-tech markets work. But here, he and his coauthors attempt to build on his earlier work to offer a "gorilla investment strategy", which has now become a victim of its own popularity. *Any* mechanical investment scheme will eventually fail if it becomes too widely used, and it is easy to find the roots of the investment idiocies of the late nineties in this book. Just look for emerging high-tech market leaders, he says over and over, with little attention paid to just how much this eventual market dominance might be worth. Worse, he asserts that you can't know which company will emerge as the dominant player in a given sector, so invest in them all. Venture capitalists, once they realized how many investors were following this strategy, responded by cranking out unlimited numbers of startups doing exactly the same thing; as long as they were competing in a market that might eventually select a "gorilla", then they could be confident of "flipping" a successful IPO to naive investors. Anyone who used this book as a basis for investing over the past couple of years would have, in effect, been getting suckered into a Ponzi scheme.

Moore creates a vivid symbolic menagerie to explain the dynamics of high-tech marketing, but any high-tech investor needs to know that in addition to the authors' gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys there are a lot of dogs. Also sharks.

High-tech professionals and amateur investors dream of catching the next hot stock before it takes off. Geoffrey Moore's latest book The Gorilla Game outlines a strategy for identifying and investing in high-tech companies. Geoffrey Moore's previous works Crossing The Chasm and Inside The Tornado serve as the foundation for the investment strategy presented. Individuals familiar with the author will find The Gorilla Game valuable as it applies Moore's ideas on product marketing to well known companies within the high-tech sector. One of the most interesting sections of the book is the three case studies which serve as examples of past Gorilla games and involve companies that most readers will be familiar with. The Gorilla Game is highly recommended for any reader with an interest in high tech industries regardless of their investment background.

A popular pastime for the past 50 years (and possibly before that) has been to look at the stocks that would have made you the most money in the last 10 or 20 years and devise an investment approach to find the next ones going forward that will do as well or better. I have lost count of how many books I have read that have taken this approach.

I found the Gorilla Game to be refreshingly above the pack in this area. The authors do an excellent job of describing some of the ways that technologies get adopted, when the stocks do well (and when they don't), and when to buy and sell stocks in technology companies. They also devise a fairly detailed, somewhat risk-controlled investment process, and detail how it would have done in a number of case histories. From the backward-looking perspective, the book is solid.

The weakness of such backward looking methods shows up in their new material in the revised edition (1999) on the Internet. Although some aspects of their model apply to the Internet, many do not. They are left needing to vaguely explain how so much money was made so quickly in Internet stocks. Their explanation is actually pretty solid, but they never quite come out and say that their methodology will not get you all of the fast-growing stocks in technology.

They needed not be defensive. No methodology is perfect. The main weakness of this one is that is designed around semiconductors, software, and computers. The technology patterns can look a lot different in future technologies. For example, what will happen with companies like Gemstar that lead in new television technologies that could disrupt the Internet for direct marketing? The reason this point is important is that the barriers to switching are higher in the technologies studied here than in many other areas. If you get into a low cost of switching area (like business to consumer marketing on the Internet), you could invest in an industry leader and still lose your shirt. Although the book acknowledges these issues, it probably doesn't create a substantial enough warning.

The book is aimed at the medium knowledge investor (about the markets and technology). I hope they bring out a more advanced version. They decided not to go into specialized semiconductors like analog devices where enormous profits may lie in the future, because of concerns about not going over the heads of readers. A lot of the best run technology companies with enormous growth potential in markets with high bariers to competitors were not discussed in this book. I am sure most readers would be willing to spend some time learning about these other markets in order to make enormous gains.

Despite my quibbles, this is a fine book that will help all but those who are already quite knowledgeable about technology companies and technology investing. Good luck in capturing those irresistible gains in the future! Perhaps you will be the first person you know to identify the next irresistible growth enterprise!

This charming name book will assist parents in choosing the appropriate Celtic name for their baby as it provides an extensive list of evocative Irish names. But why an Irish name? For some reason, this musical language and the magical legends of Ireland have become very popular in the Anglo-Saxon world and further afield. The introduction discusses trends in the giving of names and mentions the most popular current Irish names. The chapter Little Dark One provides a cursory history of the settling of Ireland by the Celts and then lists and explains suitable names for dark haired people, such as Darcy, Douglas and Duane. In the chapter The Fairest Of Them All there's mention of the Tuatha De Danaan and a discussion of names like Barry, Finbar, Kelly, etc. Red haired people are treated in the next chapters, where some of the more common names are Rory and Rowan, whilst the next chapter deals with names deriving from the root words for light or brightness; these include Aidan and Keegan. A Celtic Menagerie provides names that are connected with animal names or qualities: here you will find Colm, Conan, Conor, Oscar and Ronan. In the chapter titled The Green Isle, names derived from plants are given, including Darren and Tyrone. Warrior names in the next chapter include Casey, Fergal and Kane. Wednesday's Child provides names for less worthy traits, like Doran, Etain and Kennedy. Banshee names include Bevin, Cliona and Una, while names invented by authors include Fiona, Gulliver, Imogen and Vanessa. The next chapter discusses and lists the retranslation back into Irish, of popular Anglophonic names and also provides a list of Irish names with their English translations. The A - Z index lists all the names and their meanings/histories alphabetically and is followed by a calendar of saints' feast days. This interesting read and valuable reference work concludes with a thorough index.

Or just want to be, this is an excellent way for you to find names that will fit those new arrivals. Find names and their meanings for pets or even book characters if you're an author. Complete with pronunciation guides and is easy to carry. Very useful!

We found this book very helpful, as it does not only provide a good number of names but also gives information about pronunciation and background. Well - actually, to be quite honest - we used it to find an appropiate name for our puppy, an Irish Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier.