This book is without question the worst book I've ever read. The plot was stupid, the dialogue was totally laughable, and the characters' actions made no sense whatsoever. For a good technothriller, stick with someone who can write, like Clancy or Bond.

This was another good book featuring our hero Kirk McGarvey. This book brought about the introduction of the KGB killing machine Arkady Kurshin. Coupled with McGarvey's other nemesis Baranov this pair was extremely deadly. McGarvey stays in a dead run trying to prevent the Russians from launching first a Pershing missile and then a Tomahawk missile. This book gives you any type of action scenario that you could ask for. McGarvey and Kurshin battle each other in the sea and on dry land. Baranov is of couse trying to depose Gorbachev. This book is action packed with an excellent plot as well as outstanding characters. This is another great book from Hagberg.

Countdown is a great read and one that makes one wonder if guys like Kirk McGarvey and Arkady Kurshin can actually accomplish what they do. So much suspense and mystery. Steal a submarine? Impossible? No, not the way David Hagberg writes it. A great book for James Bond readers, and one that Bond himself should read. He might learn something.

Hagberg is Sean Flannery's cartoonish alter ego. Or, actually, Flannery is Hagberg's highbrow alter ego - as Hagberg is his real identity. And Hagberg shows his true identity almost to a fault in this thriller. Countdown and Crossfire were tight ropes of action that just kept coming. This one has the action coming at you too but its a bit more uneven. And the Japan-bashing, at a time when Chirstie Yamaguchi couldn't even land a photoshoot for a Wheaties box, was a bit irresponsible. None the less, its a breeze to read.

At issue, a Japanese computer magnate who's bent on destroying the U.S. for its use of nuclear weapons on his homeland. Yes, a unique plot - hardly ever used before. Much of the action and many of the plot twists are as cliched its main plot, but when McGarvey goes into blitz mode, it doesn't matter because plot and reality often get shredded with the goons - and that's ok, its why I read Hagberg, remember, Flannery is his highbrow self.

While I was not overly impressed with this outing, Hagberg more than redeems himself in Dessert Fire and Highflight, two of his absolute best, regardless of pen name.

Bottom line, I'd read it, but read the other four I've mentioned in this review, then catch up with this one.

Comments, email me

A good action packed novel. It was not quiet as exciting as Crossfire and Countdown. A Japanese billionaire loses his family (mother,father,wife,and child) in the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The billionaire,many years later starts making plans for revenge. His plans include Ernst Spranger and his lesbian sidekick(both are ex Stasi). This group of ex Stasi agents steal the components to assemble a nuclear bomb. Our hero Kirk McGarvey enters the picture and promptly disrupts the scene for the bad guys. McGarvey does battle with this group all over the globe. He also does battle with the goons who belong to the Japanese billionaire.The daughter and ex-wife of McGarvey are also kidnapped by the Stasi renegades. This just adds to the action of the book. The book finally reaches a screeching finale. You will be greatly entertained by this book.

I read this mainly because I had read Hagberg's earlier stuff, and couldn't help but note the similarities between him and Clancy. A pretty good handle on the action sequences, and he convinced me that he knew how to write a good old-fashioned action/adventure novel. Many people seem to be making comparisons between Hagberg and Clancy, but I think he reminds me more of early Ian Fleming. Our leading character is much more a spy ala James Bond than he is a Jack Ryan. That isn't to say his writing suffers, not at all, Hagberg has delivered a fantastic adventure story, much of which is totally unbelievable, but then when was James Bond believable? I get into 007 because he's FUN more than anything else, and that is why Kirk McGarvey is Da Man! A chip off the CIA's block and a pretty exciting one, too. Just when you think it's over and the story is fizzling to nothing, watch out! Hagberg is the real deal and even if he never gains the popularity of Tom Clancy or Ian Fleming, he IS a fun author to read. Give him a try, he just might surprise you.

The book is kind of chatty & includes lots of Kirk's philosophy of programming. Might be ok for a beginner who's never used any other communications software. Being familiar with other online programming software (IMS, ADS/O), I found the information on CICS to be so smothered in useless verbage that it was difficult to read.

This book is ideal for COBOL programmers facing the chance of working on their first CICS project. Many obscure points of CICS are explained in a readable fashion, making the book an excellent training aid.

If I want to hear how good Director is, I'd go to the Macromedia web site. This book does not go into the specific. It tells you WHAT you can do with Director not actaully HOW to do it. The money I spent on this book does not worth the education I received from it. Oh well, Director 7 is coming out by the time you read this, lt's hope these guys would do a better job at actaully writing a reference book instead of a brouchure.

This book was the required text for my multimedia authoring class because no other Director 6 books were available at the time. It was so poorly laid out that after a few weeks my instructor gave up on teaching with the book. Now that I use Director at work, I've realized that it doesn't even cut it as a reference.

Inside Director tries to teach general multimedia rather than the fundamentals of Director. The book attempts to teach you how to create sound and digital movies in other programs(Which has nothing to do with learning Director), yet it severely lacks in explaining how to handle sound and movies in Director. The book also teaches you more about how to write HTML(Which also has nothing to do with learning Director), then how to create streaming shockwave movies with net Lingo.

Save your money and buy a different book.

Personally I would suggest every begginer or intermediate Director user to read this book. I think it explains what outher books didn`t!!

I would like to see if there is a character analysis on the character of Jim Burden. I have read My Antonia and would like to know everything about him if it is possible.

I thought the book had a lot of charm. It showed how much strength mankind had to form this great land. The trusting and helpful ways to each other in order to survive. The strength and struggles for freedom: to have a piece of the American dream. The comforts we take so much for granted are driven home, how very spoiled and soft we have become. It also helped me to appreciate our farmers of today they must still face the same challenges while we just go to the store in our cars and get what we want.

I thought My Antonia was an easy read. It was short, and although it could get a little boring at times and the ending wasn't as great as it could have been, it was entertaining. It's point was to give an account of nineteenth-century farm life while still being entertaining. It achieves both. It seems like man of the people critiquing this novel didn't actually read it.

Irving's American distributors have yanked his past books off the shelf under threat of boycott. The Anti-Defamation league finds Irving's books to be distasteful. The notion that publishers have nullified their contracts with Irving because of written inaccuracies is simply not true. Although I cannot claim to support all of Irving's findings, I do not like the notion of special interest groups determining what is "appropriate" reading and what is not.

'A Faulty History Dissected' takes aim at Irving and any other historian who has the audacity to deviate from the status quo. Jackel is undoubtedly in league with those members of the political/historical-writing community who wish to violate the right to free speech -oddly enough, something they claim to champion in other arenas.

Does David Irving deserve censure for his grotesque belief that Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust? Of course. Is Eberhard Jaeckel the historian to dismantle Irving? No. Jaeckel himself has a long history of gaffes regarding Hitler. In 1983, he published in in Germany, 'Hitler's Saemtliche Aufzeichnungen" which purported to publish many "new" Hitler poems and drawings. The problem was that most of the work consisted of worthless forgeries. Jaeckel should have known this, any reputable historian would have known instantly.

The problem with Irving is that he is a diligent researcher, he just is corrupted with blatant racism which renders his conclusions on the Reich one-sided and specious. Any historian starting out with Irving's premises is standing on faulty ground. But Jaeckel is out of his league here and it clearly shows. His footnotes frequently lead to discredited sources and his conclusions are haphazard and disjointed.

Irving deserves critical, harsh examination, but it needs to be done by an historian of greater skill and repute than Jaeckel.

Sigh. I see the Holocaust deniers and quibblers are out in force here. Irving is "courageous" and a victim of "censorship" because he is harshly criticized and dismissed by all reputable historians. Sure.

Contrary to what you may have read in the preceding reviews here, Jackel is a very reputable historian, the author of two invaluable and highly regarded works ("Hitler's Weltanschauung" and "Hitler in History") that are required reading for anyone who studies Nazi Germany. There is nothing outlandish or shabby in his current book criticizing Irving--it is in fact rock solid, like all his other work. This compact, admirable volume makes a good companion to Richard J. Evans's effective debunking of Irving.

Instead of one big novel involving characters from all six current Star Trek book series, this is a collection of six short stories, each one picking up from the cliffhanger ending of each of the Gateways novels from the individual series (if that makes sense). While this sounded like a cynical marketing ploy, I had hoped that the six stories would build on each other to present some sort of unified whole, bringing the whole adventure to one grand conclusion. How wrong I was!

The Star Trek (original series), Challenger, and Voyager stories could--and probably should--have easily been included as concluding chapters in their respective books. Each one is nothing more than an epilogue to the main story. The Deep Space Nine and New Frontier stories present somewhat separate adventures, but that doesn't make them much better. In both, characters get transported to significant locations (an important historical moment for Colonel Kira, a mythical afterlife for Calhoun and Shelby) where nothing of any real consequence seems to happen. Of course, since both series present ongoing adventures, it's possible that these tales plant seeds for upcoming stories. Even if that were the case, it doesn't make these stories any less inconsequential or any more satisfying.

The Next Generation tale, longer than the other five, does, indeed, wrap up the Gateways story. But, like the other five, there's no real reason (besides financial) that this story couldn't have been included at the end of Doors Into Chaos.

Because four of the stories are completely dependent upon what came before, there is a complete lack of tension or suspense. All the big events happened in the parent novels, and all the authors have left to do in What Lay Beyond is tie up the loose ends (even when there aren't really any loose ends that need tying up). Any opportunites for suspense that could have been sustained through the other two stories are completely ignored by their authors. Frustratingly, those two authors, Peter David and Keith RA DeCandidio, have done particularly good Star Trek work in the past, which makes their lackluster contributions here even more disappointing.

So, if you followed the Gateways saga so far and need to see what happens next, I recommend waiting for the paperback. Nothing of enough consequence happens to make this an immediate must-read.

The series Book 1-6 was promising, if annoying for having a cliffhanger ending that forced you to buy the next book, or specificially the Book 7 which contains all the endings.

Well after being built-up by books 1-6, wondering if the inconsistencies between those books would be tied together in ST Gateways Book 7, wondering if Book 7 "the grand conclusion of what lay beyond" would put forth a good explanation for the Iconian mystery, tie all the loose ends together and provide good conclusions for the cliffhanger endings of books 1-6...............it was most most most disappointing to see that this was not the case.

Book 7 creates more inconsistencies and the endings are [bad]. Oh some of the endings were ok, but the final ending...for the TNG book in the series...which was SUPPOSED to tie everything together, totally messed it up and failed, completely failed to deliver! I mean...first in books 1-6 they established that once activated a gateway cannot be destroyed no matter what they threw at it because it will simply absorb the energy. THEN in Book 7...suddenly Gateways CAN be destroyed by explosive force...no explanation given!!! Just a lazy author who didn't even read the previous book he wrote and ignored all stuff he established in the previous book! Once again, this is a MAJOR LETDOWN!

Star Trek-Gateways: What Lay Beyond written by Diane Carey et.al.is the culmination of a seven part series including all of the different genre of the Star Trek Universe.

Now, I'll be up front about this series... I'm not a fan of shelling out money for poor marketing and the way this series was presented to the reader was a downright travisty. I really do NOT understand the reasons why they (Paramount/Simon and Schuster) did this, save but one, to dig into the readers wallet.

Enough said, now, here is the contents:

Star Trek: One Giant Leap by Susan Wright
Star Trek Challenger: Exodus by Diane Carey
Star Trek DS-9: Horn and Ivory by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Star Trek Voyager: In the Queue by Christie Golden
Star Trek New Frontier Death After Life by Peter David
Star Trek TNG The Other Side by Robert Greenberger

Found in this volume are the conclusions to the above stories, but the hook is you have to buy the first six volume in order to make sense of these conclusions. This is why people believe they've been ripped off... and I can't blame them. I this was my idea, I'd expect a pink slip with my last pay check.

The only saving grace in this book is The Pocket Books STAR TREK Novels Timeline written by the Timeline Gang; Robert Bowling, Johan Ciamaglia, Ryan J. Cornelius, James R McCain, Alex Rosenzweig, Paul T.Semones, and Corey W. Tacker... with David Henderson and Lee Jamilkowski.

After you read the first six books you'll see what I mean, you really lose the flow of the story. But, now that all seven are available in paperback the contenuity should be easier to follow.