I thought that Sylvester was a very good book. It was one of those that you never will know the full story until you read it. I only recommend this book to teenagers and up because of some violence.

This is a great sequel to Yesterday's Son. Again Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel into the past to find Spock's son Zar, but this time he is the leader of a tribe in the midst of a struggle to bring civilization to his ancient world. Of course, the Enterprise Three get involved in the fighting, but more than that, they witness the determination and greatness of character it takes to build a civilization. This makes the book not only a good adventure story, but a chance to gain insight into the kind of men it took to build the ancient civilizations on our own world, and maybe the kind of people needed to continue building civilizations for the future.

Wright's book lays bare the intimate connections between mainstream anglo-american analytical philosophy and the dark rites of the Inca. A fascinating new (analytic) perspective on Wicca, GM foods, and domestic violence; Wright has triumphantly pulled off another one ! If you enjoyed 'Language, Truth and Logic' and 'The Amityville Horror' this book is for you !

Time for Yesterday takes the memorable story that Crispin created in 1984. The story revolves around the trials and tribulations of Spock's son, who was concieved as a result of passing through the Guardian of Forever.

The Guardian of Forever, and the whole concept of Spock having a son in an alternative timeline, is a refreshing concept.

If you liked Yesterday's Son, then you will also like this novel.

This is an excellent "Star Trek" book, a sequel to Star Trek #11, "Yesterday's Son", which was itself a sequel to the original series episode, "All Our Yesterdays". "Yesterday's Son" was good, if not spectacular. This book is much better; one assumes that the author has matured a bit as a writer in the interim. It utilizes a plot device that is unduly common: Kirk & the Enterprise must save the entire universe. But unlike most books that use such a device, this one actually manages to make it more or less plausible, and handles the concept well. Further, the characters are well-written, and the language is handled with a smooth competence unusual in mass-market paperbacks. The plot moves well, and the book accomplishes all that it sets out to.

Excellent read for the Star Trek fan, and probably worthwhile for the casual reader, as well.

The sequel to Yesterday's Son by the same author, and even better than its prequel. Spock and Zar are reunited when the Guardian of Forever stops working properly and causes time waves that make time move fast enough to kill stars - and so also the planets around them. Spock, McCoy and Kirk go back to the past to find Zar so he can return with them and mind meld with the Guardian to tell it to return its consciousness to the 23rd century and resume its duties. Spock goes back shortly before Zar's death, hoping to bring him back for good, but Zar is determined to go back to his own people and his new wife to fight the battle that killed him. It's a wonderful story that goes from fun to heart wrenching to just plain loveable. We get to see a dimension of Spock that was never explored on the show, and for once in a Star Trek book the emphasis isn't on Kirk's postulating. I loved this book, I urge everyone to buy it!

For the most part I love novelizations, and "V" by A.C. Crispin, is one of the best that I have read. The writer does a great job keeping the reader the book form of a great mini-series. A MUST for any fan of the "V" series.

love the plot.. very interesting story.. the writing isn't so great but the plot is enough to keep me reading

The "V" pilot book has the same contents as the famous TV series. It follows the TV series pretty exactly, with just minor changes.

As a fan of the cult series, I can advise the lecture of this book to all other fans heartily. If you haven't seen the TV series - why, it's a good book anyway, check it out.

The second book in Han Solo's saga is nearly as brilliant as the first, with a solid, interesting, believable plot; good, well developed characters, and well described settings. It begins a couple of years after the first one ended, after Han's parted ways (thank God) with the first great love of his life, Bria Theran. In that time, however, he's managed to get taken into the Imperial Academy for fleet commanders, and then kicked out into the street again for one trick to many; this time rescuing the enslaved wookie, Chewbaaca. Now, with no ship, no job, no girlfriend, and an ecstaticly grateful wookie, Han's lost everything he worked his life to attain, and through it all, he begins to find his identity as a smuggler. One thing that annoyed me though, was the book's rather akward starting point. What was Han's life like while he was in the academy? How did he rescue Chewbaaca? To me, this left a huge gap in the story, interupting the smooth flow of the overall trilogy. Despite this minor fault, all in all I'd definetely recommend this book to any Star Wars fan, particulerly those who love Han Solo (duh). This one is definitely not for little kids though, on account of the often intense violence.

A very exciting book by a great author for Han Solo and Chewie fans. The Hutt Gambit explains how Han Solo is thrown out of the Imperial academy, his life of crime, and how he met Chewbacca. I think that the most action packed scene of the book was the battle of Nar Shadd. Overall, I think that all people who like Han Solo should read this book to find out what he was like before the The New Hope.

Kudos to A. C. Crispin for a superb trilogy that, in my opinion, ranks right up there with 'heavy-hitters' like Zahn and Stackpole's books. An amazing feat has been accomplished in tying together dozens of tidbits of Han's life from numerous books and comics in one coherent, smooth, and effective storyline. The book itself is interesting on its own, but its historical value is incredible. Han's relationships with Lando, Boba Fett, Jabba, Shug Ninx, Salla Zend, Mako Spince, and others are given vibrant backgrounds and realistic beginnings. Granted, some stuff from the Academy would be nice, but I'm sure Lucas wanted it restricted. Heck, they even worked around it in the 'Chewbacca' comic. And besides, Han in the Empire would have nothing to do with the rest of the story. This is about Han picking himself up after being kicked out of the Empire and forming a new life on Nar Shaddaa.

Ah, the slums of the galaxy. Never before has the Galactic underworld been so vividly pictures. Black Sun from Steve Perry's 'Shadows' hardly seemed like an underground criminal syndicate. More like a mini-Empire that worked with the real one. Here we have the dirt of it all- Hutts, gang wars, and all of that nice stuff. Truly impressive and interesting. This is a side of Star Wars never before depicted. The Empire still is there, of course, and we get the great, dramatic Battle of Nar Shaddaa. The use of Baron Fel directly ties into Stackpole's 'The Making of Baron Fel', which is also a very nice touch. See what you people miss when you read only the books?

The huge, varied cast is prefectly done and balanced. All of the people from Nar Shadda in 'Dark Empire' get their backgrounds adeptly crafted here, and a huge amount of Han's life is revealed to us. Simply put, this is a highly, highly reccomended book for fans of Han Solo and the numerous books which this ties into.

Gervase Fen is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford and an amateur detective who is advising a film company about a movie being made in Long Fulton, near London. Inspector Humbleby of New Scotland Yard visits the movie location while investigating the suicide of a young actress, Gloria Scott, who has jumped off Waterloo Bridge. Although her stage name is known, Gloria's real identity is a mystery and someone removes all identity marks from the personal belongings in her room.

Humbleby and Fen fall again into the easy working relationship they had begun during a previous case in 1947. FREQUENT HEARSES is an entertaining detective novel.

If I had to rank my favorite British mystery authors who produced their best work in the 1930s through the 1950s, my list would look like this:

(1) Edmund Crispin a.k.a. Bruce Montgomery (2) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (3) Dorothy Sayers (4) Margery Allingham (5) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (with a drop in rank for his mysteries that went off the surreal deep-end).

Out of my Fab Four Brits, Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin have the most in common. They were both of Scots-Irish background, both wrote their mysteries under pseudonyms while teaching at college, and both were educated at Oxford -- Oriel College and St. John's College, respectively. They both wrote highly literate mysteries with frequent allusions to the classics (nine out of ten of which go zooming right over my head). Michael Innes has his detective, Sir John Appleby poke fun at this high-brow type of murder fiction in "Death at the Chase":

"That's why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral."

Expect that even the most vicious murderer in an Edmund Crispin mystery will quote Dryden or Shakespeare at the drop of a garrote. "Frequent Hearses" is a fertile setting for this type of classical badinage, since its plot involves the making of a film based on the biography of Alexander Pope. Gervase Fen, Oxford don of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire is hired by the film company as a story consultant, and he is plagued throughout the book by a Scotland Yard detective who is an amateur classics scholar. Fen wants to discuss the murder. Chief Inspector Humbleby wants to talk about the Brontes and Dr. Johnson. Neither man will admit to a less than perfect understanding of either his profession or his hobby, and both despise amateurs. Their encounters keep "Frequent Hearses" sparkling along right up until its final page. ...All of Crispin's characters are carefully (one might say 'crisply') developed, and distinguished for the reader by a quirk or eccentric manner of speech (sometimes Crispin overplays the eccentricity at the expense of realism, especially with his main protagonist-- I do wish Fen would stop expostulating, "Oh, my fur and whiskers!"). Physical description is sketchy. If one of Crispin's characters walked past you in the street, you probably wouldn't recognize him. However, if you were to overhear his conversation with the postman---

And I don't mean to imply that "Frequent Hearses" is all dialogue and no action...

The mystery surrounding the murderer's identity and motivation is as cleverly convoluted as the maze, and it is equally as hard to get to its heart. The author's red herrings are logically constructed and I always go snapping after them, even after a second or third reading... Crispin himself wrote and published at least one film script and composed music for several films, so "Frequent Hearses" is told with the knowledge of a movie industry insider...

If you like vintage British mysteries with a 'classical education' and haven't yet discovered the 'Professor Fen' novels, then you're in for a treat... Here are all eleven of the Fen mysteries, in case you jump into 'Frequent Hearses' and want to keep going:

The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), Holy Disorder (1945), The Moving Toyshop (1946), Swan Song (1947), Love Lies Bleeding (1948), Buried for Pleasure (1948), Frequent Hearses (1950), The Long Divorce (1952), Beware of the Trains (1953), Glimpses of the Moon (1978), Fen Country (1979) - short stories

I put off reading this book for a long time, thanks to the questions we all had about Hatfield's integrity and the credibility of his charges against the Accidental President. This newly updated and better-annotated edition put these concerns to rest, and although it's not the best Bush biography I've read thus far, it deserves far more respect than it's received from the mainstream media. For a book which Bush's supporters went to great lengths to prevent from ever being published, Hatfield shows a surprising lack of antagonism toward his subject for the most part. Molly Ivins' "Shrub," Mark Crispin Miller's "The Bush Dyslexicon" and Paul Begala's "Is Our Children Learning?" are all far more openly partisan (and better written), but Hatfield does provide information not available elsewhere about the youthful indiscretion that Bush and his allies have otherwise done a superb job of keeping buried.

Using straightforward accounts from the public record and those who know him, Hatfield illustrates such issues as Bush's obliviousness to racial segregation in his hometown, his indifference to his studies at Andover and Yale, his alcoholism, his spotty record in the Air National Guard, his questionable business dealings, and his performance as governor. Bush's actions and words speak for themselves throughout the book, and Hatfield shows little inclination to analyze them to death or to put an actively anti-Bush spin on them. In fact, he occasionally sounds pro-Bush, noting, for example, that he got off to a respectable start in the oil business after graduating from Harvard Business School. Some of the less flattering accounts, such as that of his "service" in the Air National Guard, have a necessarily vague and incomplete feel to them, mainly because there simply isn't a lot of reliable information available about that period of Bush's life. Hatfield is, however, able to provide a number of accounts of cocaine use and womanizing that stand in sharp contrast to the family-values image Bush's handlers have managed to convey to the public. If Hatfield's research failed to answer many questions about the extended adolescence Bush himself has always refused to discuss, he did succeed brilliantly in raising many questions that deserve to be addressed but haven't been thus far.

The book's most famous accusation - that Bush was arrested for cocaine posession in 1972 and his father got the charges dropped - is more solidly supported than I'd been led to believe. Although Hatfield did fail to produce a source who was willing to confirm the story on the record, he names a number of sources who probably know the answer but - like Bush himself - refuse to confirm or deny it. Additionally, he provides three anonymous sources, not a lone Deep Throat as has been widely reported. The afterword does have a cloak-and-dagger feel to it all the same, and there are typographical and grammatical errors sprinkled throughout the narrative which have helped to make the book easy for Bush supporters to vilify.

But for all that, most of what Hatfield reports is well-annotated (in contrast to the original printing) and presented in a non-sensationalistic style. If Hatfield was not the ideal messenger, he at least provided us with an important collection of information that other journalists chose to gloss over or didn't have access to. As Mark Crispin Miller points out in his introduction, the Bush campaign's reaction to the book was just as telling in one sense as the book itself is. If it's inaccurate, why suppress it?

Celebrate your right to know. Whatever your politics, read the book and decide for yourself whether or not it's worth believing.

I read this book some months ago and thought it was an honest portrayal of how George W Bush has floated through his life. Clearly he would not be where he is without the enormous power and influence of his family. When I first heard about the book I thought it was going to be some demented hatchett job by an extreme Partisan, so completely had the Bush machine discredited the author. Now it seems clear that James Hatfield was a troubled but talented man who was not particularly liberal. He was also a good investigative journalist dispite his checkered past. I would recommend this to anyone that wants to have their eyes open about exactly what kind of man is ocupying the White House.

How could I resist buying this book when I heard it had been ordered all but burned when the first edition came out on the eve of Bush's 2000 campaign. That alone would be reason enough for reading FORTUNATE SON (and keeping America safe for democracy) but in addition, it is a good read. I discovered that my biggest mistake as a proud liberal is underestimating Bush. Even if I cringe when I hear his rhetoric, he is a savvy politician with shrewd instincts. Now I understand a recent news magazine story which explains how Ms. Rice translates these instincts into articulate policy. Unlike his lucky dad who struck it rich with Texas gold, Duwya had the ability to keep oil companies (temporarily) afloat when the wells were dry. One wonders if that is what he is doing now--Convincing Americians to buy an empty foreign policy. I Hope anyone who runs agains Bush reads this book and I thank Amazon.com and Soft Skull Press for making it available to the public against surprising odds.

If Your a true Star Wars junkie you'll love this book as a compiled work of 8 books! A.C. Crispin did a wonderful job of keeping the universe in perfect harmony. To salvage anything of value from the (look I'm a Sci-fi author) Lando trilogy is a plus. The middle of the book gives even the main character Han some time gaps for his corporate sector adventures. The plot does get real slow during the tie-ins and reads more like a history book than an action story. The "Big Battle Scene" is short and predictable but very accurate as to the start of the Rebellion and the all to famous Greedo scene!

I've been in love with Han Solo since 1977, so it's not hard for me to love any book on him. (By this you see I'm not exactly a giddy teenager.) Good continuation of the trilogy. Bogs down a little in the middle, with all the intrigue involving the Hutts. Good integration of characters from other Star Wars books (Xizor, Guri, Durga, etc.) Lacks the "introspective" quality that we "mature" readers have come to enjoy in some of the other SW books (e.g. Planet of Twilight) but this is not necessarily a bad thing; it just means that it will probably appeal more to younger readers. Tip: as soon as you've finished this book, go pop the first SW movie into the VCR. Gives you a new perspective on why Han is such a smirky smart-a** (and I mean this only in the most loving, admiring way).

'Rebel Dawn' is another truly exceptional SW novel that carries the life of Han Solo right up the meeting at Chalumn's Cantina with a certain old man and farmboy. To say that 'Rebel Dawn' is a sort of a hsityor book is in many ways true, as it offers glimpses to the early days of the rebellion. Not that that's bad, at least not for me. I am a huge history buff, after all.

Everything is wrapped up here, essentially. How Han gets Jabba on his case, Han's falling out with Lando, Bria's fate... Very, very nice and well-crafted so that everything fits together as one. Admittedly it's a rather sad book once you get to the end, but it accuarely paints Han's life and sets up his new life beautifully. Like 'Hutt Gambit', this book creates an incredible view into the 'other side' of Star Wars, far from the gallant dogfights above the Death Star and heroism of Leia and Dodonna. Here the Rebels are still struggling, and instead of a romantic space duel we get a ground invasion on the mudhole known as Ylesia. And you also het the tensions between the two Hutt clans at their height. Nothing like wars between crime syndicates, after all. Durga's relationship with Black sun also helped set up 'Darksaber', adding a little bit of background and credibility to Anderson's hopelessly absurd novel. Han's relationship with Bria was also quite interesting to watch, and its ending is certainly riveting. The final scene with Bria, in my opinion, goes down as one of the best all-time Star Wars scenes and fully captures the devotion of the early Rebel troops as they fought against all odds for a seemingly impossible goal. I must admit that I found the interlude where Biran Daley's novels go chronologically somewhat awkward, partially because I've never read Daley's novels and simply pieces bits and pieces of information about them together from various sources. Still, this is just a minor flaw in on overwhelmingly superb book.

If for whatever reason you don't want to read everyting above, I'll simplify it here. 'Rebel Dawn' is an incredible piece of Star Wars history that adds background and depth to both Han Solo's life and the SW galaxy itself. Highly, highly reccomended.