D.H. LAWRENCE AND ITALY is composed of three stories: 'Twilight in Italy', 'Sea and Sardinia' and 'Etruscan Places'. The first two "books" seem to be based on journals he wrote while traveling with his German born lover then wife Frieda, whom he refers to as q-b for queen bee, through various villages on the mainland of Italy and the island of Sardinia. Lawrence does not record his experience of "famous" sights in these two books, in fact he says he is not interested in historical places, museums etc. but rather he wishes to see the people and the places in the out-of-the way areas of Italy. He and Frieda travel by bus, train, and boat--close to the ground.

Those who have read Lawrence's fiction will recognize his writing. He describes what he encounters with a visceral language--people, clothing, food, establishments. Some of the places are stunning and some so filthy you wonder how he could have stayed overnight. He visits lemon and olive groves and various high places along the coast and in the interior valleys. His writing is graphic--the reader will be as appalled and enchanted. He reflects Italy just before and after WWI.

In the third book, 'Etruscan Places', Lawrence describes his visits to various Etruscan sites, including the painted tombs of Tarquinia. His writing is less descriptive than that of the first two books. He is concerned with nothing less than the meaing of life, and the conflict between religion and truth (he died a few short years later at age 44 so his reflections seem almost prescient). He muses that societies are organized around death or life. He speaks of the use of fertility symbols such as fish and lambs for Christians and dolphins and eggs for Etruscans; the significance of the color vermillion -- male body painting by warrior classes where red paint connotes power contrasted with the the red skin coloring of the Etruscan tomb portraits which seems to have connoted the blood of life. He says the Etuscans loved life and the Romans who subdued them loved power.

Lawrence's book provides good background for those who would know more about Italy. Many of the places he describes have changed since the 1920s--some for the better. The people have changed--their clothing, homes, etc. are less unique and colorful, but they are better fed, warmer in winter, and cleaner. Hopefully their lives are better, but I don't think Lawrence would agree.

If i were to read only two travel books then this would be the second one, although both my wife and an English friend read it in German translation and reported that it was terrible. Maybe it doesn't translate well. Lawrence, as young man, describes a thread running through his life as he starts the journey by heading south toward Italy on foot from Bavaria with Frida, a way of travel that many Germans still understand very well. Descriptions of people are attractive, like the one-legged Italian who tried to seduce the cold, northern women at a dance. I liked best his description of his own Alpüberquerung, his description therein of the hurried English hiker, the way that Italins have ruined the alpine valleys with industrialization. And I felt loss at his growing distance from Frida. The book made me want to see the lemon and olive trees above Lago di Garda and the villages high above the lake, but we haven't done that in spite of our nearness to the region. Gardasee is completely overrun by German tourists now, not just by those wearing heavy hiking boots.

Had the wonderful feeling of being lost in a magic world, while reading this book. Brought to the magic island of Sardinia, on an old train, on the mountains of the island. And then, when I had the chance to be there, it all became true. The same train, the same atmosphere... in a world that did not change...after all.

"St. Mawr" and "The Man Who Died," are two separate novellas brought together in this single book.

"St. Mawr" is the longer, and less interesting, of the two. While Lawrence uses his usual dramatic (and excellent) flair for describing landscapes and their reflections in personality of those looking outward at them, there's a lack of direction to this story. Even more than usual, Lawrence seems to suffer from a lack of cohesion with this story, but there's a worthy read in it anyway, for his character studies are, as always, sharp enough to draw blood. Put literally, "St. Mawr" is about two women, a mother and daughter, who upon finding a fine stallion with a wildness to it, realize that that wild natural je-ne-sais-pas is missing from all the men in their lives, leading them on an interesting - if continuity flawed - pilgrimmage.

"The Man Who Died," would get 5 stars from me on its own. This is an incredibly well written story of an alternate telling of the 3 days that Christ was dead. This is Christ as a human being, not a sacred figure, and as such, I can see why this story caused such a harsh discourse. Struggling to find meaning and reason for his tortures, Christ embarks on a three day journey after waking from the dead on the very same day he was entombed. I refuse to ruin any of the plot for you, but this retelling is magnificent, and a really in depth study of sorrow and suffering, and rebirth. You owe yourself a read of this, even if you skip "St. Mawr."

'Nathan

St. Mawr is one of the wisest books I've ever read. In it you can find insight and answers to some of the toughest questions you may ever encounter. What is it that brings men and women together? What is it that drives them apart? What exactly is it that we are doing to each other? What does it mean to be civilized? To be savage? What does it actually mean to be human?

D.H. Lawrence creates a world with very few words. These characters, though at times stereotypes or archetypes, are extremely real.

This book changed the way I look at the world, deepened my understanding of myself and of those around me.

This book kept me up until 3am one night because I just had to finish it.

'St. Mawr' is a very entrancing short story about a woman and her dissatisfaction with men as a whole. The heroine, a countrified gentile, has a wild imagination in this, and Lawrence describes her thoughts in terms of the horse's power and motion and ability. I got so caught up in this that I finished it in just over an hour. It's a very well structured read.

'The Man Who Died' has become my favourite contemporary version of the last days of Christ. It's an amazing and original story that leaves you asking questions. Many heavy handed Christians became infuriated by this story when it was published, and i'm sure many will continue to rail against it for the humanizing of thier idol.

At first glance, I wasn't aware that they were both seperate stories but, after reading 'The Man Who Died', I kept asking myself - Why are these two stories together like this? The only conclusion I could draw was, the fallibility of one and the infallibility of the other. Be advised though, D.H. does his best to derail your thinking here.

I am hoping to find a book that will let me set up a server similar too deja-talkway-remarq. Any suggestions?

I have never actually met Henry Spencer, despite having spent years at a Taddle Creek lab probably a stone's throw from the University of Toronto zoology department; I don't even really know what he did in Zoology, but I do know that right from the very beginning of my life online, Henry Spencer was there like a kindly grandfather, always patient, always helpful and always knowledgeable beyond our wildest imaginations. When google was collecting up parts to assemble their groups.google.com, it was Henry who provided many of the earliest archives dating back to the late 1980's (and preserving forever some of my more embarrasing novice posts ;) -- that name on the cover is more than a good sign, it's a veritable holographic guarantee of authenticity.

I needed to set up a news server for my company. Since I already had a Linux box that was not doing much of anything, I loaded INN (since it comes nicely packaged with Red Hat- although you need to install the security patch as well). I then needed a quick understanding of how Usenet/INN worked and did not have a lot of time to spend on it. This book gave me everything I need, I did not have to go anywhere else for information.

Did David act alone? After hearing a number of different things about the Son of Sam crimes, I decided to do my own research. I read many articles and accounts of "what really happened", including this book.

Now, after all this research...I'm more confused than ever.

The author of 'Son of Sam' is obviously bent on the fact that David was, as the theory says, another "angry lone nut". I have a hard time believing this theory in any case, so of course I had a hard time believing it here.

Was David really part of a Satanic cult? (Namely the Process - Church of the Final Judgement, a name that, curiously, has come up in a few criminal investigations, including the Manson murders. Though generally described as "non-violent", a number of newspaper and internet articles have associated David Berkowitz and the Son of Sam murders with this cult.) If so, why doesn't Klausner mention this? Surely he seemed to focus on David's spirituality, but even in the exerpts from the diaries at the back of the book, I'm pretty sure I read something about a "church group". If it wasn't there, I'm sure I read comments David made in a number of other articles.

In defense of the book, David's psychosis definately suggests that he was capable of committing these crimes alone. He did know the specific details, and nothing directly implies that anyone else was involved.

Yes, David is given to exagerration, childish bragging and self-empowering lies. He reminds you of a confused child in a man's body. In other words, he's a paranoid schizophrenic. He has often blamed unseen forces, specifically demons and the devil, for his actions. He thought he was a victim of demonic possession, that he and the "Son of Sam" were different people. As anyone who has read the book will remember, David considered himself to be a "good" person. Could he have lied about the church group, consciously of unconsciously, to shift blame from himself? It's definately possible. But did he?

Also, was there new evidence, after the book written, that Klausner didn't know about? I've heard a bit about this, though I don't know the specifics.

After what I've read, I'm not sure what to believe, except that Berkowitz committed the actual crimes alone. However, all we get from that conclusion is that he deserves life imprisonment. (365 years, whatever.) It doesn't offer us any guidance as to the actual motive, which, in my opinion, is the most important part of any crime, so we can ensure that something this horrible wouldn't happen again. There are no reasons for crimes like this, just contributing factors. Like I said, I'm still confused.

As for the book itself, it's quite good, though at times it reminded me of a novel based on a movie, adding melodramatic little touches and outstanding, supposedly "shocking" statements. Recently having read Helter Skelter, I probably would have appreciated Klausner to include more facts and make this less "entertaining". Entertainment is good, but to see a story that carefully introduces characters, charts their progress with small yet memorable details, and ends in emotional payoff...well, that's why I go to the movies. The reason I read true crime is to know the little things: the details of the crimes, the investigation, lie detector tests, complete interviews... I greatly appreciated the pages from David's diary at the back, though I wonder about the author's intent on including it.

I realize that I'm the first person to give this book any less than five stars, but I'm not going to lie; that's simply how I feel about it.

Anyone with any comments about David Berkowitz, his involvement in this crime, any theories (however outlandish they may be, I keep an open mind)...any comments about my review, or anything related to this book can e-mail me at

guelph@canada.com

Thank you to anyone who actually read all of this. Lisa.

You want to learn the real NON-exploitative story of the Summer of 1977 and how David Berkowitz terrorized us here in NYC?

Then read this book: It's straightforward, painstakingly researched, fast-paced, and provides extremely sympathetic portraits of the police, the politicians, the victims, and even the killer himself.

As the True Crime genre goes, this book is up there with the best of them: Helter-Skelter and Fatal Vision.

My only quibble: I wanted to know more about the legal process after Sam's arrest...Mr Klausner is there an unedited version of the book?

NOTE TO CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: I tried reading the updated version of "The Ultimate Evil." After a terrific opening about the Arlis Perry murder and summarizing the earlier events of the "Sam" terror, the author goes into some far-out detail about the Stacey Moskowitz murder...the story lost me there it was so convoluted and complicated. I felt as if alternate events were "fitted" into the real time-frame to make the event more interesting.

Maybe you, dear reader, can remember 1977 and all the things that happenned. Perhaps, like some, you get all the info you need from books and film.

Let me say this and I'll leave you to your lattes and precious consumer goods: 1. If Berkowitz did not act alone, why the widely varying descriptions given of "the killer" ? 2. There was a fellow running from the park on one occaision, what of him?? The tall, thin guy, remember??

3. Berkowitz DID belong to an organization(a satanic cult no less) whose members started mysterously dying in the year after Sam was caught. 3 in all.

4. The charter arms .44 special that was used was part of a shipment stolen in 1976 (over 100 just like it). Does this explain the ever-so-subtle differences in ballistics between bullets the F.B.I. pointed out??

People, i won't bore you with forensics, but my last statement is the most important of all because while it does not exonerate Berkowitz, it raises the question of why more than one of the same gun??

These people are things that you and I will never see in the light of day. Killers who don't necessarily stick to one M.O. and call it quits or stop if they get caught. This is something thats been going on since the Manson days and possibly before, the major players move on when the heat comes down and pop up someplace else a few years later.

I highly recommend reading up on the Zodiac killer as well as Manson's "family", I think the similarities speak for themselves.

On that note, I will leave you all to your own devices to educate and enlighten yourselves. Adios!! :-) zipper

Most of the book is written in a expository way, but some chapters and all the appendices are useful for reference. The example MMX programs are great and the accompanying CDROM is more than worth the price of the book. One drawback is that the book needs to be updated for the Pentium Pro and Pentium II vagaries.

Given this book, I was able create several MMX routines for performing high-speed bitstream compression. Each instruction is discussed in great detail with clear diagrams and examples. Useful rules are given for calculating the exact timing of MMX instruction sequences so that you can optimize the u/v pipeline pairing of instructions. An excellent choice.

A young man must break away from his mother and her life before he can discover a life of his own.

I skipped over Lawrence for years. I had heard the tawdry tales of his work and felt a bodice ripper is a bodice ripper no matter what century you put it in. But I was wrong! He is a marvel. As soon as I finished Sons and Lover's I went out and got The Rainbow. S & L, reads very quickly, much like Maughm's On Human Bondage. They are both of the same period and are both loosly based on the perspective authors lives. Tantilizing, they allow us a glimpse into the emerging industrial era. The middle classes and lower middle classes are emerging into the plutocracy but slowly. All around them are the dredges of a past system. The coming of age of Lawrence as he throws off his childhood and his need to throw off his mother is engrossing, since you know it is based on real life and not a campy Sally Jessy Rapahel show. He struggles as we all struggle to make the right choices. What Lawrence does is let us in on the stuff that most novels don't let the reader know. The truth the character gives to the reader is unheard of today. Read this book and follow him from childhood of a mama's boy in a coal town in Norther England that love's, and love's, and looses only to truly love .

This is collection of short stories that offers a wide mix of speculative genres. Fantasy, SF, horror, and just plain weird. The stories run the gambit and most are good. "Jeo Defined" and "Moon Warrior" were excellent stories and well worth purchasing the book. Even just the so-so stories were enjoyable and all the authors are names to keep a look out for. In the end, this is a book of up and coming writers and a few of them will no doubt be big names someday.

I didn't know what to expect from this collection of short stories but I was happily surprised. The stories cover a wide range from fantasy, science fiction, and horror to those hard to classify strange stories. Each one is worth reading. My favorites were the one about a radio personality who was singing the Siren's song and the one about a criminal who is forced to undergo "augmentation" to control him. Some wild stuff for a great read.

I was so inspired after reading The Window Song. I've have read it over and over again. I used to watch the news before retiring a night. I now read a passage from the book. I'd like to say, I'm now sleeping a lot better. Mr. David, thanks for sharing a bit of your soul with others.

The Window Song is a book you can't sit down and read all in one sitting-it is so deep and thought provoking you must read it in bite size pieces. At times when I read these proverbs I would sigh outloud, amazed at the insight into life and reality the author shared. Although there is a Christian slant to the book, you need not be a Christian to be challenged and effected by the thoughts in this gem of a book. If you enjoy Walt Whitman, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis and Tolkein, you will love this book. I highly recommend The Window Song.

Written in response to widespread condemnation of the sexuality and libertine lifestyles presented in his books, Apocalypse was the final attempt by D. H. Lawrence to make himself understood. The modern reader will probably detect a full throttle blitz against the puritanical deacons of the Church of England and his establishment tormentors. Launched from the most contentious and abstruse of the Bible's books, Revelations, Lawrence levels his antipathy at a rigid, superficially moral, life denying exposition of Christian thought. He argues that the confining nature of living the 'good' life in expectation of reward in Heaven cuts to the root of an immensely rich potential for experience and passion presented in the world. He continuously falls back on opaque codices-- of arcane civilizations that he states more fully explored the metaphysical realm. Lawrence divines a heroic age where apparent creation and destiny were seen as integral and complete. Robert Graves's 'The White Goddess' comprehensively analyzes the same mythological, magical architecture, but Lawrence uses it in a much more targeted and critical way.

Lawrence saw the aesthetic brilliance of Revelations as a bridge to a more mysterious, immediate, compelling theology. At the same time he condemns the apocalyptic churches who interpret the book as the evocation of Hell and Judgement, rather than in its potent poetic symbolism. He goes so far as to accuse John of Patmos of not presenting a revelation at all, but of appropriating a truer, more ancient historiography for eccliastical and political reasons. Not above placing his own eccentric opinions of government in this tract, he could be accused of mounting his own pulpit, if with literary distinction. His claim of an affirming devotion to the visible universe as the only 'true' route to the holy can be countered by reading some of the lively writings of Christian ascetics. This treatise, however, is not about them. It is aimed squarely at the convention seeking, socially regulating, sanctimonious attitudes that had censored and prosecuted him. Not surprisingly it did not raise his stock much among his critics, but it is an essential text in understanding the underlying motives behind his works.

Although Lawrence's writings are noted for more earthly activities, he shows a surprising knowledge of Biblical matters. In this book he analyzes the last book of the Bible-- Revelations-- and not too favorably at that. I cannot argue with his facts because I am not as familiar with them as as he is. What I find fascinating about this essay-book are his observations on democracy, and especially about life.

The last page or two contain one of his most remarkable and inspiring observations about the individual and his soul. Lawrence often argues that you cannot "save" you soul; you must "live" it. Near the end of this book he writes:

"What man most passionately want is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos....I am part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched."

The most poignant phrase in this passage is "...and ours for a short time only." Lawrence lived a shorter time that most of us will, but in his lifetime his output was as perceptive and prodigious as any author who has ever written. Scattered throughout this book are irritating but illuminating thoughts like: "But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness."

Some people have taken that statement as proof that Lawrence is against democracy. But I consider it a valid danger for democracy, one that is being played out in the press every day. To preserve democracy, the best of all possible forms of government, we have to analyze and try to correct its failings and weaknesses.

Puzzle your way through this book. I hope you will find it as rewarding as I did.

Attacks everything blindly and madly promoted by the dominant ideas of the dominant socio-economic classes and strongest institutionalized influences in the current civilization of inauthenticity and death.

The power of money must go, according to Lawrence, as the power of the sun must return--as it indeed has always been the power of life whether we recognize it or not. Also, the power of blood must be reasserted. As human beings we are connected to all things. However, this perspective is suppressed as it constitutes a threat to the status quo.

Lawrence here sees no salvation in either democracy or western monotheism; but solely in human beings connecting up once again to the universal forces of nature from which come life's vitality.

This book skips some important basic concepts and has several poor, glossed-over explantions. I'd recommend Neter or Mendenhall.

I used this book for a second level statistics course for my Master's degree in Epidemiology. I liked it!

All the underlying math you want to know is sitting on the pages, clearly explained though examples with computer output and graphs. I worked through the problems in the text without difficulty and reproduced their work. I understood what I was doing. Each chapter is followed by a series of problems. You probably want to get a solutions manual if you want to check your answers.

The material covered includes: Univariable and multivariable linear regression, correlations including multiple partial, ANOVA, ANCOVA, Polynomial Regression including orthogonal polynomials, dummy variables, selecting best regression equation, and introductions to repeated measures ANOVA, maximum likelihood methods, and logistic regression.

Now that I feel that I have these basics under control, I would like a book on "approaches" to data and dealing with "difficult" data. This book contains one chapter on regression diagnostics -- not enough. But I guess that is the next step....

Other readers have commented on other books addressing the same topic, unfortunately I have not read those other books. However, I am certain that you will learn from this book, and when you are done, you will be ready for more.

(Did I mention that I signed up for a course with Dr. Kleinbaum on analysis of matched data?)

The most complete and cristal clear exposition of multivariate analisys I ever read.