I've been catching up on Wells' work lately, and up to this point, I've been fairly impressed. His best work, written at the turn of the century, holds up fairly well: it's entertaining and thought-provoking (The Time Machine, War of the Worlds).

I wasn't very impressed with this book, however. It doesn't read like his other works. The story probably could have been told in 20 or so pages, definitely a short-story candidate. I was amazed that Wells stretched this out to its present length, as the middle 40-odd pages were quite dull and really didn't go anywhere.

The science behind the story (while iffy, of course), is fascinating. Griffin is a great character, but more could have been done with him, besides his spending so much time having to convince people that he IS, in fact, invisible ("I am invisible. I really am an invisible man", etc, etc). It gets mind-numbing after a while. I guess the biggest let-down of the book is the fact that the title gives everything away. Once you've seen the cover, you pretty much have it; no real surprises. Yep, he's invisible, and there ya go.

What a great idea to assemble scifi icons from Star Trek to perform various H.G. Wells's classics! Of the works they've performed are: The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

This audio recording of The Invisible Man was easy listening, and fun too. It's definitely worth a listen. I'm going to have to check out the others!

One side note, obviously the original work was abridged and adapted for audio drama. You'll still want to read the classic.

Okay, so Wells didn't load the book with the violence seen in the recent movie Hollow Man. Consider when the book was written, and what was comparable at the time. I, for one, was engrossed in the book and read it in about three sittings.

Wells excellently portrayed Griffin (Invisible Man) as a man crossing back and forth from sanity to madness. You may catch yourself considering how you would overcome his difficulties, or how you might abuse his power.

What really stood out for me was the tongue-in-cheek undertones Wells incorporated into the story, such as the cockney dialect and rustic behavior of the people of Iping. Also, consider Wells' narration during intense moments, such as the fight between Griffin and the people of Iping...
"...[Huxter's] shin was caught in some mysterious fashion, and he was no longer running, but flying with inconceivable rapidity through the air. He saw the ground suddenly close to his face. The world seemed to splash into a million whirling specks of light, and subsequent proceedings interested him no more."
Later elaboration of the events included the terrifying realization that Griffin was "smiting and overthrowing, for the mere satisfaction of hurting."

If you find the book difficult to follow, try the version adapted by Malvina Vogel, complete with illustrations by Pablo Marcos. It's not as powerful, but easier to understand.

This is simply the best Anglo-Saxon dictionary you can find for anything resembling a reasonable price. It helps to know a little bit about the language (for example, the "ge-" prefix is used much the same way that it is in German). The only serious problem I found is Hall's using the "eth" character for cases where "thorn" is used in the original texts--a serious scholarly failure, though one that the serious student should be able to overlook with relative ease. I do feel that this dictionary could use quite a bit of revision--anyone up to the task?--but at the same time, it's the best you can find for the price, and certainly worth the money.

... this is more a lexicon than a dictionary. But it is the only affordable and valuable one on the market, behind the great (but very expensive) Bosworth and Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dict. Thus, sometimes you might not find the word you're looking for. So be smarter than the lexicon: search another word derived from the same root, suppress the prefixes, change the cases, think of the infinitive of the verbs, and you may finally obtain your translation of the word.
But let us be honest: this book is great, and affordable for most of us.
A classic ?

A wonderful source for Anglo-Saxon words and their meanings, which is very reasonably priced. Intended as a teaching aid, I have found it very helpful to the writer of period history and fiction.

As is true of any encyclopedic work, there will be quarrels with what is included and what is not. Nevertheless, this is a highly readable, well organized book. It is accessible to scholars and more casual fans as well. Every college library should have this book. Stylistically and typographically it could be improved, but that would have sent costs even higher. The essays are well-done and the authors of the essays are respected, knowledgeable people. This is just a fine piece of work.

This book has been helpful in learning about crime and mystery fiction. It is great for current terms, history, and even authors. Everyone from novices to experts who love or are just learning to love the genre could use this book.

Informative, fascinating, great fun. This book includes an enormous variety of topics, expected and not, such as occult mysteries, feminism, religion, politics, conservative and radical world-views, gays and lesbians, country house mysteries, fairy tales. It is more comprehensive, and has a more objective tone, than Bruce Murphy's "Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery." There are extensive cross-references. Too bad the editors didn't hire some proofreaders and fact checkers. The book is riddled with typographical errors, misspellings and factual mistakes. Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone is consistently misspelled "Milhone." In one instance, Margery Allingham's "The Crime at Black Dudley" is attributed to Ngaio Marsh. In another, Dorothy Gilman's 1975 book "A Nun in the Closet" is credited to Sister Carol Anne O'Marie. I hope these errors will be corrected in a later edition.

Seymour and Girardet's book is a good beginning place for people who want to learn more about environmental problems and how they can tread less lightly upon the Earth. The text is clearly written at a level the average person can understand and a large number of drawings illustrate well the various systems and cycles they discuss. One of my favorites is the four-page spread (58-61) showing how food gets from the farm to our tables. One suspects that if more people followed the book's Six Principles for Good Housekeeping (18), the world would be in much better shape.

Readers must read critically, however. Several times I found the authors overstating their case. One wonders, for example, if more widespread paper recycling programs would really make this industry, "hugely profitable, and the scourge of paper litter would vanish." (90) I was simiarly skeptical of their discussion of the Borana tribe, a people who "live almost entirely on milk--with a little meat from time to time" but do not suffer from heart disease usually associated with a high fat diet. (70-1). These and similar exaggerations, perhaps made with best intentions, are dangerous ammunition for opponents who wish to discredit environmentalists.

Heather Drake
Bloomington, Indiana

This is a great book. I have become more aware of my actions toward our Earth.

Through this book, there is a better understanding of the struggles and the hardtimes that JFK was presented with. The struggle with personal life and the issues that surrounded his presidency. It was an overall nice approach to portray his life and develop a better picture and understanding in what was going on in his life.

For a book that conspicuously describes itself as a "pocket sized manual", the Manual of Common Bedside Surgical Procedures is curiously large. Measuring 6 inches in width from spiral binding to cover edge, the manual is the exact same dimensions as the pockets of 3 of my lab coats (all by different manufacturers). Thus, it is impossible to put this book in the pocket of a size 38 lab coat. Nonetheless, it is the only major complaint this reviewer has about this book.

Written by the Halsted Residents at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the book covers most of the common bedside procedures any surgical, IM or ER resident may encounter. Many handbooks cover a few of these topics (ie, nasogastric intubation, urinary catheterization,sutures, etc.) but not nearly in depth as does Chen's work. From Airway Management,through vascular access procedures, lumbar punctures, splinting to needle biopsies and joint injections the book covers everything well. Each procedure includes:

-indications for the procedure -contraindications -anesthesia needed (if any) -equipment ( I LOVE having a "shopping list" handy when I'm doing procedures) -patient positioning -step by step technique instructions -complications and management after the procedure

Several of the procedures also have graphics to aid in the positioning of the device,incision site,or relevant anatomy.

The book does provide a cautionary warning in the Preface that experience and knowledge cannot be replaced by simply following directions in a book. Despite this statement, I was suprised that some of more highly specialized procedures did not contain enough information about the difficulty or the suitability for a house officer. For example, when the vermillion border of the lip is disrupted, a 1 mm error in matching up the edges is visible to the naked eye. Because of this and the potential for scarring on the face, most surgical residents I know prefer to leave such procedures to Plastic Surgeons and/or their residents. It would perhaps be prudent for some of the more specialized and/or potentially troublesome procedures to include mention of the pitfalls and the possible need for consultation.

All in all, the book is a valuable resource for the fresh resident and I would recommend it to anyone doing a surgical, medicine, or emergency medicine residency as an asset to their book collection.

Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics" appeared at the right time. The development of quantum mechanics demanded familiarity with methods of advanced mechanics that no student of physics had been introduced to. Dirac told in a semminar that he didn't know what a Poisson bracket was, when he was constructing his version ot quantum mechanics (where Poisson brackets play a fundamental role). Heisenberg didn't know matrices, in similar circumstances. Max Born did know these things, and actually wrote a superb book on mechanics using them, but it was in German, at an advanced level and called Mechanics of the Atom. The book then available in English was the formidable Whittaker "Analytical Dynamics", whose exercises took sometimes a whole page just to be stated! In this panorama, in the fifties, Addison-Wesley published the beautifully produced Goldstein. It was an instant sensation. In the introduction the author candidly confessed that, in his opinion, a cou! rse in mechanics justified itself only as a preparation for quantum mechanics, and that was clearly the slant of the book. It was extremely well written, except for a disastrous chapter on the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. The exercises were not at the level of the text: you found much better ones in Slater, Frank's "Mechanics", for instance. The references were excellent, commented, and gave the reader a sense of perspective (and of awe, in the company of men like Riemann, Born, Weber...). I loved the book and hated the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Later on the slim book by Landau, Lifshitz, "Mechanics", entered the scene and showed that Goldstein's program could be made better, briefer, and that the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, clearly and sensibly derived, was the jewel of the crown. Not only, in the subsequent volumes of their Theoretical Physics course, they showed how invaluable this Hamilton-Jacobi was, by applying it with great skill in all kinds of problems.! Then, finally, it became clear that mechanics was not dead! : the whole affair of stability, chaos, etc, exploded, and it became impossible to consider mechanics just as a ladder to quantum mechanics. So, even the philosophy of the venerable Goldstein had to be forgotten. Still, Goldstein's Classical Mechanics is alive, possibly now more Classical than Mechanics.

I read the first printing of the third edition.

Cons first.

Some material has been deleted: the discussions of stability, some historical notes along the discussions, correspondence between HJ and Schrodinger Eqn, etc. The nice further references and notes to various other books in the end of each chapter has been omitted, the same thing happen to the extensive bibliography. A lot of typos appear in this new edition. And still no attempts to include advanced mathematical methods from differential geometry, except when discussing SR. Also, no attempt to include some worked examples. The discussions on classical fields has been shortened, a regret if we remember the need to leard classical fields before step into quantum fields.

Pros.

The book became more accessible, in fact some undergrads might be able to cope with this, either after Marion-Thornton or somewhere in the junior-senior year. The discussions on SR use the standard -2 metric instead of the awkward ict. Several discussions on one-forms and GR appeared. More problems. Also there is a new chapter in nonlinear oscillations

Suggestions.

If you want a modern book on classical mechanics check also J.V. Jose and E.J. Saletan, Classical Dynamics: A Contemporary Approach ... it offers roughly the same material PLUS advanced treatment with geometrical methods and differential geometry, and there are extensive discussions on nonlinear dynamics and classical fields. I recommend some instructors to adapt Jose & Saletan for their class, since it is cheaper, more modern, than Goldstein.

This is probably the best treatment of Classical Mechanics I've ever read, though, as with anything, it could use some improvement. My only gripe is the usual one with texts like this: There are few if any specific physical instances of formulations that so often serve as a watershed of understanding in physics. For example, in the derivation of the Langrangian, and finally the Hamiltonian, no point for point physical example (say, with a central force like gravity) is offered. It would be nice to see a step by step description of how the Riemann sum over time of the difference in kinetic and potential energies changes as different paths are chosen. I did this and it was beautiful and incredibly enlightening. Once you can _see_ that kind of behavior, you're powerful! It is then easy to generalize to any abstract system. But all else was excellent. If you really want to learn Mechanics, you must start with Goldstein. Recommended preliminaries: Stewart's Calculus; Schaum's Linear Algebra; Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics and Symon's Mechanics.

For those of you who read "Into Thin Air" and were somewhat fascinated by the story of George Mallory's attempts to climb Everest in the 1920's and the later rumor of the discovery of his body by a Chinese climber in 1975, then this book will only heighten your interest.

I had thought about buying this book, but I came across it at the public library and checked it out. I'm kinda glad I didn't buy it, because the text isn't that well written--people are referred to by their last name and then formally introduced several pages later, some details are left out, other details are repeated, etc.--but the photographs from the 1920's expeditions and of the items recovered from Mallory's body are absolutely captivating. It just fascinates me to no end to think about these guys making the first attempts to climb Everest, experimenting with oxygen tanks, and reaching a height on Everest not surpassed until the 1950's.

I think the main problem with the book is this: the authors had made two expeditions to find Mallory's body in 1986 and 1995. They were unsuccessful. Another team was successful in 1999; this was documented in a PBS/NOVA documentary and they have their own book, which deals more with the discovery of the body. It seems like the authors of this book pulled out the material they had been working on and wrapped it up somewhat hurriedly to capitalize on the publicity (as another reviewer has also noted). So they don't talk much about their own attempts to find Mallory, and they don't talk enough about the successful team's discovery of his body (because they weren't there).

There are many books on the market dealing with the summit attempts of George Leigh Mallory. No one tome has yet encapsulated the adventures to stand out as the consummate work. It will be necessary to read several books to lay claim to being fully informed. The great strength of LAST CLIMB is in its wonderful collection of vintage photographs from the 1920's British Everest Expedition and its members. Its one thing to read of gentlemen climbers in tweed and quite another to see it, a picture being worth a thousand words and all that. The many dozens of photographs, some taken by Mallory himself, breath life into a much exhausted realm of discussion. Mallory was an aesthete and I believe he would not want his story to be told in the mere blandness of words but exhorted on the artistic level provided by the beautiful photography collected here. Hats off to MR. Breashears and Ms. Salkeld for presenting these heroes in all their glory.

It states in the prologue that this book was started prior to the discovery of Mallory's body on Mt. Everest. With that said, after reading it; I'm of the impression that it was completed quickly and rushed into print after finding the body so it could sell the maximum number of copies.

I've now read what I think are all the post discovery expedition books. This is an excellent book. There are wonderful pictures of the early British expeditions which are not found in other books and the writing was concise and tried to cover all areas. After reading it, the historical aspects seems to be a greatly pared down version from Audrey Salkeld's previous book with Tom Holzel "The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine".

Overall this is a wonderful coffee table book. It covers Mallory's history with Everest; has plenty of 1920's photographs; a section on how he went into legend like he did: pictures of what was removed from the body and a section which reviews the clues based on where the body was found and what he had on his person. If you have a casual interest in the topic, this is a great book to choose. If you are looking for something a bit more involved, try the aforementioned "The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine" by Tom Holzel and Audrey Salkeld. Looking for a book on the history of the expedition to find clues on the disappearance? The exclusive team story is in "Ghosts of Everest". Conrad Anker's version is in "The Lost Explorer" (he's the one who actually found Mallory's body). My favorite of the expedition books however, was "Lost on Everest" by Peter Firstbrook. It covers historical background on Mallory and the early Everest expeditions in more of a conversational yet detailed manner, and this I found overall the most intriguing.

I was tricked into reading this book due to it being a well known classic and from a desire to read a good romantic story which I thought it would be. Well, um, IT'S NOT.

I like to read books that draw me right into the story and then a couple of hours later you notice you are turning page 250 when the last you recall touching was page 97. This book was not like that at all. Unfortunately, I was always conscious that I was reading print from a page but kept reminding myself that a book this famous had to get good sooner or later. Far from not being able to put it down, I found myself often looking to see what page I was on and if I had read my quota for the night. It never did get good and when I had finished the last sentence I felt frustrated and cheated.

I worried that my lack of appreciation for this classic must be due to my inferior intellect and that I must after all be just some obtuse hill-billy. Thankfully I found that several people who had offered their reviews here shared my opinions for this book and I was quite relieved that I was not alone in my reaction.

For me, Lawrence's supremely descriptive, possibly brilliant (although I really wouldn't know) and flowery writing is all for not because of selfish, unlikeable and unbelieveable characters who don't really do anything. At the very end, the only care I had for anyone in the book was poor little Winifred. I hope she was alright.

In conclusion may I suggest that you pass on Women in Love and read instead Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It is so much more a wonderful book about believable, likeable, women in love.

Women In Love written by D.H. Lawrence is not as explicit as his other novels, and instead of concentrating on sexual content, Lawrence chose to depict the relationships between two sisters and their boyfriends. D.H. Lawrence goes deep into the minds of human beings and reveals the real secrets of emotions, feelings, and thoughts that people usually hide inside. Statements such as "The Dead Should Bury the Dead" illustrate the content of living and dying, which the book frequently discusses. The book is difficult and long to read, but it opens up the reader's mind and forces the reader to reavaluate the content of his or her relationship with other people.

First of all, I have to own you up that reading Women in Love was one of the best experiences on books that I ever had. I know it's not Lawurence's masterpiece, but I touched me very deep. Everthing seems to wok in this book, from the characters to their enviroment.

It seems to me that Lawrence took daily events and showed them the way they are: unglamourised. He showed me what love and support seem to be. It's not about being happy all the time or that kind of love that happens only in movies. The book deals with the ordinary love, the one that normal human beings have the chance to face.

Following the experience of both couples made me see how different love can be and it is the still the same. I could perfectly understand all the worries and anxiets Gudrun had. And I think Gerald and she made quite a couple! Yet Birkin and Ursula look very nice together since the begin. Their love is not as 'wild' as the other couple's, but it is very strong indeed.

When the book was over I got down because I had to let them go. Following the lives of such people for a few days made quite an impression on me. Even though they may not be XXI century people like us, they have the same essence we do.

All in all, I know this review may read very emotive and personal, but this is a book that I couldn't apart in other to write about