A seminal book in the world of crime fiction, Higgins' 1970 debut placed maximum emphasis on creating realistic dialogue for the criminals and police and letting that carry a fairly slender plot along. The story concerns a smalltime hood named Eddie Coyle and a loose ring of associates. He's sweating because he's facing a two year stretch, and he can't handle any time at his age (45). The question is, who's he going to throw to the cops in order to duck that time? The story and its resolution are very much in keeping with the dark tone of the early '70s when the nation was realizing Vietnam was unwinnable and hard drugs were getting more and more prevalent, think of films like The French Connection, Badlands, or High Plains Drifter. (I've not seen the 1973 film version of the book, starring Roger Mitchum as Eddie Coyle.)

The book has been greatly lauded for its simplicity, dialogue, and realistic characters. However, my own reading was that everyone in the book (men, women, law, criminals) spoke more or less the same clipped wise guy talk as everyone else, and not only that, but other than talking about the "Broons" (Boston's pro hockey team, the Bruins), there's little that differentiates the speech from that of countless New York and Brooklyn gangsters. So much so that one occasionally has a hard time keeping track of who is who. So, maybe it was revolutionary to reveal the inner woes of criminals back in 1970, but read today, the book lacks the punch it must once have held.

This book has a great reputation, particularly for the crackling dialogue, and I must say I was in complete agreement for the first 10 pages, which took me through the end of the brilliant first chapter. After that, you start to notice that everybody in this book -- the good guys, the bad guys, their wives, girlfriends -- _everybody_ talks exactly the same, some sort of blue-collar, Cliff-Klaven-meets-Edward-G-Robinson patois. It's lazy writing and the result is that the characters all kind of blur together. Tack on a "so what?" ending and you get a two-star book, plus one extra star for the first chapter, which really is terrific.

If you like crime novels, your best bets are Ray Chandler, Jim Thompson or Joe Wambaugh. You may enjoy Chandler or Wambaugh even if you _don't_ particularly like crime novels. Thompson has probably too much of what Southey would call "the yell of savage rage, the shriek of agony, the groan of death" for the unsuspecting reader.

I read a list by James Ellroy where he listed Higgins as one of his major influences, so I bought this one. I was pleasantly surprised.

The story is very simple, the dialog is incredibly lifelike and readable. The characters are very real and the story is believable. Its not really a mystery as much as it is a story about some criminals and what they think and feel.

Warning, though. Don't buy this if you like the 'high concept' plots of Grisham and Patterson. This is a very simple story about real people and real criminals. If you're an aspiring writer of crime fiction, definitely check it out especially the dialog.

After using this book in conjunction with my anatomy and physiology for school, the information was easier to understand and helped me to pass the class. Springhouse takes a large amount of in- formation,and simplifies it. I didn't feel so overwhelmed.... Thank You Springhouse Notes...... You saved my grade..

What a fascinating contribution to American medical history! Weistrop succeeds in transforming one man's story -- Ogden was a pioneering figure in biomedicine in Milwaukee, a provincial Midwestern city -- into a window on the historical cross currents of 19th and 20th Century America. Through dogged archival research, Weistrop uncovered Ogden's voluminous correspondence, and his book weaves together the personal and professional dimensions of Ogden's exemplary life. Weistrop deftly portrays the emerging professionalism of medicine and the specific concerns of a provincial elite: both precursors to the contemporary contours of medical practice in many parts of this country. As I understand, Weistrop himself is a practicing physician, so his book can be read as both a historical document and an exemplar of professional self-consciousness.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier arguably had the silliest of plot concepts, and the touches of buffoonish humor did not help the movie much either.

Sybok, a renegade Vulcan from Spock's past, has managed to seize Nimbus III, the 'Planet of Intergalatic Peace'. But it is a ruse, what he really needs is a starship to take him to the center of the galaxy. Once there, Sybok believes he will meet God.

Dillard attempts to fill in the many character gaps in Shatner's Kirk centered story, giving each brainwashed member of the crew a chance to have center stage and a moment to shine. Thus it is more of an ensemble piece than the film. Dillard also clarifies some of the fuzzy plot points, making the hijacking and trip to God a tad easier to believe. There is also an honorable attempt to fit the concept of Nimbus III into the Trek Mythos rather than having it just be a gimmick jumping off point for the story. But despite all this hard work this novel is worthwhile reading only for those who would like to see a silly story told in a more well thought out manner. Strictly for Trek buffs.

Yeah, so what they said. The movie was a bomb, and the book tells the story the way it should have been.

Trek books are a tricky thing. Novelizations are a tricky thing. This particular Trek novelization does everything it should, and more. The only problem is that an artist is only as her subject matter, and Find God in the Center of the Galaxy still remains a hokey premise.

But let's focus on the good things. Every major Trek player gets a focus in this novel, including Sulu, who had a big part in all of McIntyre's novelizations. I was glad to see Dillard continue his story in the same vein. We get to see his and Scotty's "secret pain", as well as several other characters in the movie who got left out.

All the characters have depth -- the three delegates, the Klingons, Sybok himself, even the funky-toothed guy drilling holes in the opening shot. Every one is three-dimensional. Example: Klaa (Klingon captain) is no longer a chip-shouldered upstart with delusions of grandeur. He's a Klingon worthy of Klingons, and his motives in pursuing Kirk are revealed as devious and calculating, rather than dumb and bumbling as they appeared in the film.

This novel ties the movie into the others. Star Trek II-V form one continuous tale, without a whole lot of break in between. Yet they still make very little reference one to another. In this novel, we see a Kirk who was re-rejected by a dear love only months before, who lost his son very recently, and who is still coping with Spock's death and resurrection.

I have nothing but praise for the work of J.M. Dillard thus far. And this is no exception. If you, like me, consider Star Trek V the red-headed stepchild of the Star Trek series (no offense to all you red-headed stepchildren), then please read this novelization. Give it a shot. You'll like it. Or I'll buy you a Twinkie. (not really though)

The movie version of "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" was an unutterable turkey, totally unconvincing on a number of levels. This book, while remaining true to the movie in most major plot points, varying only in minor detail, nonetheless manages to be a great deal more plausible and internally consistent, both with itself and with the established Star trek universe as a whole. The characterization is better, the plot flows more smoothly and makes more sense, and several details that were completely implausible in the movie are at least arguable here, if not completely acceptable. The book is quite enjoyable on a simple action-story level, and on deeper levels it is at least as good as most Star Trek stories, better than some if also not as good as others.

Definitely recommended for any "Trek" fans who would like to see the movie version turned into a viable story, and if you actually liked the movie, there's nothing here not to like.

To draw the most from this new book, you need to know already quite a bit about occupied France. The authors trace in detail academic perceptions of Vichy since 1945. Regime apologists tried to maintain in the 1950s that Petain had played a clever game in seeming to collaborate whilst plotting to maintain French independence. We now understand this was nonsense: Petain and Laval may have been interested in collaboration, but Hitler's only concern was booty. But equally in error was the Gaullist position that forty million Frenchmen supported the Resistance against a tiny number of traitors. The editors demonstrate that more recent research has shown how fragmented both the pro and anti Vichy groups were. For example, it was possible to be faithful to Petain whilst being anti nazi. Many ordinary French people, both in the cities and in the countryside, adopted an eclectic attitude according to "how the wind was blowing" in their area. The book suggests new lines for research on Vichy, especially a comparative approach with what was happening in other occupied countries such as Bulgaria and Hungary. The book is largely a tribute to Robert Paxton who wrote a ground breaking study of wartime France in the 1970s. This reviewer found the continuous adulation of Paxton, however merited, somewhat repetitive. You will enjoy this new volume if you really want to explore in depth the meaning of Vichy over the past sixty years. Given that France was still prosecuting men for war crimes in the late 1990s, Petain's regime is still a hotly debated topic in that country's academic establishment.

This book is an essential text for anyone interested in the history of of France during the Vichy regime. It offers a superlative compilation of the latest scholarship in the field, contributed by some of its most important writers, people like Michael Marrus, Jean-Pierre Azema, Henri Rousso, Stanley Hoffmann, Philippe Burrin, etc. etc. The introduction by Fishman and Smith is a thorough map of the entire contents of the book which, again, provides a rich collection of articles destined perhaps not for the general reader without any background on the subject, although the book itself is reader friendly....

I was looking for a basic introduction to Mardi Gras to share with elementary French classes. This book is big on the past, but has little to do with present day Mardi Gras celebrations. The cover is wonderful, and it was images such as this that I was hoping for more of. If it is JUST history you are interested in, this will be a fine choice.

This book makes use of many pictures and historical references to past celebrations of Mardi Gras.

Rand was not the greatest non-fiction writer. In fact, some of her non-fiction books are downright mind-numbing. _The Voice Of Reason_ sort of plies a thin line between being interesting and just plain pedantic.

Rand was, in essence, a reactionary. She reacted -- and with good reason -- to the 1960s and 1970s, a rather insane period in our time. She makes some excellent points in "Apollo and Dionysis," contrasting the amazing human achievement of the Moon landing with the mud-wallowing revelry of Woodstock.

But venomous polemics do not "reason" make. In the world of Randians, all is black and white. Balance does not exist. Either you are are an Apollonian creature of the mind -- a faceless John Galt -- or you're a craven Dionysian carouser. (Rand never figured out how to, as Hunter Thompson wrote, "wallow with the eagles at night and fly with the pigs in the morning.")

This maddening tendency toward judgment leaches from every essay in this collection.... and is the prime reason why I can't give it a much better rating.

This volume contains a selection of lesser known columns, articles and essays from Ayn Rand's impressive oeuvre. The essays, etc. are arranged into three broad sections: Philosophy, Culture and Politics.

Page after page reveals profound insights into the intellectual atmosphere of the times. The writing is always informative and thought provoking, and quite often brilliant.

In short, this volume is especially suitable for readers already familiar with the gist of Ayn Rand's philosophy and literary writing.

This collection of essaies is invaluable to those individuals who believe that "reason ... is the glory of our nature." In these essaies, Ayn Rand analyzes events in the world from the '60s and '70s, such as the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and the American debacle in Vietnam. There is an incisive clarity to these essaies, and to Ms. Rand's philosophy in general. Her philosophy, that of Objectivism, is not a faith or a creed: it affirms the fundamental principle that man should be guided by his reason in an objective manner, to pursue his own self-interest. Personally, I felt this way about life when I was younger, but I was sidetracked during adolescence (when we all are vulnerable to "collectivist" ways of thinking due to our intense desire at that age to be accepted by our peers) by the prevailing philosophical ideas of the day: that reality is not knowable to us with any certainty, that one opinion is as valuable as another, that there is no objective reality, and that there is no basis for me to have strong convictions about anything. Reading these essaies (after reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) is like coming home again to the reality that was there all along. Rand, despite the unwavering strength of her convictions, was despairing of the chances for America to retain any of the glory with which it was bestowed at its inception. She makes a convincing case that the birth of this nation was during a brief historical flash when the ideas of the enlightenement (e.g. that the distinctive feature of a man or woman is his power to produce earthly success by the power of his intellect, and that I have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of my own happiness) were transcendant, and that the US has been in intellectual (and hence, real) decline ever since. These essaies provide clear, practical instances of looking objectively at events in the world. Ms. Rand shows the rottenness of multiculturalism, while at the same time blasting racism. This is an example of how screwed up intellectual life is in this country: today you would be called racist if you are against the emphasis on multiculturalism in this society. But Rand's point is that people cannot be judged based on their race or other accidents of birth; we should be judged instead solely on the acheivements of our intellect--the products of our reason applied to our free choice. This is a beautiful book that has had a major impact on me. In fact, it has helped to save me from the cesspool of collectivist philosphy that threatens to overrun our world. Incidentally, this in fact may be the good that comes out of 9/11/01: that the people of the US and the world will see how years of appeasement and passivity has emboldened the enemies of reason. Buy this book and read it. You'll be glad you did.