An excellent work that offers support for the tenets of Chomskyan linguistics. The book offers clear insights into the workings of the human mind and would serve well as a text in developmental psychology as well as for related courses in linguistics. The arguments are lucid and the subject matter is both fascinating and central to a more complete understating of language and the mind.

An excellent work that offers support for the tenets of Chomskyan linguistics. The book offers clear insights into the workings of the human mind and would serve well as a text in developmental psychology as well as for related courses in linguistics. The arguments are lucid and the subject matter is both fascinating and central to a more complete understating of language and the mind.

An excellent work that provides support for the tenets of Chomskyan linguistics. The book offers clear insights into the workings of the human mind and would serve well as a text in developmental psychology as well as for related courses in linguistics. The arguments are lucid and the subject matter is both fascinating and central to a more complete understating of language and the mind.

From an interview with Paulo Lins, published today in the NY Times: "Though Mr. Lins now lives a middle-class life, he still visits the City of God, 'where I still have family and friends and am treated as if I were a celebrity, like Michael Jackson.'" (I'm sure no irony was intended.)

The reporter adds, "Thanks in part to the enthusiastic international response to the movie, the book has been translated into English, Spanish, French, Italian and German, among other languages."

Great book and movie. I will add this to my collectiion. I hope the DVD will have more info on the characters this movie was based on. The truth was bound to come out sooner or later.

Seen the film? Shocked? Now read the book for the real lowdown of life in Brazilian shantytowns.
Shocked by scenes of young children being shot in the hand or foot (their choice) in the film. That's just the tip of the ice berg.
Paulo Lins lived in 'cidade de deus' and he paints us a frighteningly clear picture of its reality. He has since received death threats for all the unwanted attention he has brought to the favela.
A top read. Highly recommended.

Chronologically this IS the last adventures of Conan. He's an old man now, and after this adventure he doesn't return to his homeland; prefering to let his son Conn rule Aquilonia.

A decent read, and better than most crappy Conan-novels not written by Robert E. Howard, though still lacking that certain pulp feeling.

The book starts extremely well with one of the best scenes ever written about Conan (The tavern scene). It's forever burned into my brain. Burn it into yours. The second half lags a bit but over all it's very entertaining. The Isles is an important book in the Conan series because it's the last Conan story. Conan shows that even at 60+ he's still got more than it takes. Great ending.

Back in the mid-60's, when Lancer Books reissued the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, they enlisted the aid of L. Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter to polish Howard's grammar, soften his more "politically incorrect" statements, and fill out the saga with pastiches. This, the last of the stories, is 100% pastiche, but it still has the flavor of Howard's barbarian. I first read it as a teenager, but now that I have passed the half century mark, the story has new resonance. In this adventure Conan anticipates George Foreman by several millenia. He may be old; he may not be the man he once was; but he can still outmuscle most foes, and those he can't outmuscle, he can outfox. At the conclusion of the book you might just get a little misty-eyed when Conan ends his adventure and sails off into the mists of time, never to be heard from again.

As usual for the Chaosium series, editor Price gushes academically about minor entries in the Lovecraftian Derby, and it's never more evident than in this collection of Lin Carter's mythos tales. Carter was a supremely talented editor and a good heroic fantasy writer (I love his Throngor novels) but his mythos writing falls prey to juvenile adoration and extremely flimsy plotting. Price's attempts to defend Carter's over-categorization of the mythos merely exacerbates the silliness of most of Carter's work. Interesting for mythos completists, but newcomers should seek other books in this series that deal with multiple authors (highly recommended: "The Hastur Cycle" and "The Nyarlathotep Cycle").

Robert M. Price and Chaosium Books have scored big again with the latest entry in their growing "Call of Cthulhu Fiction" catalog which explores aspects of Lovecraftian fiction. Price introduces the whole and each entry in The Xothic Legend with his quite considerable and thorough literary, religious and Lovecraftian erudition and iconoclastic wit. Lin Carter's take on the Mythos in his Xothic Legend Tales is an hommage to, and a pastiche of, both Lovecraft and Col. James Churchward (of "The Lost Continent of Mu" fame). The stories are entertaining, sometimes reverential to their subject matter, and offer the classic Cthulhu Mythos frisson of long-expected terror. A good place for the beginning reader of Mythos Horror, and a must for anyone exploring the background and effoliation of the genre.

These are the "Big Kahuna's" of Supernatural Horror. A very well compiled selection of Cthulhu Mythos by Chaosium & Robert Price. Price's introductions to the short stories are educational and perhaps even a bit witty. His writing is even better.
A 'Must Have' for Weird Tale, Lovecraft, or any horror fan.

This book is appealing to young women and mature readers alike. It is a tale of romance with the added dimension of family relations and cross cultural ideas. The text gives the reader a glimpse into the Taiwanese society as well as the feelings, desires and emotions of the two sisters. The book is thoughful and well written.

This book may appeal to high school age girls and older for two reasons. One reason is the romantic story line, with two sisters who respond differently to their cultural tradition of arranged marriages. The personalities and choices of the two twenty-something women are contrasted. The expectations and desires of their parents are clear, but not accepted by either San-yih, the eldest daughter, or Fun-yih, the younger. They each must deal with disappointments in their romantic lives, one as she remains in Taiwan and the other in the U.S., where she has emigrated.
Another appeal is the picture provided of Taiwanese culture in the 1970s and the life of a Taiwanese immigrant to the United States. The book may pique the interest of high school students of Taiwanese background in their cultural heritage and may encourage communications with their elders about life in Taiwan and/or life as a new immigrant to the U.S. Others may enjoy reading about traditions totally unfamiliar to them and find that the book expands their understanding of people.

Before I get into this I need to state that the ONLY reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is because the book doesn't go into GMing enough IMO. It doesn't go into how a good GM is orgnized or how to make good quests or any of that. Because of this you need a good (and probably experienced) GM if you are going to get into the game enough to love it before you quit because of frustration with a new incompetant GM. If you are going to be a new GM and have never been in charge before then I would recomend that you pick up the 3e. D&D DM book and read the sections pretaining specifically to how to make quests, how to make rulings, and how to keep orgnized.

Other then that one point I cannot express enough what a wonderful system this is. It is much easier to learn then every other pen and paper RPG I have seen yet. It goes into detail where detail is required and moves on when the point is made.

There are MANY races to play and unlike D&D it doesn't get bogged down in too many details on the races. It gives the benifits and harms of each race as well as a breif outline of what they are like. No name outlines, no complicated benifits or harms (for the most part), and most of all the format is clean looking and keeps things down to as few words as possible without making things over simplified.

Okay, let's get something straight here. If you're not into the whole furry thing, your opinion of this game may vary. If you hate the whole area (too much Doug Winger?), I suggest you avoid this game.

That said, Jadeclaw is nonetheless one of the more entertaining RPGs I've played in recent years.

The setting is Zhongguo, a rich nation based heavily on medieval China and populated with anthropomorphic creatures. Using the same ruleset from the Ironclaw RPG, Jadeclaw fails to streamline a clunky system, yet pulls out plenty of new tricks to keep the game entertaining.

The dice system's flaws really show in combat - you roll to-hit, and your opponent rolls defense. If you get the higher score, you have the chance to do damage -- but your opponent gets to roll a Resolve check to prevent the damage. The endless chain of dice rolls, coupled with the bonuses and penalties applied to them, makes combat go even slower than it does in the typical RPG session.

Nonetheless, the variety shown here is impressive. Nearly 30 different races can be chosen, each one built from a system that, despite the difficulty of combat, makes it quite easy to add new races that were not listed.

Also a wonderful feature are the martial arts: easy-to-purchase Gifts that can do anything from let you parry twice with a sword to leap over your opponent's head and attack him from behind. And that's just the basic ones!

The introductory adventure that comes with the game leaves something to be desired, although it's not too difficult to link it into an overarching storyline. However, the lack of supplemental adventures all but demands a talented GM.

Overall, Jadeclaw is a game that, although difficult to learn, is different enough to capture your attention and good enough to keep you entertained.

Lin Carter is best known for his editorial work in the field of fantasy, particularly in the creation of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. His own work, alas, all too often emphasized his weaknesses at the expense of some very real strengths. But occasionally those strengths had their chance to shine, as in this solid novel.

While Leigh Brackett may have provided the basic model of his Mars, Lin Carter did something exciting & moving with it. Combining the wish-fulfilling adventure of the best of the pulps, a streak of elegaic poetry, and a clear, direct depiction of a dying culture struggling to resist the rapacious colonialism of a greedy Earth, he created a fine story that lingers after the last page. And while the science has been superseded by real-life discoveries, that hardly matters; the color & haunting, dreamlike longing for something precious but fading is what counts. A worthy addition to the small shelf of autumnal Martian fiction!

Strange and unusual concepts about Mars and it's relationship to Earth, a quest for redemption, and a budding romance all make up this classic by Lin Carter. It is a book that, while short on scientific fact as we know it now (thus resulting in the 4 rather than 5 star rating), is not short on imagination and pure fun!

It is a fast read and not designed to delve too deeply into the background and motivation of the characters other than the main one, but that suits this book as it is not intended to be a character driven story: more a plot driven story with much emphasis on the main character.

An ancient civilization on Mars conflicts with the civilization of Earth and a man tries to regain his own identity amidst the struggle. I do not want to spoil it too much for you, but if you have read and enjoyed the "Martian Chronicles" or any other Martian book regarding ancient civilizations on the Red Planet, this book will also fit your fancy. Get it, you will be happy.

I have used this book, along with other similar sources, for writing a parametric grammar of Persian.The book is coherently organized into ten chapters: 1.Foundations Methods,Arguments,2.Government and Case, 3.Binding Theory,4.A-Movement,5.X'-Theory,6.A'-Movement,7.Barriers,8.LF Representation,9.Binding and Logical Form.10.Head Movement and Minimalism.Beginning with the second chapter the author picks up a syntactic problem and critically examines the solutions offered by linguists. For instance,in chapter four he concentrates on the analysis of the passive and its properties, namely, the movement of the underlying object into the surface subject position of the sentense in terms of a lexical analysis, a movement hypothesis and a chain relationship.Moreover, at the end of each chapter there are ample exercises from varius languages ( except Persian, of course) for readers / students to ponder over. Crucially,readers/students can familiarize themselves with current linguistic as well as syntactic issues and their proposed solutions. Nevertheless, the book suffers from a couple of drawbacks concerning the ultimate plausible solution for each problem and , more significantly, the definition of principles and parameters as a theoretical foundation / approach selected by the author,as the title suggests.I consider the latter a critical issue because there seems to be a fair degree of concensus among researchers concerning the principles which describe univerasl properties of grammatical operations or structures.However, differences of opinions arise regarding the parameters and the components of the language in which they have to be found. According to Chomsy, parameters are associated with the principles of Universal Grammar.Other linguists attribute them to the inflectional system of the language, the fuctional categories or lexical categories in general.From this book one cannot understand the author's position on the theory of parametrisation.

Since Chomsky established the GB model in the early 1980's, many introductory books have been published. Culicover's book came out by the end of the GB fashion when most people were attracted by Chomsky's new ideas of the minimalist program (MP). However, this book is not out of date at all, since Culicover illustrated the GB theory in a very critical way providing with quite a number of problems which cannot be solved at ease within the GB framework. All those problems are interesting issues that generative syntax has to manage. Though the author gave some suggestions, the issues remained open both to the GB framework and the MP followers. After reading this book, you may realize that the GB model is not as good as most people believe and that the burden of the MP will be heavier when it has to take over what left insolvable in the GB.

I mostly agreed with Eric Ma. There are some areas that Wrox needs to review the whole process of publishing Java-related books. Here are some drawbacks that I can draw from reading recent Java-related books:

(1) Repeated Contents: Materials about Servlet, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, etc are repeated over and over many books. This could waste time, money, and papers for both Wrox and readers.

(2)Books or Articles?: I asked myself: is Wrox publishing books or articles? Each book is written by many authors and the book's flow is inconsistent. The assessment that it is not a book but a collection of articles may partially true. It is true that a book if written by a team of authors could speed up the process of releasing it, but if Wrox editors and coordinators have to do their better jobs.

I suggest that Wrox should review its strategy of publishing books to avoid the repeating of materials over and over and thus bring down the cost associated with publishing the books. The final result is: readers and publisher will both save time and money. Otherwise, readers will loose their belief with Wrox.

For the past 2 years Wrox has been publishing books dedicated to Windows-based data access (ADO etc.), but the same cannot be said about their Java/database collection. Although you find chapters on JDBC scattered all-over almost all server-side Java related books by Wrox, there was no single volume from them that teaches JDBC first, and then show how it is used by the newer dependent technologies, until this book arrived. After looking through this book, I must say the authors and editors have done a rather commendable job.

Why do I make the above conclusion? Let me give you my general impression of the book first. A theme repeated in several of my recent reviews on books from Wrox is about the problem in coherence associated with multi-author books. Well, having more than a dozen of authors for a single book seems to be a fact of life (for books from Wrox at least) now, as the publication cycle gets shorter. I was rather surprised to find out that the organization and coherence is very good in this book, i.e., there is very little overlap among chapters. Also, this books uses JDBC cleverly to tie other pieces of J2EE together, making smooth transitions from one chapter to another. If you want to know, this factor alone prompted me to add an extra star to the overall rating of the book.

Let's now run down the chapters of this book quickly. The first 115 pages deals object-oriented and database modeling, and can be skipped by any "Professional" developer. Then after your obligatory intro to JDBC API, the next chapter covers the JDBC 2.0 optional package. This is the best treatment of this topic I have seen. Then another chapter is all about SQLJ, another first. The effort of having a chapter on database performance should be lauded, where connection pooling, prepared statements and stored procedures usage are demoed. The reminder of the book is about applying JDBC in various J2EE components, such as JSP, servlets, EJB, JMS, and XML. For this part of the book, even though I accept the fact the proper stage has to be set for each one of them, I still don't believe the book found the right balance between focusing on JDBC and showing what these other technologies are about. A large number of pages are used to teach basic JNDI, servlets, JSP's, and EJB's stuff (remember there is already a book on J2EE from Wrox!). Therefore, it is up to the reader to discover the real nuggets of gold hidden in this pile, which are far and in between in places. I found that some critical issues are not highlighted or details are lacking, such as how to use connection pooling/data sources in servlets, JSP's, and EJB's, the threading issues related to sharing database connections, and good database practices in BMP EJB's. However, the one thing I cannot complain about is that the book did not forget to teach the transaction aspect of EJB with a good depth (there is a short ans sweet chapter on using JTA/JTS inside EJB). There is also a chapter on the brand-new JDO framework, even though the spec is still in a state of flux. Finally, there are 4 case study chapters in the book - although the design and implementation are limited in scope and as a whole those samples do not teach all you need to do know about enterprise scale J2EE system development, they do provide a flavor of how JDBC is used in real world, together with setting up Tomcat, JRun, Orion, and WebLogic to access MS SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Now my overall take of this book. For VB/SQL and pure back-end PL/SQL developers who are eager to jump on the Java express train and need a suitable platform (especially for the ones who learn best from playing with actual code), I recommend this book as one of several you should own. Compared to other JDBC books from say O'Reilly and Sun's JDBC Tutorial, this book is the most up-to-date, contains the most source code, and has the broadest coverage of related topics. But keep in mind some of the advanced topics such as EJB and JMS can be intimidating for new-comers. On the other side of the coin, people who are advanced in various server-side Java technologies are unlikely to benefit a great deal from this book and should look elsewhere for info (for example Wrox's J2EE and upcoming EJB titles).

This book is full of errors in spelling, grammar, syntax and tense. The story has some promise, but it has suffered so from lack of editing that it is basically unreadable. Don't waste your money on this one.

I found this novel to be very enjoyable. It is a blend of romance and science fiction. I think fans of both will enjoy it. This was not intended to be "classic scifi", just a good story.

The story starts with Felicity, a young lady who's had some recent hardships and finds herself alone and penniless. She is young and naieve and forced to grow up quickly. She is hired as a day-care worker on an outer-space mining colony, where she meets new friends and runs into an old lover. However, sinister things begin to happen...

Ms. Cawthra is an excellent story teller. Her talent for foreshadowing is second to no one. There are many hooks that will keep you interested, and give you the sinking feeling that you know what's going to happen next and the characters will not like it one bit.

I also found the characters to be very likeable. Especially Felicity and the friends she meets at the mining colony, Maragaret, Pheobe, and Amber. They are humorous, sensitive, and very real people. You will feel for them throughout their hardships.

Why did I deduct one star. There are some passages that are graphically violent. Ms. Cawthra has a way with words and a few passages turned me a bit green. It is important for intersted parties to note that this books is an ADULT book with some scenes of gratuitous sex and violence.

In spite of my few complaints, I will be buying her next novel. I'd also like to add that I have had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Cawthra after reading her novel and she is a lovely lady. So treat yourself to a good story and try a new author.

I loved this book. It kept me spellbound through the end. There is a caution about graphic sex, violence, ect. I felt these areas were handled well with english and grammer correct for the situation. I understand there is a book 2 which I would like to order.