Henry A. Harter has written one of those rare and unique books that comletely and exhaustively decribes the history and details of one of the most fabled railroads in the world. Not only do you read about the rich and famous that helped build this railroad (and all of it's privately owned spurs), but there are detailed plans showing locations and gauges of all the lengths of rails. Long gone RR stations are described in location and historical function. Although it can be a tad dry sometimes, one never loses the feeling of romantism regarding this great period of history.

I certainly hope that someone writes and updated version of this railroad including all the political and natural circumstances that have affected it since it went into disrepair after the 1980 Olympics. Until then, nothing matches this marvelously ,heavily researched book.

The daughter of a Hungarian-born father and Milwaukee-native mother, Edna Ferber spent much of her childhood years in small midwestern towns. Her family, while not observant, always closed their store for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, never missing a Passover seder. Ferber felt that being Jewish was to be subjected to anti-Semitism. In 1917 she wrote Fanny Herself, based largely on the experiences she had while growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin and later in Chicago, Illinois. Her's is a tale of a young Jewish girl trying to become a successful businesswoman in early twentieth century America without denying her Jewish roots or subverting her social conscience. This newly abridged, four cassette, six hour audiobook edition (wonderfully narrated by Suzanne Toren) will introduce a whole new generation of listeners to a remarkable literary talent and an engaging, personal, affirming biography.

Edited by Lawerence Durrell, The Henry Miller Reader encapsulates some of the very best of Miller's writings. It includes sections from the Tropic books, Black Spring, and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. I have the 1956 New Directions edition of the book, and I don't know whether it has been re-edited since that point, but any erotic, or sexual content had to be strained out for the censors. What is left is pure genius. There is a wonderful section on Alfred Perles...otherwise known as "Joey," to those familar with Miller's work. His insights on the writings of Anais Nin hold a certain poignancy in light of their twenty year relationship which both writers had to withold from their readers; Ms. Nin was married still to Hugh Guiller. I would highly recommend this book be purchased along with The Tropic of Cancer, or any other of his works.

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.

I just ordered a number of the Andrew Lang books from Amazon. The Blue Fairy Book arrived yesterday, and I could not have been more disappointed. It came in a very plain blue hardback. I opened it up, and NOWHERE inside is Andrew Lang mentioned, nowhere are any of the illustrations, from either of the two other versions I know. The production quality -- the paper, the binding -- is poor, and the "author" is listed throughout as "Anonymous." The publisher of this book is IndyPublish.com. I don't know the deal, or how they get listed under Andrew Lang, but I recommend that if you want a real Andrew Lang book, don't buy one of the IndyPublish books.

Andrew Lang's series of fairy-tale books are some of the fundamental children's reading of the twentieth and late nineteenth century. The stories are not "original": there's no such thing when they were almost without exception passed down orally; but they are in old, not very modernized tellings.

Many readers who have only seen or read modern, Disney-fied versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Snow-White will not recognize some of the darker twists in these tales. For example, in Sleeping Beauty, when the Prince wakes the Princess and marries her, the story is by no means over. The Prince's mother is an Ogress, whom his father married for her wealth, and it's suspected that she likes to eat little children; that "whenever she saw little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to avoid falling upon them". The happy couple have two children, named Day and Morning, and the Ogress decides to dine on them one day when the Prince is away. Yes, it still has a happy ending, but Disney it isn't.

The illustrations--8 full page, plus 130 smaller ones--are all from the original 1891 edition. They're black and white woodcuts; very atmospheric, and I think most children will like them.

The only thing that might have to be explained to a child is the occasional use of vocabulary that is no longer current. Most often this is the use of "thee" and "thou"; but a few other words will crop up. However, they're usually inferable from context, and the stories are marvellous entertainment regardless.

"The Blue Fairy Book" is amazing. I am planning to collect all of Andrew Lang's color fairy tale books. It has an excellent group of stories from different fairy tale writers, including Perrault, d'Aulnoy, and Grimm. This book was originally printed in the 19th century. It has not been abridged, nor have any of the original pictures been taken out. (Be warned, they're *artistic*) These are the original, unaltered by Disney versions, and contain the nightmarish plots they were meant to have. Anyone who collects fairy tales should have this.

This storyteller's screen is suitably moody, and the "Buried Secrets" book is useful, but neither is 100% essential for a good game of Wraith: The Oblivion. If you have a few bucks to spare, the elegantly dark screen will definitely contribute to the mood of the atmosphere (it looks great by candlelight), the nicely organized reference tables will be a great convenience, and the "Buried Secrets" book will give you a few good ideas.

I consider this screen to be the best White Wolf has made. It has the normal wraith/chains artwork, and spans an extra page from the other Stroyteller's Screens (4 pages total). Beyond that, it has similar information. I just feel it looks much better than the others, and I use it most of the time when I run my games. The book, Buried Secrets, has many little-known facts that are quite interesting. It has the most secrets about what's really going on in Wraith excluding, of course, Ends of Empire. While it is not incredibly useful from a gaming aspect, the book is a great tool to help design role-playing scenarios, as it gives enough information to better flesh out certain adventures that the main rulebook is vague on. I would recommend this book at least for storytellers, and for anyone who wishes to know more about the secrets of Wraith.

Wraith - The Oblivion is a great book. I just read it and I couldn't stop reading it. It adds a whole new dimension to WOD. I use to love playing Vampire the Masquerade but now my frineds and I play wraith. Charon plays a role similar to Caine, but he has his own accomplishments. Try to figure out who is Able (he is not under that name in the book). The Hierarchy is what I believe the Camarilla should have been created like. There is the Rebels for the rebels out there and theres the Heritics for you True Faith Players. The Shadowlands is a whole new world to roleplay.

Henry Fairlie is on the right track, but his effort is marred by his political ambiguity and, especially, by his inability (albeit not unwillingness) to believe in God. Moral law is based on religion, and religion is based on belief in God. Mr. Fairlie's refusal to fully accept this premise blunts the point he wishes to make: Our culture is crumbling under the onslaught of the Seven Deadly Sins in ascendancy (and the situation has deteriorated considerably and visibly since this book first appeared).

Leaving aside his mystifying choice of Vint Lawrence as an illustrator, the only time Mr. Fairlie fails miserably (indeed, it almost cost him a star) is in his pompous and almost incoherent chapter, "The Paths of Love," where he makes such risible statements as: [page 209] "In nothing has our science made us more free than in the fearlessness of its search for truth and its willingness to confront it." Oh, please.

The bottom line? Mr. Fairlie's effort is a worthy one, just not as successful as one would have wished.

Whatever happened to sin? as another book's title has it. Despite our best efforts to discard or "outgrow" the idea, sin remains a woven-in part of the human tapestry. We have not made ourselves into exceptions to human nature, and we are very like other people. Such is the thesis of the late British expatriate journalist Henry Fairlie, who also used to write for The New Republic. His style is very grave, like a less colorful G. K. Chesterton, or an even more disaffected Allan Bloom. He describes himself very aptly as "a reluctant unbeliever". Yet, while he cannot accept that we can in some way grieve the Supreme Being, he is sensitive enough to see the wreckage that sin visibly causes in our earthly lives. "Sin is the destruction of one's self as well as the destruction of one's relationships with others," he says. What makes this be sin rather than just some ordinary failing of character is that sin perverts something indefinably fundamental in us, from which all the rest of our humanity proceeds.

And so off he goes, incisively describing and deploring each of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. His heartfelt, well-supported exposition should win understanding and respect from believers, and should give unbelievers pause. His politics sometimes trip up his argument. "Even our socialism is sinful..."--as if a political system based on breaking the Eighth and Tenth Commandments could ever be anything but sinful. But such missteps do not impede this pilgrim's progress

What does bring everything to a screeching halt is the final chapter, "The paths of love". Here his agnosticism brings him up short, and he is quite at sea trying to formulate a counter-balance to the awful fact of sin. One hopes that he eventually realized before he died that he didn't have to re-invent the wheel. An incredibly brave near-classic from a modern "pagan worthy".

It is difficult to praise this book sufficiently. Henry Fairlie's 1978 book has thankfully been reprinted by the University of Notre Dame Press for a new generation. Fairlie presents the Seven Deadly Sins--Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust--as they manifest themselves in contemporary Western (especially American) society and in individual lives. Whether or not one is religious in orientation (Fairlie characterized himself as a "reluctant unbeliever")this book offers a disciplined optimism in suggesting that "The understanding that we sin is a summons to life."

The psuedo-autobiography is very good at keeping the reader educated of indian terms and traditions. However, there is too much description and not enough action to keep the reader's attention. Also, since the novel is old, the language is archaic and thus does not seem to interesting to today's audience. However, 1850s British India is a fascintaing time and place, and this novel does present the times well, though through the lens of a European mercenary rather than a British officer.

I'm glad I didn't miss this book. So many literary works seem to contain some vengeance or spite, but this is the first work of criticism that I've come across which studies the constant of revenge across a number of authors.

The betrayals described in the book are extreme, and include a homosexual husband writing of his bride's "frigidity" while the two are still on their honeymoon. The book is not for the young or squeamish reader, as Desalvo describes in detail some bizarrely depraved acts committed by adults upon the chidren in their care. There were a few letters from an incestuous grandmother that I found quite disturbing, and would prefer to have skipped.

This is a type of book I never thought I would encounter - an absolutely captivating work of literary criticism. I couldn't put it down.

I used this book to study for the ID boards in 2001. I found
it well organized and thorough enough for most topics. The travel medicine sections were excellent as were the sections on
bacterial infections. The chapters on viral infection could
have been a bit more thorough but were for the most part adequate. The sections on parasitic diseases were very well
written and appropriate for board review. Overall, I recommend
this text for ID fellows and ID practicing physicians but not for physicians in other fields.