Ogilvie's treatment of Acts was easy to read and educational. He made a two thousand year old book come alive with its historical context and spiritual importance. This was the first of this series I read, and it prompted me to buy more. The style of the other authors has not measured up with his.

This book is stylishly presented with amazing graphics and beautiful photos. The guiltily sexy pictures of hot models add a sense of uniqueness. I find the use of blood and dirty models to be not offensive, but entirely appealing. This book is reccomended for all who enjoy the beautiful geometry of the human body and the contented irony of the modeling world as seen through a woman's eye. I am moved to say there is no such work as pornography, only pictures. This collection of photographs is by far more introspective and inviting than any I have seen to date.

Othniel Charles Marsh died in the last year of the nineteenth century. The names coined by Marsh for his dinosaur discoveries are better known than his own: Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops, to name just a few. Before death intervened, Marsh had planned a series of richly illustrated monographs. The illustrations were prepared, but the monographs on the Sauropoda and Stegosauria were never written.

In 1966, the beautiful but all-but-forgotten illustrations were unveiled by John Ostrom and John McIntosh in the book Marsh's Dinosaurs. Now this wonderful book is again available, with a new introduction by Peter Dodson, and an updated history including the exploration and research that have taken place during the thirty-plus years since the book was originally published.

Marsh's Dinosaurs is not your garden variety dinosaur book. There are no color plates or discussions of the latest controversies. This book focuses on the fossilized bones of dinosaurs that lived near the end of the Jurassic period in North America, and which were discovered in spectacular abundance at a place called Como Bluff, which paleontologist Robert Bakker calls "the Real Jurassic Park."

If you want to see what Stegosaurus plates look like, or the vertebrae of Apatosaurus, the bones are here, with detail that few photographs can capture. Here, too, is the large camarasaurid cranium that Marsh selected as the skull for Brontosaurus. Except for trace fossils such as trackways and a few skin impressions, our notions of what the dinosaurs looked like and how they lived are built on bones, and the bones are here to behold. For anyone whose interest in dinosaurs has gone beyond the popular summary, and who wants to go further than plaster and resin restorations in museum displays, this book is for you.

The illustrations are preceded by a history of the discovery and working of this paleontological gold mine. This section of the book includes watercolors by Arthur Lakes, whose sketches, diaries, and correspondence with Professor Marsh provide an eyewitness account of the thrill of discovery at Como Bluff, as well as the hardships involved, and the inevitable conflicts of the colorful personalities.

For those with an interest in art, the charming watercolors of Lakes provide an interesting counterpoint to the magnificent lithographs. Here we have the human history of discovering dinosaurs, over one hundred years ago, and the history of the dinosaurs themselves, over one hundred million years ago.

I heartily recommend this book to the dinosaur enthusiast. But for those of us with a passion for the denizens of the Jurassic Morrison Formation, this book is a necessity!

As a business user in publishing who's just upgraded to Windows XP I found this book excellent. It's mercifully free of jargon and provides a comprehensive guide how to get maximum use out of XP. XP is fast - but it's significantly different in appearance to previous versions of Windows. I'd recommend this guide to the general home XP user as well. It supplies all the basic info you'd expect - creating folders and files, printing, internet use, shortcuts, using the explorer bars - as well as some you might not (eg. how to customize XP for a user with a disability). For the business traveller there's a helpful section on how to use XP on a laptop, including tips on how to specify new dialing rules, use a calling card and encrypt folders.

As someone who in the past has struggled even with one of the Dummies guides I found this book very straightforward as it cuts its way through the jungle of faxing, blocking or routing messages, security settings and conferencing with Net Meeting. Not to mention how to set up a distribution list or a Newsgroup account.

The section on Administrative Tools Demystified is very useful. As the authors point out, data has an inherent tendency to fragment and no user, no matter how expert, can avoid this problem. The advice on checking for disk errors and defragmenting files is lucid and to the point. With this guide every XP user should be able to optimize their system for peak performance.

The book has a pretty neutral tone (unlike the sometimes irritatingly folksy tone of the Dummies series), though a dry wit sometimes surfaces. The section on what the authors' call XP's plumbing aims to supply "all the information you need to appear very knowledgeable the next time that bad-tempered tech-support guy barks his questions at you".

A final section is devoted specifically to business projects. Topics include setting up a small network, working with a client/server network and last but not least troubleshooting system problems and errors (including guidelines for setting up a diaster recovery plan). A useful glossary defines terms like "Ethernet address" and explains enigmatic acronyms (IAB, IANA, ICANN, ICS, IETF etc).

For business users this is definitely the authoritative guide to XP Professional but XP Home users should find it useful too since it also covers features like Media Player and Movie Maker, printing photos, protection from viruses, working with floppy disks, and all those other things which the home PC user is likely to use.

Clowney gives a straightforward and helpful exposition of this significant epistle. This series is highly readable, and Clowney's contribution on I Peter is no different. He has clearly thought long and hard about most of what he says, even if some of the argumentation for his views is left out of the book.

For a more serious exegetical commentary, look to Paul Achtemeier's Hermeneia volume, J. Ramsay Michaels' work in the Word Biblical Commentary series, or Peter Davids' NIC volume. For a more expository commentary, this book stands with I. Howard Marshall's IVP New Testament Commentary as the best you can find.

Marshall has more of a scholarly bent, and his footnotes contain much information that Clowney either leaves out or works into the text, which makes Clowney's work a little more uneven. Sometimes he devotes much attention to an issue (e.g. his excellent treatment of the spirits in prison passage, encapsulating some of the material and arguments Wayne Grudem presents in his excellent appendix on the topic in his Tyndale commentary, but Clowney does so in a more shorter and more readable manner).

Other subjects get shorter shrift, and you would need a more in-depth commentary to get more background on those. Marshall seems to give a little more depth to more issues with some exegetical help in the footnotes and for that reason may be more helpful to someone who asks questions about that sort of thing. But I enjoyed Clowney more out of the two and got more out of his work personally. As straightforward exposition, this is great work.

Peter Cozzens rightly compares General John Pope's memoires with those of U.S. Grant and W.T. Sherman. This is a highly readable account from one of the participants in some of the least-understood episodes of the Civil War.

Of course, Pope's writings are not "new." As Cozzens relates, the entries which make up this book appeared in the National Tribune and other Reconstruction-era publications. However, they have spent the last century forgotten by the general public. Cozzens and his colleague, Gerardi, have done a great service both to Civil War scholars and to the casual Civil War buff by bringing Pope's reminiscences and analyses to life.

What is most surprising is the humor, candor and generosity of a man who has gone down in history as a narrow, bitter mediocrity. For example, devotees of General Lee, whose comments largely consigned Pope to history almost as a barbarian, will be surprised to read Pope's poetic evocation of the beauty of Virginia and the nobility of its citizens.

In a similar vein, readers will benefit from a "fresh" take on a wide range of issues -- such as the relationships between Lincoln, Stanton, Halleck and McClellan -- from a player very much in the know, but whose views have gone largely unremarked.

My only cautionary note would be that an appreciation of this volume depends upon a basic understanding of the events of the war, and perhaps also upon an introductory familiarity with the post-war debates on those events.

This book by Iron Crown is a quality addition to the middle earth roleplaying world - it combines excellent material with an easily understandable, logical presentation pattern. I personally find Mirkwood the most fascinating area of Middle Earth, and to be able to acts within it is great fun. Dwarf, elf or hobbit; no character should be without a bit of first hand experience under the portentious bowers of this ancient forest. If you only buy one supplement for the MERP game system, this should be it!

I take the course this term. And I think this book is great.

Walter Benjamin's "the object IS the theory" certainly complies with this marvellous book. Lots of pics and intelligent texts make a very important catalogue of new insights in art history. Although art historians know lots of the depicted art works already, this book re-orders them in quite a startling and refreshing way, telling the story of early modern art in a very concrete and no-nonsense, but richly articulated way. Wonderful imaginative associations with the classic moderns we all had are now elevated in this new canon. The theories on which this catalogue are based are simple and instructive, enlightening.

As with all of the National Audubon Society's field guides, the "National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Rocky Mountain States" is a most worthwhile purchase, perfect as a gift or for your own collection. The guide is durable and very portable, which makes it well suited for use in the outdoors. More importantly, it has excellent content. Despite its small size, the field guide contains a wealth of information. In addition to the usual focus on flora and fauna species, there is information on constellations, parks, ecosystems, and more. While the depth and detail of the information in the various sections is not vast, the breadth of subject matter more than makes up for this; the information presented is ideal for a general field guide. Moreover, the book is beautiful, filled with gorgeous color photographs. Residents of the Rocky Mountain states and non-residents will both love it.