Tallahassee's own Dr. James and Charles McCulloch, provided a key paper, on the strength of inferences about causes. Often it is easy to blame one source or another for declines, but this paper helps understand the need for "true experiment".

An interesting series is four chapters on temporal perspectives on population limitation, including a discussion of summer versus winter limitation, habitat use in the neoptropics, and habitat requirements during migration. The chapter on insect outbreaks and other perturbations (such as climate) by Rotenberry et al was important perspective, particular here in Florida, where a hurricane can change the vegetative characteristics of an area overnight.

The middle six chapters discuss forest management, and other human effects such as agricultural practices (this chapter was particularly eye opening: with 52% of the land area in the 48 contiguous states).

The final section on landscape scale perspectives, provided problems of management at different scales, from a local clear-cut to continental scale. This perhaps might have been frustrating to the land manager seeking to understand how to manage his 1000 acres, or what to do about the cowbirds that are impacting wood thrush.

There are other threats such as West Nile Virus, exotic species, and perhaps global warming that may become important in the future. Perhaps Faaborg's "Saving migrant birds"... may provide other insights.

Chapter 1 tells of the Central Park Jogger attacked in April 1989. Page 9 tells that if a suspect denies being at the scene of the crime, he has something to hide. Perhaps there's another reason for not getting involved? Detective McKenna got a confession that resulted in a conviction. But in 2003 the DNA evidence caused their release from jail, and exoneration. "There was no physical evidence". Is there a lesson to be learned? Should anyone be convicted on a disputed confession when there is no other evidence? But it happens.

When crimes occur, Detectives show up after to gather the statements of eyewitnesses, and begin their investigation. Sometimes they get information from people who were not there. After spending hours and days the facts emerge to point to the suspects. They are tracked down, arrested, then convicted. Detective McKenna emphasizes that "police work is all teamwork". Many of the crimes just happen by opportunity; there are few masterminds in street crime. One exception is on page 40. After you read this book you can turn to the classic Hammett and Chandler short stories with a new viewpoint.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the book was published. I'm giving it five stars -- not because I really believe she was Anne Frank (I'm skeptical) but as a vote of free speech for a very brave author. The book raises some real questions about how issues from one life might be carried over into another, and how they might be resolved. Regardless of whether you decide the story is fact or fiction, "And the Wolves howled" is a very thought-provoking read!

A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

This book is anything but boring--calling this book boring strikes me as a desperate subterfuge by someone who want to keep its explosive contents from fuller circulation. This book is *fascinating* and explosive, not least because of the very well documented coverage it provides of how Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, used Robert Maxwell to penetrate not just the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, the military, and the national laboratories, but many foreign governments including the Chinese, Canadians, Australians, and many others, with substantial penetration of their intelligence service databases, all through his sale of a software called PROMIS that had a back door enabling the Mossad to access everything it touched (in simplistic terms).

Also shocking, at least to me, was the extensive detail in this book about how the Israeli intelligence service is able to mobilize Jews everywhere as "sayanim," volunteer helpers who carry out operational (that is to say, clandestine) support tasks to include spying on their government and business employers, stealing documents, operating safehouses, making pretext calls, and so on. I am a simple person: if you are a Jew and a US citizen, and you do this for the Israeli intelligence service, then you are a traitor, plain and simple. This practice is evidently world-wide, but especially strong in the US and the UK.

The book draws heavily on just a couple of former Israeli intelligence specialists to address Israeli use of assassination as a normal technique (and implicitly raises the possibility that it was used against Senator John Tower, who died in small airplane crash and was the primary "agent" for Maxwell and Israel in getting PROMIS installed for millions of dollars in fees all over the US Government).

Finally, the book has a great deal of detail about the interplay between governments, crime families, Goldman Sachs and other major investors, and independent operators like Robert Maxwell who play fast and loose with their employee pension funds.

This book is not boring. Far from it. It is shocking, and if it is only half-right and half-accurate, that is more than enough to warrant its being read by every American, whatever their faith.

This book is suitable for both database application programmers and undergraduate students. My undergraduate students, who have had a strong course in Java, would love this text. I am using it as a supplement in this fall's Database Systems course.

Java has really come into its own and Oracle8i strongly supports it. The Oracle8i database server supports both PL/SQL and Java. Oracle's Jserver, which includes a JVM (Java Virtual Machine). The authors provide a clear overview of how Java and now SQLJ fit into the database world.

This book presents very clear explanations for people new to database programming. They discuss JDBC and SQLJ and compare the approaches for accessing a relational database server. The authors give a detailed explanation of how a SQLJ program gets translated into Java source code. Nothing is skipped in explaining what the SQLJ translator does. For example, there is a fine discussion of the SQLJ iterator (which is essentially a Java class; the SQLJ translator actually replaces the SQLJ iterator declaration with a Java declaration for a class.) There is a detailed explanation about how the Java class contains a next() method and has accessor methods for columns in a particular table. The discussion of SQLJ stored programs is clear. Pros and cons of loading/compiling on the client versus the server side are given. There are fine examples of both ways of doing things. They give a very good explanation of how a SQLJ program connects to a database using an instance of a connection class, which is really a Java class that is defined in a SQLJ connection context. In conclusion, this is a very refreshing book that gives theory and detailed programs with great explanations. Java is an exciting language and SQLJ makes database work very interesting. These authors are doing a super job in promoting this new and relatively easy way of developing for Oracle databases. I have not found any other book to come close to what they have done for the database community.

"The House of Bairn" opens with Bjorn, a mage-gifted hunter, accidentally unleashing a MageLord on his unsuspecting world. This Lord, Soren, transported himself from the distant past, before the MageLords died in a world-devastating war, and he sends Bjorn back in time to balance his spell.

In the past, Bjorn, now called Bairn, becomes an apprentice to the MageLord Rylur. He learns magic and math, while plotting the destruction of the MageLords, who rule the world with no consideration for the powerless. Martin makes an interesting link between this world's magic and modern theories about subatomic particles, and the conversion of matter to energy; in this world, magical Power is produced by the destruction of matter, not a nuclear explosion.

Bairn eventually provokes a war between the male Northern Alliance and the female Southern Alliance. After the war, he ends up as the most powerful man in the world, lives for thousands of years until the time he, as Bjorn, released Soren, and returns to set the world to rights. He defeats Soren, and forcibly establishes peace between normal people and the magi, who have lived in hiding according to his laws. He also miraculously saves his parents from death, and ends up with three loving wives.

This whole book is basically adolescent wish-fulfillment. Bairn, alone of all people, is willing to study Power reservoirs, and so learns the secret of converting matter to Power; he doesn't tell anyone, and for some reason, Martin assumes no one would ever be able to duplicate Bairn's experiments. Be serious, please.

Also, Bairn has so much Power that he can effectively take over the world, and for many intents, does so. He provokes a world-devastating war, instead of trying to change the future. He could save thousands in the years he spends on the moon, yet he only saves his parents. He imposes sanctions against any normal people who harm the magi, and enforces them, yet doesn't do a thing to stop any other crimes. We're supposed to treat this man as the hero? This is supposed to be an emotionally satisfying conclusion to a story of hideous persecution?

"The House of Bairn" is selfish, childish trash. No, I wrong trash. This is tripe. It is, however, reasonably well-written and entertaining tripe, though it left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.

The author has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Heidegger's critique is accepted, that Aquinas' philosophy does not answer to it. The oblivion of Being in Heidegger's sense is definitely not the oblivion of the act-of-being (esse) in Etienne Gilson's sense. Where the book is very weak, however is in refuting the counterclaim of Lotz that it is Heidegger who has fallen short of Aquinas and not vice-versa. Up to this point, Caputo faces the issues squarely, but here he turns away. Either he seems not to understand the counter-charge, which is difficult to believe after his fine exposition of thomistic metaphysics, or he simply has his heart set on the postmodern path. He cannot seem to muster much more than to fall back on stock terms, such as "radicality" of Heidegger's critique. Yes, radical it is, but true?

Caputo's final effort to discern a Heideggerian mysticism underneath Aquinas' metaphysics really is almost not worth commenting upon. To suggest that Aquinas' mystical experiences involved this kind of gnostic and historicist spirituality is absurd, bordering on the scandalous.

Finally, while the book is generally well balanced in tone, the author sometimes takes up a rather defensive and patronizing posture towards Aquinas when Heidegger's critique is on the rocks.

All in all, I got something out of this book, at least the first half. But it has the weaknesses I mentioned.

"We do not live long enough to learn all of the things which it is essential for our survival to know:" and Harold Bloom, "there's no time to lose reading bad books." Reading for Life provides not only a path of guided study for the lifetime student, but, through the commentaries, examples of Godly leadership, and Godly readership, from the faculty of one of the most distinguished liberal arts facilities in the country.
As a writer and a student of literature, I've rarely been so (grandly, confidently) assured of the value of this discipline, as by Reading for Life
[I've also rarely felt so ambitious!]