I've been searching for some basic knowledge of my Byzantine heritage for quite some time. "Standing In God's Holy Fire" has quenched my thirst. I now understand why the Byzantines have the type of liturgy that we have. This book is a "Must Read" !

It is a great book to have for learning the principals of interventional radiology. I have read since I started my fellowship last year. Dyet's Textbook of endovascular procedures is a complete solution to getting up to most daily interventions,and also including recent procedures, like carotid angioplasty and stenting and uterine fibroids embolization.

When Bennett first wrote this book he was unable to complete the manuscript, so in effect, this book is not complete. Neverthless, it represents a good introduction to spiritual practice in the Gurdjieff tradition, and also one that transcends the Gurdjieff Work into a wider arena. It covers different kinds of work on oneself, including Struggle, the often misunderstood form - Sacrifice and the magic and mystery of Grace. I first read the book back in 1982, and I find myself referring to it over and over again, both for myself and my students.

I loved this story about a young fellow who keeps on making his life work. It is so interesting to read about the depression and obstacles and the positive outcome of his life. I'd love to see it as a film. It's a great story for young people

This book is a biography about Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is a very interesting book that tells you a lot about her life but also about the 19th century and the antislavery cause. The book was very well written but was someimes a little hard to get through. However, I think it is important for people to read about Harriet's life because she was a very important abolitionist. She wrote the book UNCLE TOM'S CABIN which changed a lot of people's minds about slavery. I recommend you read it if you are interested in history.

Elephant tails can be 5 feet long, African elephants can be 13 feet high and Asian elephants can weigh 12,000 pounds. These are just a few of the many fascinating facts children will learn by reading this book. Children may know that elephants do have good memories, but they might not have known that elephants walk on tiptoes, flap their big ears to keep cool, and that their trunks can reach higher than a giraffe. Wonderful photographs accompany the interesting text.

As several other reviewers here have noted, the plot of this novel is based on numerous implausibilities. The biggest, to me, were

- that somebody could predict years in advance that a court case would reach the Supreme Court.

- that the bad guys would try to kill people connected to the brief when precisely that would only reinforce the credibility of an otherwise rather far-fetched theory.

- that the protagonist is so reluctant about sharing her brief with the world, when disseminating it would be the easiest way of ensuring that killing her had no further value for the bad guys (and indeed, they run as soon as the story is finally published).

To compound these issues, the novel ends with essentially the same escapist ending as _The Firm_, the Grisham novel I'd read prior to this one.

However, despite all these weaknesses, this was an entertaining book that made for a fun 2 days of reading. As a further redeeming merit, Grisham had a surprising flash of brilliance when he equipped this novel (written in the early 1990s) with a dimwitted, hands-off, U.S. president, run by his handlers, whose interests were mainly playing golf, packing the Supreme Court with rabid right wingers, and doing favors to his cronies.

Pelican Brief isn't one of Grisham's strongest novels but it's certainly a page-turner, it moves with amazing speed, and it's a heck of a lot better than some of his later stuff, like The Street Lawyer or A Painted House. Many of Grisham's novels rely upon courtroom drama - on one lawyer versus another, with some clever legal or psychological trick thrown in for good measure. Pelican Brief relies almost totally on action. Two Supreme Court justices die on the same day. Darby Shaw, a law student comes up with an ingenious theory - they were shot and strangled by an international terrorist so that the conservative president would appoint new, conservative justices who will help out a case involving an industrialist who's no friend of the tree-huggers. Darby's boyfriend, Thomas, gets dissected by a car bomb meant for Darby. She uses her 'get out of hospital free' card and hooks up with a Washington Post reporter, Gray Grantham. But bad guy terrorist is after her and everyone starts dying...

Pelican Brief's a fun story - not to be taken too seriously - and will provide an entertaining few hours while the dinner's cooking. But don't expect too much else.

I think that an average customer rating of 3 1/2 stars is good for this book. It may not have been the best book I have ever read (thrid grade writing) or the worst I have ever read (try The Secret History or A Map of the World). I thought that the Pelican Brief was an enjoying, fast paced, and occasionally scary read. On a dark night in Washington D.C., a man disgusied as a jogger sneaks into an invalid's house and kills him, his nurse, and the cop guarding him. On the same night, within a porno house, another man is strangled to death. The next day America awakens to find that two key Supreme Court Justices have been assasinated. And in Harvard Law School, a beautiful young woman writes a legal brief...Darby Shaw was only guessing. She never meant what she wrote. Her guess at the murder was completely a joke. But all of a sudden she is witness to a car bomb and her boyfriend is dead- which was meant for her. This sends Darby into hiding from numerous assisins and she may only be saved by Gray Grantham, an aspiring newsreporter looking for his story. I did like The Pelican Brief, but I felt it was too easy to read. I also would have liked it more if Grisham had delved into Gray's character a little more. But it was much better than the pitiful The Firm, which restored my faith in John Grisham.

First, I want to say that I have NOT read this book; I have some comments based on its table of contents. I teach research methods in education, and have served on over a hundred dissertation committees in education and other fields (including several dissertations in psychology), and I would not use or recommend this book primarily because of its extremely limited treatment of qualitative research. Despite the book cover's claim that the book deals with "the entire range of research methodologies in psychology", the coverage of qualitative methods appears to be limited to one chapter on naturalistic and case-study methods. (A second chapter which deals with field research in fact seems to focus on quasi-experimental and single-subject designs, which are not qualitative.) The rest of the book is heavily quantitative/experimental in its approach (there are three chapters on experimental design alone). It seems revealing that although there are sections on the limitations of naturalistic and case study research and correlational and differential research, there is no explicit section on the limitations of experimental research. There is also no discussion of one of the most common qualitative approaches used in psychology--the qualitative interview study, which is different from a "case study". (For more on this approach, I recommend "Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies", by the psychologist Robert Weiss.)

If you are a student in a very quantitatively-oriented psychology department, this may be a useful book for you. However, at a time when many research methods books are devoting much more space to qualitative methods, Graziano and Raulin's book seems a bit anachronistic. Several highly regarded research methods textbooks that are more even-handed in their coverage are David Krathwohl, Methods of Educational and Social Science Research: An Integrated Approach (second edition, 1998), and Colin Robson, Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioner-Researchers (1993; second edition forthcoming). There is also an enormous literature on qualitative methods specifically; simply search this site under "qualitative research".

As a Ph.D. student that is about to start my dissertation I found this book extremely helpful in wading through the various research and analysis methods. Filled with examples (although principally focused on Psychology), the book has helped me plan my dissertation. A great reference book and in my opinion a must have for those who are about to start their dissertation.

I decided to adopt this text for my course as it is comprehensive, up-to-date, and includes a wealth of supplementary materials that are web-based, as well as available on the accompanying CD. Recommended highly for undergrad AND graduate students.

With this book I learnt C++ from scratch. Even now when I can handle C++ quite well and used it to earn a living, I am still using the way the author presented the material in this book to think when I write OO programs. I said it's a "close to perfect" book is, in fact, to express a kinda regret that I need to find some other materials on C++ to tell me more about multiple inheritance. If not taking this into account, I would rate this a 5-star book. From scratch, it shows and walks with you the way from how to write procedural functions, arrays, pointers to classes, from simple private inheritance to polymorphism and from objects to containers. Simply, it's really a great book for beginners.

I have purchased several C++ books, and this one is by far, the best...
This book makes a great subway companion, and it's not a 1,000 page monster. I love the way the author explained pointers. He uses simple graphics to visualize memory...but they are very effective...

I bought this book after I took one semester of programing class with C++, just to freshen my memory by solving many problems. it was very useful, after all, then when I started to take the next programing course, I felt very comfortable. if you think about this price and the ingredients, it is a great buy. i have other C++ books for more detail references. the best part of this book is that you can try all the problems if you want since all the problems have solutions, so you can check right after you solve the problems. (please check for some mistakes in the programs -- you will find out if you write your own programs and run them) I highly recommend this book.

Having read other "Five Views" books before, I really looked forward to this one. However after finishing the book I was somewhat disappointed. Of the five views presented, only three of them struck me as really different from each other: the Wesleyan, Reformed, and dispensational views. The Pentecostal and Keswick views sounded far to similar to the other three to justify their inclusion. In fact, the responses of the authors to each other's essays was almost always "this view is so similar to mine." While that was nice because the debate was never uncharitable, it really just seemed too repetitive.

It would have been better to keep the three views I mentioned above, the Wesleyan, Reformed, and dispensational, and added a fourth view that was tragically not mentioned in the book: the so-called "Oberlin" view of sanctification. This was the view propounded by Charles Finney and Asa Mahan. Though Oberlin professors themselves had slightly different views on the subject, President Fairchild best pinned it down in that Oberlin sanctification does not have the "second blessing" distinctive that Wesleyan sanctification has, but does teach that it is possible to obey God completely. That view is very important historically, and as I said, was not even mentioned in the book.

There are however, occassional discussions in the book that I found myself appreciating that were well referenced.

As it stands now, I'd not highly recommend this book. I would recommend "Wholeness in Christ" by Greathouse for a good presentation of Wesleyan sanctification. Then I'd say to pick up another book (though I haven't found a great one yet) for a presentation of Reformed sanctification. I think the only way to learn about Oberlin sanctification is to read older books by Finney on the subject.

I had to read this book while taking a college course on ethics. I found the studies to be very thought provoking with some having stronger, biblical arguments than others.

I had some problems with the strong remarks held by Dieter and Hoekma for Stanley Horton, the only Pentecostal of the five scholars. Horton, a very graceful and well educated man whom I have met, gave an excellent treatment to the Assemblies of God approach to the doctrine of sanctification. Dieter (Wesleyan) and Hoekma (Refomed) treated Horton with much contempt while not arguing against his points using various texts to back up their points.

I would encourage you, if you are like me and you enjoy studying various theological camps on many issues, this is a book you will enjoy reading.

The New Testament exhorts Christians to "walk in the Spirit". What does that look like practically? How does the evangelical church teach believers how to "be holy" as God is holy? Too often we do not critically examine our teaching -- and the consideration of our teaching against other evangelical views that attempt to do justice to Scripture is often very helpful in evaluating our own position. That is precisely the reason why this book is helpful. This book allows you to read proponents of the views in their own words -- which is a helpful antidote against the mischaracterization that can sometimes occur in a standard theology text.

That being said, because all 5 indeed attempt to do justice to all of Scripture, they are actually not that far different from one another. Where they differ is in nuanced visions of sin, "walking in the Spirit", the question of the old v. new nature struggle, and in "being filled with the Spirit".

Don't be put off if the terms "Keswick" and "Augustinian-Dispensational" are unfamiliar to you. They are actually very common views in evangelical Christianity -- and related forms of both are taught throughout the evangelical Christian church (just not often identified by those terms)! Two very well-known ministries that espouse Keswick teaching are the Christian and Missionary Alliance and Campus Crusade for Christ. "Augustinian-Dispensational" is just a term Walvoord uses to identify the teaching on personal holiness which has been historically associated with Augustine, the early Reformers, and many dispensational and Bible churches today. You'll find it in Jerry Bridges' "Pursuit of Holiness", and probably much other contemporary Christian devotional and theological literature. It basically contends that the old and new natures are alive and active within the Christian believer, whereas the modern Reformed view is that the old nature is empirically dead.

Especially interesting is how each author traces the historical development of the teaching.

I did not find Dieter's and Horton's arguments to be well-defended from Scripture. Fundamentally, I find that the Wesleyan understanding of sin as applying only to intential wrong-doing and the Pentecostal understanding of being "baptized in the Spirit" as referring to charismatic experience are both problematic. The other three make compelling arguments from Scripture, but I must bark this note of caution: all of the authors make too much of the Greek verb tense! Unfortunately, the arguement of the tense of Greek verbs in the New Testament is only a good indicator, not a firm foundation, particularly the aorist -- which does not have to refer to a fixed past event! Rather, the aorist is best described as "undefined" and somewhat fluid in meaning. So we hold must hold exquisitely nuanced theological positions on sanctification in humility -- clinging to the essentials and allowing for some apparent paradox (Paul loves to say again and again in his epistles that 'you have put off the old nature' and then implore his readers later to 'put off the old nature'!).

May God bless you as you read this fine exploration of this important topic of faith and practice.