This story broke my heart. My family has served at Weirton Steel for over three generations from the ranks of the hourly to the in-house engineering staff, to the management team. The account of Phil Smith has been known for a while, but this is the first time I have seen it in print. Hopefully, business students will take these events to heart to prevent a future tragedy such as this.

The world we live in is dependent on credit and this book gives a very insightful and tremendously useful guidance in understanding the laws that governs our financial rights.

Read Barber & Pykitt's book, JOURNEY TO AVALON, and read their criticisms of this one. And read it because those two have done a bit more work (i.e., a hell of a lot more work) than this fantasy.

Remember: Geoffrey of Monmouth might have been making it all up! There is NO WAY we can know!

Nennius' compilation or "heap" is regarded by most historians as UNRELIABLE, as are the Welsh annals (Annales Cambriae)!

Where does that leave us? With a few lines of pseudohistory from which the entire body of work regarding the "historical" Arthur emanates.

We should all be reading the works of FICTION, literature, regarding Arthur, which are more beautifully written beyond comparison to this book, the so-called "truth".

This book is utter nonsense!

Mostly flawed exploration, based on documents that they treat far more seriously than they should. It is a success, as an introductory work for new readers in this genre. It covers all the main points of the main legends. But as history? My favourite chapter, was the one on Vortigern, though it didn't reveal anything new. I always like to see this historical character gaining wider exposure in these pop-paperback pseudo-histories: the popular culture has never embraced him, as much as Arthur, Merlin, etc. This book, at least, goes someways to addressing that. Otherwise, the highpoints of the book are the maps, photos, and some great black and white drawings (page 196!). The chronology at the back of the book was useful. Some dates however, seem to differ, from author to author, on some events. But, its strength lies in following the times the events may have happened, through cultural changes, until the times they became popularized by now famous authors. If by chance, I seem harsh at all with this book, it is perhaps because I have all the books in their bibliography already.

Myths and legends span around the life of King Arthur and what the truth really is is hard to tell. Phillips and Keatman did a marvelous job compiling the scarce information available and let the reader participate in how the data was compiled and put in order.

Of all the books I read on the historical King Arthur this is by far the best. If there are errors in their reasoning it might attribute to the fact that not many reliable sources on the subject are out there but so far this is the most convincing attempt at getting the most out of it.

Prague by Arthur Phillips is the ironically named novel that takes place almost entirely in Budapest. It follows the lives of five expatriates living in the Hungarian capital in 1990 and 1991: John, the mostly main character, who is the "disproportionately loathed younger brother" of Scott, an English teacher; Mark, who studies the history of nostaligia (!) and whose dissertation was entitled "Vacillations of Collective Popular Retrospective Urges in Urban Anglophone Canada, 1980-1998"; Charles, nee Karoly, Gabor a Hungarian-American venture capitalist representing his New York firm in trying to find the right way to invest in the new capitalist nation; and Emily, a Nebraska woman working as a glorified intern at the American embassy.

The book is largely episodic, though I found myself following an accelerated pace toward the end toward a natural climax and to the I-should-have-known -- but lovely -- falling action. The episodic nature and the way the narrative shifted focus among the five above characters rang true with me, myself a former expat of Prague, 1996-1997. Some of Phillips' observations of this hit home, the sadness when your friends find their time has come to its end and leave, the restless feeling you yourself begin to get when you are tired of hanging out with the same five people all the time.

I also found Phillips to have a very keen eye about how the invaders feel about their host people. John, particularly offers interesting views of the Hungarians he meets. One, Nadja, an elderly pianist in a piano bar who tells him many romanticized stories is most certainly a liar, but he loves her dearly. Another, Imre Horvath, a man whose family has owned an important publishing house in Budapest for generations and has certainly lived through enough to warrant his self-awarded stature, is viewed by John and Charles as a joke, a self-important drama king.

The book takes a very compelling side trip into the history of the Horvath press, following its owners' and its shared fate from its founding in 1808 to the 1990s when privatization is beginning, a very inventive and engaging way to fill the reader in on the last 200 years of Hungarian history.

The narrative zings around a little in time, aside from the focus shifts from character to character, but not too often. Sometimes I thought Phillips was a little too wordy or descriptive, but overall the prose was funny (sometimes laugh-out-loud), cleverly descriptive and memorable.

I visited Budapest with four other people in 1996 at the beginning of my time abroad and I did not like the city, or maybe I was just stressed about spending 48 solid hours with people I barely knew, but I did remember very clearly that the Blue Danube was not very blue. Phillips describes it this way: The river was "the deep cerulean Matisse blue of caramel or of mahogany."

The book is named Prague because all the Budapest expats believed their Prague counterparts had it better somehow. If this book is any indication of the real thing (which the author experienced himself), it might be that the scenery was better in Prague, but the people had the same good and bad experiences in their daily lives.

As a voracious reader and former English major, I feel compelled to defend this novel. A year after reading it, I find myself still thinking about it, about John Price and his Budapest. Simply put, the characters in this novel--and the city of Budapest is a character--got under my skin. I suspect critics may have missed Phillips' subtle humor (e.g. a character works on a thesis on the history of nostalgia), Prague's pervasive understated emotion, and the clever little treats along the way (e.g. the juxtaposition of communist Budapest and the clueless hipsters of the '90s; a character's imaginary wife of a photo left behind in the apartment he rents). Both heartbreaking and hopeful, Prague is top on my list of favorite books of 2002. I only regret I can't read it again for the first time.

Prague is the end...Budapest is the means. And Arthur Phillips is far too stylistic an author to pontificate--although he comes close at times.

"Prague" is a book full of Gen-X angst, yet it maintains a vision of hope and a future--even if that hope is misplaced. Despite the dark moods, the writer's words crackle with wit and humor. The irony of the title is not lost on us readers, though, apparently, the book's characters never do quite realize the transience of their dreams.

Phillips' debut novel follows a group of young Westerners afloat in the sea of Hungary's early 90s ambiguity. I, myself, was in both cities during that time period and believe he admirably captures the raised expectations and shortsighted youthfulness of my generation. Does he capture the pulse and ambience of Budapest itself? No. Even having lived there shortly, I was hardpressed to conjure memories of that wonderful city from Phillips' narrative. He cheats us of the magnificent views from the castled ramparts, of the out-of-this-world concoctions in authentic subterranean restaurants, of the brooding violence and discontent of the young nationals. But, in all fairness, the physical setting is not Phillips' tableau. He chooses, rather, to delve deep into the psyche of his characters, particularly that of John Price, a budding journalist and bastion of virgin ideals. Through John's eyes, we see hopes chased, stolen, dashed, and recreated. Through John's abandonment of his own ideals, we see a generation that flounders on a sea of neo-modern (ie. tediously ancient) amoralism and thinks they'll yet find goodness in a world of gray.

Throughout the book, I was reminded of the caustic and biting works of Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke). Where Palahniuk decides to chuck the culture, Phillips chooses to buck the system while still believing in reform. Where Palahniuk dives into savage and sexual mayhem as a form of shock therapy, Phillips splashes in the same waters with some restraint, with fingers clutching for possible survivors. Although I couldn't always admire or even like his characters, I could understand them. Relate to them. Alternately, hate and fall in love with them. I could fully believe their parts in the larger whole. True, the story dragged at times, begging for greater doses of Phillips' well-nuanced dialogue, but it refused to let go. Some questions never do receive answers...was Kriztina one of Imre's illegitimate daughter's? for example--we are simply left to wonder...but this is not a story about answers. Or is it?

Phillips is a truly gifted writer. "Prague" is a book full of ideas and melancholy and dysfunction. For me, the hopeful ending was the saddest bit of all. To close the pages was to turn my back on friends needing direction.

If you're looking for easy solutions, go elsewhere; if you're looking for anarchist chaos mixed with brilliant satire, go to Palahniuk...but if you're looking for something in between, join with Phillips and go to "Prague."

This title is billed as the Sixth Edition, and reflects the coming and going of co-authors. It is too bad that the editor had so little influence. Sections of this book that stick to their cartographic knitting are excellent. Historical information is very intersting. Basic explanations, such as the evolution of ellipsoids is very well done. Some of the writing is so bad it could have been extracted from a sophmore term paper, sprinkled with such inept phrases as "such as", "similarly", "however" and "in fact". The most glaring deficiency is in the area of computer technology. Either this material has not been updated since some earlier edition, or the author(s) are very uncomfortable with the subject matter. As examples: "Most common procedures used by cartographers have been translated into software programs written in special computer languages such as FORTRAN and C." "Today's well-rounded cartographer is routinely involved with these 'canned' (prewritten) mapping programs..." "The professionsal cartographer should, therefor, have a working knowledge of at least one computer language." We are regaled with three pages of detailed obselescent material on computer structure, but only 23 lines of overview on current instrument technology. There is a whole chapter on fonts and lettering, but no algorithm for conversion from Lat-Long to UTM. The central meridians for the UTM zones are not provided, nor is the DoD lettering scheme. One of the responsibilities of a text book is to arrange the subject matter in a structure where it can be easily referenced. This book reads like a series of articles of varying quality published under one cover, with overlap resolution left as an exercise for the reader.