Three black youths are killed on the mean streets of Los Angeles. There is not one thread except for the city and their race to link the three victims. Yet they all seem to have been murdered by the same killer. Still, murders of black males in LA is like apple pie to most of America, so no one in authority or the media pay any attention to the killings. In fact the only person besides family members to show any interest in the three deaths is African American private investigator Ivan Monk, who believes the triple killings are linked, possibly the victims of a serial killer who is targeting young black males. ..... Ivan tracks the killings back to a small Oregon town called PERDITION. He arrives at the town and quickly wishes the trail had led elsewhere as Ivan is caught up with a white supremacist group and some vicious skinheads. Before long, Ivan realizes that it is him against the mob on their turf. If he is not extremely careful, Ivan might find himself the next victim. ..... With his second novel starring Ivan Monk, Gary Phillips shows that the talent he demonstrated with VIOLENT SPRING was not a flash. PERDITION, USA is a wild ride that takes readers back and forth as it journeys through the different scenes. This strange trip is not for everyone, but to, at least this reviewer, fits the lead protagonist's persona as a hard boiled detective and makes this mystery worth reading. .....Harriet Klausner

Ohmigod! This book is as close to a roller coaster as you can get. It doesn't quit. Marley is one mean mother (shut your mouth) and Phillips abuses his main character through a tortuous ride up from Tijuana to Sacramento with more action packed adventures than any Hollywood blockbuster has served up in many a summer. Buy this book. Read it. Make others buy it. Pass it along. Leave it at bus stops. IT IS THIS SUMMERS MUST READ BOOK!

Censored 1999 is a great resource for learning about the atrocities that corporate media overlooks. However, none of the articles present enough information; articles involving the death of millions of people, big money corporate scandals, and other major issues are usually given 2-3 pages. While Censored 1999 provides resources where the reader can get more information on these topics, the book itself has too much breadth and too little depth. This can hardly be blamed on Censored 1999, though; if the media itself did a better job of covering the real issues, then all of 1999's news wouldn't have to be crammed into a single book. Censored 1999 is a necessary index to the real issues, but if you want the full story you'll still have to do most of the research yourself.

The mainstream press controls what you see on the evening news and for most people that may be find, for the rest you need to read this book. What you haven't been told just might surprise you.

From how the United States has undermine the nuclear test ban treaty to tax money use to support death squads and 23 other "missing" stories, you may find yourself outraged and infuriated and maybe a little scared.

Project Censored has certainly done their homework with book; they bring out what we really need to know, not at all like the mainstream media reporting about sex in the oval office.

It would behoove every person to buy this book and begin to read reality for a change. It would also behoove everyone to take a closer look at what is being reported versus what they really need to know.

The top-censored stories of 1998 are more nightmarish than usual. The corporate gods whose interests are best served by the underreporting or ignoring of these stories are becoming stronger and stronger. Corporations may soon be able to sue and defeat governments whose citizens are protected by current laws; Monsanto may bankrupt farmers with its one-shot sterile seeds; fluoride may make you sick or kill you; the same company responsible for your breast cancer may sell you drugs to cure it; etc.

Every American citizen should read each year's edition of the Project Censored neglected news. If collectively we do not act, we are doomed.

BOOK CONTAINS A LOT OF PICTURES WHICH MAKES IT VERY EASY FOR THE BEGINNING USER TO FOLLOW.

The use of screen prints to assist the reader/student in learning an application is not a new idea. What the authors have done here, though, is use them extensively throughout the book.

There are virtually no "blind spots" in the learning process. The reader simply cannot miss a step. I cannot stress how helpful this book has been in illustrating how Access works.

The projects the reader goes through are very practical and the different types of tests at the end of each project reinforce the learning. Highly recommended!

How have I lived this long w/o knowing about Gary Phillips?!? These books rock. It's an exploding video happening before your eyes. Only gave this one 4 stars because the second one in this series is even better.

Readers who, like myself, have heard good things about Gary Phillips but don't want to commit themselves to reading the four Ivan Monk books should find this a good starting place to sample his work. Former Vegas showgirl Martha Chainey makes an interesting protagonist. She's not a cop, a private eye, or any of the typical mystery heroine professions. Although a courier for the Vegas mob (such as it is in the 21st century), she's also not a crook. She's just a woman doing her job, until events force her to track down thieves and murderers, if only to clear her own name.

Mr. Phillips does a great job creating distinctive characters. While some characters are more likeable than others, almost everybody makes an impression. He also evokes a real sense of place in his descriptions. Best of all, he keeps the story moving and the tension high, rarely slowing down, never letting the reader forget that Chainey is working against the clock to save her own life.

The book isn't perfect; there are one or two too many coincidences, and sometimes characters' sexual quirks were played so broadly they almost felt gratuitious. And while the main plot is resolved by the end of the book, Phillips does tease his readers with a cliffhanger about future threats to Chainey's life. On the other hand, the main story ends with a stark simplicity that I found refreshing, and I didn't mind the dangling plot threads. Real life never ends neatly, and now I have an excuse to pick up the next book in the series.

I really enjoyed Martha Chainey in her role as mob courier and ex-Vegas showgirl. This is a great new character and series.

As a young, college-educated Christian, I saw this book (and the movement of PK for that matter) as a last-ditch attempt to preserve patriarchal ideals popularized in the 40s/50s.

In one chapter, Dr. Tony Evans claims that the "sissification" of men in America is to blame for ALL of our problems. About these "feminized males," he writes, "Somehow, many men got the idea that the definition of manhood has to do with how many women they have conquered and the number of children they have sired." I think Dr. Evans needs to reevaluate his definition of feminine, because those attributes sound distinctly unfemale. Or does he really think that females are overtly licentious?

There are a number of purportedly "true" stories relayed in the book which in no way could possibly be true. These "promise" keepers can't even keep a promise about honesty and tell genuine stories with less zing.

All in all this book seems to be just another painful example of someone trying to make a buck off of Christianity. It happens every day, on TV, at the bookstore, and in church.

** I gave the book 2 stars because it is entertaining.

This is an awesome book. If the men in my country (the United States) would take to heart the principles in this book, a whole lot of unhappiness and misery would be eliminated.

I found this American book being used in an Australian church and brought it back to England. It works here too! Covering key issues that men need to get hold of it formed the basis for the start of men's ministry in our church. Some "Transatlantic adaptation" was necessary particularly in areas dealing with racial disharmony, but apart from this it "made the journey" very well.

After being fired from his job as a union organizer in 1989, Gary Phillips took a writing class with Robert Crais (author of the Elvis Cole series) on how to write a mystery novel. Crais taught the class how to structure a book by dissecting Robert Parker's first Spenser mystery, The Godwulf Manuscript (see Orrin's review of A Savage Place). Phillips eventually found a way to incorporate his own liberal social beliefs, the elements of the classic hard-boiled private eye genre and the backdrop of post-riot Los Angeles into his first Ivan Monk mystery, Violent Spring. Then he and John Shannon (see review of Concrete River) put together their own publishing outfit and printed the book. As a result of their success, the Monk books have been reprinted by Berkley and are now readily available.

There has always been a weird dichotomy in detective fiction. The private eye is in a certain sense something of a bleeding heart--trying to protect innocents from the corrupt system, trying to heal the pain of their clients, often protecting wrongdoers whom they feel should not be punished, and so on. But on the other hand, they are fundamentally conservative--adhering to rigid moral codes, fighting evil, completely alienated from bureaucracy and government in general. So there is nothing really new in what Phillips is trying to do here.

Ivan Monk is a former Merchant Marine, former bail bondsman, now absentee owner of a donut shop and full time private eye. When the body of a Korean merchant is found at the groundbreaking for a new business development in South LA, both the Korean Merchants association and the white developers hire Monk to look into the murder. It is assumed that Monk, because he is black, will be able to investigate the seeming gang related nature of the killing without ruffling feathers in the Hood. But Monk finds himself ensnared in a vicious web of politics and ends up caught in the middle of a turf battle between black street gangs, white developers, Asian merchants and Latino community activists. As Phillips says, modern LA most resembles the Balkans, with the different ethnic groups all struggling for their piece of the pie and mostly willing to do whatever they have to do in order to get it.

Phillips does try to inject some liberal cant into his tale, but it is mostly too formulaic or downright ridiculous to take seriously:

Not that Monk laid the entire blame for gangsterism at the feet of men like Reagan and Bush. Still, he had to admit that they had set a fine example as the biggest gangbangers of all with their violent escapades in Grenada, Libya, Panama and Iraq--all while the cities went to hell and the young folk emulated their elders.

Uh huh, I can see the though process of that young hoodlum now: "I was going to finish high school and get a job at Go-Go Mart while I went to Community College, but now that we've bombed Qaddafi, I'm going to deal crack instead." You betcha.

But if you can gnaw your way through these brief servings of tripe, he does serve up an action packed mystery set in a milieu that is unfamiliar, fascinating and frightening. The tribal politics make for a classically tangled web and Monk is an affable guide through the thickets.

GRADE: B+

Gary Phillips' _Violent Spring_ introduces readers to his detective, Ivan Monk, a great new hardboiled private eye for the 90s.

Monk is hired by two seemingly disparate groups, a Korean Merchants' group and SOMA, Save Our Material Assets, a group interested in rebuilding downtown LA, following the riots of 1992, to look into the murder of a Korean businessman, whose body is uncovered during a ground-breaking ceremony. Monk gets involved in a politically-charged, racially diverse investigation that threatens to spark more violence, the closer he gets to the truth.

I'll be honest--this book did take a while to get going. The first hundred or so pages didn't really grab me. But as I stuck with it, Monk and his group of friends and relatives really began to grow on me, enough so that I immediately started into Phillips' second book in this series, _Perdition USA_. Monk is very reminiscent of Walter Moseley's Easy Rawlins and part of a growing renaissance of African-American detectives in the 90s (see also Gar Anthony Haywood and Robert Greer, among others).

Based on what I've read, Phillips and Ivan have a great career ahead of them.

This guide to Access 97 was very easy to use, but very thorough. I found it a great resource, even though I am now running Access 2000.

This is book is part of Zondervan's Counterpoints series. According to the editors of this work, the purpose is to bring Christian thinkers together to discuss the question of the salvation of non-Christians. The contributors are: (1) John Hick, advocating pluralism; (2) Clark Pinnock advocating inclusivism; (3) Alister McGrath advocating a somewhat exclusivistic position; and (4) R. Douglas Geivett & W. Gary Phillips advocating exclusivism.

As is often the case with this series, the book suffers from poor editing. All of the essays are worth reading, but they generally don't deal with the alleged topic of the book. For example, Prof. Hick tells us that he believes in universal salvation and that he has written a book arguing for this position, but he doesn't give his reasons in the essay. Prof. McGrath touches on the issue, but not in any great detail. Prof. Pinnock deals with the topic in a limited manner. It is only Profs. Geivett & Philips who actually go into the question in some detail. They provide an exegesis of Acts 4:12 and some other passages. However, none of the other contributors responds with any detailed exegesis. What is often seen as the key passage concerning the salvation of non-believers -- Romans 2 -- is only mentioned in passing. So, this book is really a discussion of religious pluralism, not salvation.

In spite of my criticism, I think this book is helpful to anyone who wants a background on the general issue of religious pluralism. If you are looking for a discussion of evangelical views of the salvation of non-believers, then this isn't the place to look.

I like all the differing views. While I am a conservative, I like the other points of view. This series is usually good for exposing differing views.

I was somewhat disappointed in this particular book, since I was hoping it would deal with what salvation means (Saved from what?) and how people are saved. Instead, it focuses exclusively on who may be saved.

Without a good understanding of the meaning of salvation, it is hard to be confident about who it may or may not apply to. However, the WHO question seems to be of more concern than the WHAT, WHY and HOW questions to most people interested in questions of salvation.

I got this book in a class on MS Access, perhaps I went into it with too high of expectations, but the book is basically a wizard walkthru.

If you have the basic ability to click "Next" on a wizard and select the basic styles you are already well beyond the scope of this book. Sixty percent of each page is full colored, often pointless, illlustrations about the task at hand. I recall one section where the book used three pages and three seperate diagrams to resize a text box on a form.

Calling this book "Comprehensive" or applicable for the "Expert" skill level is like saying playdoh is the prefered material of master artisans.

Microsoft Access 2000 Comprehensive Concepts and Techniques
by Shelly and Cashman is a good text if you are completely new to computers and/ or want to learn MS Access without instruction. If your skills already include Excel or any level of Access expertise, then the text will likely be too slow for you. The style and layout make it easy to work through on your own but makes the text unsuitable as a reference source for specific MS Access information.

I have never used Access before and wanted to learn it. I got this book in a college course for a beginner course on Access. I thought the book was perfect. Lots of diagrams and it walks you through everything step by step with great explanations. I have other books on Access, but this one was the easiest for me to learn from. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Access that has no experience in it what so ever.