Yes, I too have read all of Phillip Margolin's books, starting with his best, Gone But Not Forgotten, and then going backwards to his first effort. Maturity is a great attribute in a writer, and Mr. Margolin has certainly matured, but why has he written this book? As an avid reader of Margolin firmly over Grisham and forsaking all others, I, like one of his characters, am searching for the answer to the real mystery: why write this book? This novel is confusing, and I don't mean complicated. Characters are absentmindedly tossed to and fro like deck chairs on the Titanic. The plot is interesting enough, but it borrows a major part of the Firm that any fiction reader will see coming far before the character sees it. (If poor Quinn had read The Firm, he would have cancelled the trip to St. Jerome!) I feel as pained as Judge Quinn putting old Gideon in jail for two years. I love Phillip Margolin's books, and I'll buy the next one. But I have to be honest and say that the only joy I got out of this book was in saying that Phillip Margolin is the ONLY author I've read the entire works of, with the exception of William Shakespeare. (And they made me do that in the English department to get my college diploma in English). The usage of ramshackle twice in 50 pages makes it looked like the author was rushed by his editor. I think that's the real mystery in The Undertaker's Widow: a book had to be written. Case solved. Back to work!

Like many reviewers I have read and enjoyed mr.Margolins earlier books and am a little surpirsed with this one. The plot is OK, if somewhat simple. It does not take too long to figure out the main culprits, but the issues raised are interesting. What I find puzzling is that the book reads like it has been written in two weeks and somehow bypassed a good editor. Some parts of the story are far too long (like the development of the marriage between Laura and Quinn or the early court room scenes) and others are an insult to the readers intelligence, like not sharing the findings of the M.E.officer with the reader. What annoyed me finally was one of the recommendations on the paperback cover claiming that "the book reminds me in many ways of IN COLD BLOOD but in a way it is even better". That is bullocks and the publisher should know that.

Margolin definitely has another bestseller here with all the twists in the plot. The situation is a judge faced with some of the most difficult choices in his life at one of the times in his life when his marriage is also in danger of failing. Some of the plot elements are evident to the reader (like the fact that someone is being set up as a "patsy") but the story itself grips the reader so hard that it's hard to put it down until you've read the conclusion. The characters are portrayed realistically--the reader feels empathy for the judge as well as Senator Crease, the undertaker's widow. Judge Quinn has to decide whether to live by Lincoln's credo which he has hanging on the walls of his chamber or to try to save his reputation and his position using any means necessary. Margolin is Grisham without the political commentary and with a lot of pathos.

I am being charitable to have given this book a 1 rating. If you want a reliable book, try to find BACKGROUND OF A BANDIT: THE ANCESTRY OF JESSE JAMES by Joan M. Beamis and William E. Pullen. Otherwise this will have to do. Steele's book has a chapter on the "Tennessee James Family" that should be taken with a barrel of salt. There are plenty of James families scattered across the country, but it's a subject of question as to whether there is any relationship with Jesse James of Missouri. I have heard that the errata in this particular book would be substantial.

This is an execellent resource book for James family researchers. All background information appears in order. Very detailed and full of family knowledge. A book worth investing in for any James Family historian.

"Data About Us: Statistics" is one of the Connected Mathematics Project units, a set of units designated for grades 6-8. "Data About Us: Statistics" explores 4 different types of graphs- line plots, bar graphs, stem-and-leaf plots, and coordinate graphs, along with the 3 averages- mode, median, and mean. Instead of chapters, the book has investigations, and has 5 of them. Each investigation explores a different concept. In each investigation, there a certain number of sections. Each investigation has up to 5 sections. In each section, there is a problem. The problems are named according to what the investigation and section is. For example, if the problem is in Investigation 1, Section 1.2, the problem is called Problem 1.2. Following each investigation is a lengthy set of ACE (Applications-Connections-Extensions) questions. They are mostly reasoning and critical thinking but also include drawing graphs. At the end of the unit, there is a unit project in which you conduct a survey regarding typical characteristics of a middle schooler, make graphs, analyze the data, and conclude what the typical characteristics are. So, all in all, I would give this text 3 out of 5 stars because some of the questions are quite repetitive and moronic (e.g. How do you find the mean?) and require sentences and sentences of reasoning.

When word got out that "The Twilight Zone" would make its move to radio with Stacy Keach filling in for Rod Serling as
host, the response was generally on the order of, 'Uh,
how can you go from TV back to radio? And why
Twilight Zone to make the regression?' Well, the producers
of the series obviously saw no problem with it...they
pay CBS their fees, get the product on the shelves,
and collect the cash from the sales.

This is, unfortunately, another example of an

over-commercialised, slapdash attempt to revive
and sequelize a classic masterwork....sort of like
taking Shakespeare and cutting out all the middle-English
so everyone on the planet can understand it in "plain"
English. Bad example...and call me a mindless dolt
for using it. But that's exactly what's happening
with these Twilight Zone radio dramas.

The producers hooked Dennis Etchison, an excellent
writer, to expand and water-down the great old stories
of Rod Serling (and yes, the stories of Richard Matheson,
Chuck Beaumont, and other writers are going to be
adapted for radio as well, sans a few segments
that don't work well on radio including Matheson's
near-silent "The Invaders" and Serling's highly visual
"Eye of the Beholder"). Sadly, it is all too apparent
that Etchison knows, deep down, that the work of
the old writers can't be topped. For a show like
"The Twilight Zone", whose domain was almost like
a world parallel to our own, with the entire universe
as its breeding ground,
to take its stories and bring them back to the mundane and the reality-grounded
as radio programs is pointless. These first two sets
really come off as no more than bland recitations of
old stories that fans know inside and out from the
original TV versions.

The actors for the first series of eight dramas
include Jim Caviezel, Lou Diamond Phillips, Tim
Kazurinsky, Jane Seymour, James Keach, Blair Underwood,
Kim Fields, Chris MacDonald, and Ed Begley Jr.
Of these, only Jane Seymour does a credible job
as star of Serling's episode "The Lateness of the Hour"
(which originally starred the late Inger Stevens).
Tim Kazurinsky and Lou Diamond Phillips do earn
their paychecks with fairly humorous performances
in episodes "Mr. Dingle the Strong" (originally
starring Burgess Meredith) and "A Kind of Stopwatch",
respectively. The rest of the actors quite obviously
have no clue as to what they were doing, reciting
all their lines as if read directly from a cue card
(which in fact is probably what they did!)

In the role of ersatz-Rod Serling, the narrator,
Stacy Keach pretty much mails in his performance.
His readings of the intro/closings are but
lacking the gripping sincerity and meaning that
Rod always imparted to each and every narration.

Further hampering the dramas is the inclusion
of sponsor commercials, which pop up several
times. The CD versions are all one continuous
42-minute track with no option of fast-forwarding
through the commercials unless done manually.

In short, this new radio series does not yet offer
anything that the original series didn't. The
days of good ol' radio are gone, never to return.
But there are many more of these dramas still yet to
be released. Collections 3 and 4 have already
been released and do offer some nice sound
effects and a fabulous performance by Morgan
Brittany in episode "The Passersby". So perhaps
there's hope. Brittany is the first actor who
appeared in the TV series, to star in these dramas,
and more celebrities are reportedly going to
appear in future installments. Stay tuned...but
keep the volume on low until the producers come
full circle and prove their worthiness to carry
Rod Serling's gauntlet.

Okay, So I was all geared to be disappointed with this whole package. And, unfortunately, the producers picked the weakest of the four stories to begin the set. The actor in "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" sounds like he just walked out of some ivy league acting school and not like a hardened pioneer who has been wandering through the desert for months on end.

The next story, "The Lateness of the Hour," is ruined by a too-long explanation of the "daughter" being a robot at the end. Does it take that much explanation for today's "dumbed-down" society? I hope not.

But the next two shows blew me out of the water. Lou Diamond Phillips is superb in "A Kind of Stopwatch." His over-the-top performance is one of the greatest I've ever heard in any radio drama. Then "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" followed and it was wonderful, too.

Another plus is the original Twilight Zone soundtrack music which is used and other pains that are taken to maintain the flavor of the original classic TV series. I would suggest buying one collection and seeing if you like it before buying the second.

This is not everyone's cup of tea, but the people who put these dramas together did the best they could and it's well worth a listen.

I agree with the other negative reviews.

The index is really very bad - I hardly ever find anything I'm looking for.

I can only describe it as a curious mix of sometimes very arcane information which may be useful for usenet gurus and absence of information for a novice user

Having never specified hardware for or managed a Usenet news server I was looking for high-quality technical guidance. Within minutes of buying this book I knew I wouldn't find it in these pages. The content is simplistic and slow paced. Each time it seems you will get to some meaty discussion the section ends leaving you still feeling hungry and not even providing an interesting taste. Many pages are wasted on instructions for installing Solaris and an overview of the topology of the Internet. The included CD might be useful for signaling passing aircraft but lacks anything more useful. You will be sorry you bought this book. Luckily this isn't the only choice. Take a look at "Managing Usenet". It is the book this one could have been.

As a neophyte to Usenet servers etc. I found this book very helpful and would recommened it. I wasn't looking for a Ph.D. on the subject from one reading--that takes hands-on experience in anything.

Although the book overviews many topics in cosmology, it seems an excersise in personal interests of the writer. The results are often not directly applicable to "real-life" situations and rewritting of formulae is usually required. Personally, I would recommend the book "Cosmological Physics" by Peacock, which is much more transparent and up-to-date.

The first person is right this book does nothing for the parents,there is no way you can figure out what is going on unless you have had algebra before, no examples no help what so ever.

These series have not examples to follow, no parent helps. No other books are taken home to show how to work the problems! Unless you (an adult) have extensive algebra training, forget this series.

Under normal circumstances, one of the minimal requirements for writing a biography is a degree of sympathetic interest in the subject. On this criterion one would wonder why Cassandra Pybus bothered to research and write the story of James McAuley. Apart from a flicker of sympathy for the emotional coldness of his upbringing, this account is almost entirely lacking in empathy or understanding of McAuley's motivation and his strengths.

McAuley had at least three public faces: the poet, the scholar and the political/religious activist. It seems that Pybus has a tin ear for verse and so is unable to convey any sense of his achievements in that area. Instead she mines his poetry for symptoms of sexual, religious and political hangups. Religion has traditionally been a vehicle for the highest spiritual aspirations, but she is apparently tone deaf to this area of human experience as well.

The English historian and philosopher R G Collingwood deplored the decline of religion and the rise of the "Prussian philosophy" of political bullying. Obsessed with the rise of dictatorships in the 1930s he felt that democratic principles had lost the 'punch' that religious faith had once imparted to them. This amounts to a repetition of the mournful commentary by Yeats in his poem "The Second Coming":

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...

This was the situation confronted by McAuley when he turned from the romanticism and anarchism of youth to Catholicism and political engagement in the 1950s. It is the domain of politics where Pybus is most at home. Reporting on an address by McAuley at the University of Sydney she writes "It was not the poet I went to hear all those years ago. Then, as now, it was the political ideologist and cold war warrior who compelled my attention". Unfortunately her attention must have wandered, or maybe he said things she did not want to hear because she went on "I don't remember what it was he said".

Of course it is unreasonable to demand that McAuley's biographer should be a poet with religious sensibilities, however an academic historian should provide something more than a journalistic account of the work of Santamaria, Krygier and others who opposed communist influence in the trade unions, the Labor Party and the universities. Pybus provides no historical perspective on these activities. A younger generation of readers may need to be reminded that there was a cold war, sometimes more than cold, as in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and other insurgencies, not to mention Hungary. During that time a hostile totalitarian power threatened peace and security all over the world, with its agents in the west, including Australia, being funded and directed from Moscow. Due to the treason of the intellectuals, who as Pybus pointed out, mostly supported the other side, those who did not, such as McAuley were called all manner of names.

McAuley was the first editor of the Austrlian quarterly named Quadrant, the Australian arm of the worldwide anti-communist Association for Cultural Freedom. The magazine first appeared at the time that Hungarian refugees started to turn up in the West after escaping from Russian tanks in the streets of their home town. Many Australian communist left the party at that point, though the realities should have been apparent to well informed people from the 1930s, from Koestler's Darkness at Noon, from George Orwell's journalism and from the local waterside workers disruption of the allied war effort during the Hitler-Stalin pact.

It appears that Cassandra Pybus has missed the moral point of the anti-communist stand of the Quadrant supporters. They were a small part of the worldwide intellectual resistance to an aggressive dictatorship. As for the CIA funding to Quadrant which provided so much delight to Stalin's "useful idiots", it is unfortunate that Quadrant could not raise more funds locally but nobody has suggested the writers took their orders from overseas in the way that the communists did.

The outcome of the cold war remained in doubt until well after McAuley's death. The stakes were high and this no doubt contributed to the sense of urgency and impatience on the part of the McAuley and others, especially in the face of indifference or obstruction by people who should have known better. The final collapse of the Soviet empire surely revealed to the most empty-headed Vietnam Moratorium marcher that there was something rotten behind the Iron Curtain.

Pybus merely notes that McAuley was on the losing side in the 1970s. It should be added that this was mostly because the leadership in Australia and the US destroyed their moral credibility by introducing conscription for the Vietnam war. This was hardly McAuley's fault because he was a not a rightwinger of the coercive kind. He probably would have endorsed Hayek's statement "Why I am not a conservative" (Postscript to The Constitution of Liberty). A real conservative such as Malcolm Fraser (Prime Minister during the 1970s) showed his true colours when, in addition to supporting conscription and retrospective taxation, he cut back funding to Quadrant and raised the tariff barriers to impede free trade.

Defects in the research in this book have been documented by other reviewers who were closer to the action than myself. The embarrassing gesture towards homoeroticism as a spring of McAuley's motivation has been rubbished by commentators across the ideological spectrum.

Almost 100,000 dollars of public money went into this project and what is one to make of the expensive white elephant that has come off the press? As a taxpayer who unwittingly contributed to the funding I would like to ask for my money back. However if Cassandra Pybus is prepared to make the trip I would be willing to support research in the Moscow archives to document the flow of Soviet funds to the communist party in Australia and to fellow-travelling writers.

So after 2000 years of history, someone claims to have proven that John didn't write his own Gospel?

The author claims that, not only is there no proof in the Bible that the apostle John wrote the Gospel of John, but there is "proof" in the Bible that it was written by someone else. The operative term here being "in the Bible", because that is all he's willing to use - no evidence can come from anywhere else - and the KJV Bible at that. It's like the author is using the Bible as his own personal game of "Clue" and he will bend and break rules of scriptural interpretation, historical document interpretation and simple rules of logic to try to show that it was Colonel Lazurus in the town of Bethany with the pen.

For example, Phillips claims in the introduction that the three disciples at Jesus' transfiguration were SUPPOSED TO tell people about it after His resurection and gives three verses to support it. Why would John keep quiet about it and leave it out of his gospel?, he says. But a quick glance at the verses will show that Jesus said NOT to tell anyone until after that time. Obviously, it would be a good thing to tell after the time alloted by Jesus. But, there's a difference between "don't tell anyone until a point" and "you must tell after a point". These two statements cannot mean the same thing and is tantamount to twisting Jesus' words. This kind of shoddy detective work permeates the book.

The author has pulled together only the passages that seem to support his cause and does not tackle the texts that presents problems for it. Otherwise, the book is easy to read, but be prepared to shake your head alot. And it helps if you enjoy exclamation points and bold type. It takes a lot of extra punctuation and fonts to try to hide the paper thin structure that this book is built on.

Yes winning doesn't begin on gameday. It begins by winning your job by stabbing your former boss in the back. It is followed with lots of lying and cheating. Buy as many players as you can and fix their grades and status to reflect they are passing so they are elligable to play. Put the SEC front office in your hip pocket so they can run interference for you and make you appear clean. Show recruits forged letters on NCAA letterhead paper saying your rivals will be out of business in a couple of years. Be creative with Pell Grant Money and ATM cards. Lighten the classroom load for your athletes, Walking is a tough course and many fail this class. Learn to self-report any infractions and remember the best line of defense is to say there was nothing improper found. Cheat and cheat well and deny everything that anyone other than your mouthpieces have spoken. Be sure to send Christmas Cards and presents to Roy Kramer, Milton Kirk, Roy Adams, Doug Dickey and all the gang at the SEC office and the NCAA.