This book is funny, realistic, and the characters are exceptional. Anyone can relate to the plot of a girl that would like to make it big, help a friend see the light, and make it out of a small, provincial town. She meets people along the way that help her to learn where she's going. The ending atypical. If the reader has already decided in what direction Ruby is going, they might be a little let down, but it is nevertheless a realistic ending for a realistic and humorous story.

I love disaster books, and have since I was old enough to read chapter books. Early in my relationship with Amazon, I did a subject search on different disasters, and was suprised by the meager selection. There really are very few readable first-person/journalistic book-length disaster accounts available. We are indeed fortunate to have first-rate books like "The Perfect Storm," and "Isaac's Storm" come out so close together.

It is also the reason I must be kind in this review. These books remind you that you read books like this for two reasons. One is to participate vicariously in an intense experience. The second is to further our understanding of science--both social and physical. How does a disaster develop? How do we react to it? Were the right decisions made? This book, written before the others I mentioned, does not fufill any of these purposes very well.

"Lunatic Wind" is essentially a first-person account of the passage of Hurricane Hugo through South Carolina and how it affected a man, his two teen-aged sons and their grandmother. The account is very parochial and not very insightful.

Perhaps the most memorable passages are the descriptions of the two young men, doggedly ignoring and resourcefully dodging all attempts to keep them from surfing in a hurricane off a barrier island. If anything proves the late development of judgement skills in the adolescent this is it!

One hungers for comprehensive journalistic accounts of important disaster events like Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew: "How did the storms develop?" "Were they predicted accurately?" "How did people (and institutions) survive?" "What was the long-term impact?" But they are apparently rarely attempted. Which makes books like "Lunatic Wind" valuable.

"Lunatic Wind," should be seen as a primary source, a building block, to an eagerly anticipated comprehensive treatment of Hurricane Hugo.

Hello....what book is this? Is it about hurricane Hugo? I need lots of info about hurricane Hugo! Now!

This incredible book is the novelization on actual incidents that occurred during Hurricane Hugo. You will be unable to put this book down, in fact, you may very well fall off the edge of your seat!

It is incredible how they trust blindly in EVERY aspect of General Relativity. Space-time warpages and singularities happens ONLY in mathematics! There is no way out. It is funny how Scientific American gives credibility to such a kind of science-fiction. It is time to stop lying to the public!

Hawking and Thorne, grasp it: Time-travel is physically IMPOSSIBLE.

Time travel appears pretty impractical based on this book. Maybe it's mathematically possible to fold time and punch wormholes in it in theory, but I don't think NASA or Greyhound is going to be offering trips back and forth through our lives. However, it's always intriguing to read what really smart people come up with, because they make a lot of it seem so obvious, even though I could never come up with it on my own.

I'm usually wary of books that are collections of essays, especially essays by several different people. Like many such books, The Future of Spacetime is something of a hodgepodge. Still, when I saw that the authors included Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Timothy Ferris, Alan Lightman and Igor Novikov, it seemed to be worth taking a look. That decision was very well rewarded.

The five essays in The Future of Spacetime were first presented as talks for a celebration of the 60th birthday of Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist. Three of them, plus a brief introduction by physicist Richard Price, deal with relativity, and especially with the possibility and implications of "closed timelike curves" in spacetime--time travel for short. In addition, Tim Ferris writes insightfully about why it is so important for scientists and science writers to do a better job of informing people about scientific theories and discoveries, but even more importantly clueing them in about how science works. He points out that it may take 1,000 years for a concept to penetrate to the core of society. Since modern science is at best 500 years old, there's lots left to be accomplished. Alan Lightman, who is both a physicist and a novelist, beautifully describes the creative process that lies at the heart of both science and creative writing. Scientists and novelists, he argues, are simply seeking different kinds of truths.

The three physics essays are gems. Each sheds at least some light on the nature of spacetime, on the possibility (or impossibility, or improbability) of time machines and time travel, and on intimately related issues such as causality and free will. Novikov, for example, concludes that the future can influence the past, but not in such a way as to erase or change an event that has already happened. Hawking argues that time travel is happening all the time at the quantum level, but that nature would protect against an attempt to use a time machine to send a macroscopic object, such as a human being, back in time. I was particularly impressed by Kip Thorne's essay, in which he makes a series of predictions concerning what physicists and cosmologists will discover in the next thirty years. He explains the importance of the gravity-wave detectors that are now starting to come on line. They promise to let us read the gravitational signals of such primordal events as the collision of black holes and even the big bang itself. It is as fascinating to get to piggyback on how these great minds think as it is to read their conclusions.

In short, The Future of Spacetime is a bit of a salad, but an extremely delicious and satisfying one.

Robert E. Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, 2002).

This is basically a stretching-out of two of his earlier short stories, "Dear
Diary" and "Dear Diary: Wanda" which were published as part of "Southern Fried Plus Six" in the late Sixties. If you've read those, you've seen pretty much everything in "Wild Blue Yonder." A high school dropout enlists in the Air Corps and various things happen pretty much the same way they did in the earlier stories - training, a bar fight in Texas, the girls he and his buddies meet in town and their night out, he's just adding to old stuff that he's said before. A couple of examples:

From "Dear Diary":
"Had lunch. Good food. Had two helpings of everything. Nice cut of ham with raisin sauce. Potatoes, beans, ice cream and coffee."

From "Wild Blue Yonder":
"Same day 1830 hours. Great food for supper. Nice cut of ham with raisen sauce. Raisen e or i? ...Had two helpings of everything. Except ice cream."

Now, I have been a Fox fan for quite awhile, long enough to have had a copy of "Southern Fried" since the Seventies and to remember big chunks of it, but I have to say I was thoroughly
disappointed with "Wild Blue." I bought it at the Southern Festival of Books, a big literary gathering that happens in Nashville every fall, and meant to go hear Fox speak at one of the authors' forums and maybe even get him to sign this, but I managed to miss his appearance and it's probably just as well. It's actually quite a good story if you haven't read those two from "Southern Fried," but if you have you can see everything coming before Fox says it and the book's not nearly as interesting.

Wild Blue Yonder is a superbly written, semi-autobiographical novel by William Price Fox which is set in 1943 South Carolina, and is about Earl Edge, a 16-year-old truant and small town trouble maker who sees no way out of his problems than to lie about his age and join the air force. Wild Blue Yonder is highly recommended as a coming of age saga told largely in the form of the protagonist's journal entries of change, hardship, the loss of friends, and surviving the perils of World War II.

I've spent a lot of time in this industry, and I was disappointed to see the lack of accuracy with many basic details. Clearly the guy has a lot of experience with this subject area, but his manner of encapsulating his knowledge should have been done more at arm's length, rather than attempting to come across as a one-size-fits-all solution, again, because it looks like it took a serious toll on accuracy. If you're looking for pictures and tidbits, then go for it, but what about the bigger picture? Perhaps his next release will cover this. One other thing: I found lots of typos and grammatical errors. Again, perhaps the next releast will fix these too. I would wait until then.

Lots of cool pictures. I've spent hours looking at them, but I really wanted more info like how I can place a value on matchcovers. Also looked for tips on how to take care of matchcovers, but I didn't see much. I think this stuff is important, so I had to buy another book by someone else. To bad this book doesn't cover that stuff. If you don't care much about reading and just want the pix, the book is OK.

Let's see, I have matchbooks with matches and matchbooks without matches. Some have front strikes some have back strikes. Some of the matches have a design on them when the cover is opened. Some have 20 matches some have 30 matches...what to do? Well, I ordered this book and quickly, some 900 matchbooks of different sizes, shapes,ages and colors all began to come together with order. I even had some of the exact matchbooks described and pictured in the book. I recommend for the novice who finds him/herself with a sudden collection of firestarters from yesteryear.

While I found this book informative, considering that this edition purports to be the "revised 3rd printing" and its author is apparently the founder of a magazine, it's an absolute publishing travesty. There are several misspelled words, pages 3 and 4 are duplicated in part, and silly errors such as "by 1989, Aurora stopped producing new figure kits" abound(Aurora folded in the 1970s). Spacing problems, captions that don't correctly identify illustrations -- the whole gamut of what constitutes poor proofreading and slipshod publishing can be found here. Hire a good editor -- or even a marginal one! A pity that what could be a very good book is made almost unreadable by errors. Color pictures, such as one finds in some other books of this type, would be nice too -- this volume is entirely in black and white. Overall, a real disappointment.

This book is not only very informative, but was enjoyable to read and easy to read. The pictures of both what boxes the model came in what the completed model looked like was great. Pick this book up if you are a model collector, BUY IT!

This book is commonly used by grade schools as a transition for students to get acquainted with algebra topics and prepare for high school math courses. Sadly, this book is poorly laid out, skipping back and forth between topics like a ping pong ball, and often pampers the reader to an extent of which is clearly childish. Even grade school students who were polled often find the pictures both useless and distracting. The chapters of this book also waste space, while providing very little mathematical content. If you are reading this book, or thinking about getting this book for a school environment, you should seriously consider that this book in no way prepares students for high school math courses. Why 2 stars then? The overwhelming use of pictures and comics to portray mathematics may provide easier to understand concepts for children with learning disabilities; but is often distracting.

I had to prepare for some college placement exaims and needed a refresher course. This book was a trememdous help to me!

The stock market barometer is a completely unecessary defense of what the stock market is. It provides an incredible amount of uninteresting and completely trivious information. It is definitely NOT a must read.

William Hamilton was the successor (both at the Wall Street Journal and in expounding the Dow Theory) to Charles Dow, and the one who clarified the Dow Theory as most people understand it today. To students of the Dow Theory, and of Wall Street and Investment history in general, this is a must-have volume. Also see works by Robert Rhea.

This book does an excellent job in exposing the unexpected out of the food industry. According to the book, Americans have always thought the food they eat was nutritious and some what healthy. This book exposes the different scandals that the corporation giants use to swindle people for their money.
This book is written in a journalistic style. Depending on whether you like this type of style in a book, if you like this style, you should read this book. If not, don't. Personally, I do not like this style so the flow of the book was a little dry to me. However, this book did a great job in letting me realize the scandals that go on in the food industry. I now look at the food I used to eat in a different way. In some cases, I do not eat some products. I either want to boycott that product because of the corruption behind it or because the food has too many hazerdous chemicals to my health.
This book also exposed the whole political scandal aspect to me. Before this book, I did not know that this country no longer has private family farms anymore. Big corporations have taken over the farm industry and created monopolies on different products. Thus being able to jack up prices.

You need to know that there are NO color pictures in this guide. This book has small b&w photos of what must be nearly all of R.A. Fox's prints with a price guide. It's great to know all the names of the pictures that I have, and the one's that I've seen that I would like to have. However, this book is better for someone with better eyes than I have. For me, the b&w photos are too small to distinguish much of the detail.