A squalid little book featuring characters almost entirely devoid of redeeming qualities; even the "heroine" is barely admirable. The story's other principal is a male prostitute and erstwhile trainee priest, though how the transformation in lifestyles is achieved is feebly (and implausibly) handled. Although a police officer at one point claims not to believe in coincidences, the plot hinges around several outrageous ones, for instance a shadowy European underworld "financier" just happens to be the cousin of the prostitute's minder. The alleged street language of northwest England is incomprehensible, and the inane device of starting each chapter with a definition of one of these terms - most of which have left the reader befuddled pages earlier - beggars belief. The tale peters out unsatisfactorily at the end, revealing an author who has run out of ideas

I didn't expect a "Lovejoy" type of new series from Gash; maybe something very different. But this book is a true oddity. It begins slow, becomes more interesting in the second half and then peters out; the momentum doesn't carry through. The dialogue is close to indecipherable and makes for very slow going. The concept of the relationship between the two major characters is interesting, which is why I gave it 3 and not 2 stars.

Different Women Dancing is certainly no Lovejoy novel. Lovejoy frequently finds himself involved in dark doings and the underside of life, but his attitude towards these things pulls them out of the realm of Dostoevsky. The character of Bonn and that of Dr. Burtonall are not only dark, but depressing. She's a professional woman with no will of her own and an unbelieveable sexual inexperience for a nineties professional woman. Bonn is too ascetic and murky for me to like him much as a human being. But, there is the intriuging part. As a reader one is drawn into this emotionally polluted environment by the writing. I agree with previous reviewers that the language was nearly unintelligible at times, and not because it was English slang; I believe most of it was made up slang. Now, Anthony Burgess created a more complicated language in A Clockwork Orange, but he was kind enough to include a glossary at the back of the book. I was tempted not to complete the novel, but I feel that that's cheating, so I read on to the end. In future, I will stick by Lovejoy and avoid Bonn and the good doctor.

This is an interesting read, and certainly stands out amongst recent attempts to get clear about Heidegger's religious proclivities (or lack thereof). The author judiciously treats some of the most important parts of Heidegger's work, and does much to illuminate Heidegger's position on matters theological.

While the book has a clear thesis - one looses touch with it during the course of the discussion. In the end, it seems like this is really a book about the author, Marion, and Derrida, rather than a piece of Heidegger scholarship.

For the record, the only writing Roland Martin did on this book was the forward. The main text was by other, unlisted writers who apparently needed Roland's name for marketing purposes.
This is basically a picture book of bass fishing. Nice coffee table book for the angler's home, but not an educational offering. The photography is good but quite frankly, if you get Bassmaster or one of the other fishing magazines, you've already seen a lot of the pictures. Not my cup of tea but if a gift book for anglers is what you want, this could work.

Unlike lawyers Grisham, Turow, and Scottoline, turned writers, Steve Martini is a journalism graduate and writer who went on to become a lawyer! (Seems there ought to be a good joke in there somehow!) He must be doing fine, as his booklist now numbers eight (five of which comprise the defense attorney Paul Madriani series), with a ninth hardback due out late this year. Let's get real here folks -- this is his first book, and we thought, not bad at all.

In a very complex plot, almost shades of Clancy, we're quickly engrossed into the hunt for possible survivors of a 1942 blimp crash; a search for 16th century documents, possibly the journal of the explorer/pirate Francis Drake; the murder of the partner (and former {?} love interest) of the leading man, lawyer Sam Bogardus; and some other crimes and problems too numerous to recount. There's really not much lawyering happening, and sure, some of this winds up a little silly and improbable, but hey, it's mystery fiction. We thought the goings-on, climaxed by a very neat wrapping up of all the puzzles and murders, plus one totally unexpected revelation in the epilogue, were indeed quite entertaining. And the huge surprise ending left us aghast -- we cannot imagine many at all will be the slightest bit prepared for this icing on the cake!

In sum, a fine plot with quite a neat ending, with good story telling hurt somewhat by a few weak characters and/or some improbable action, gives Martini's first effort a passing grade, leaving us anxious to try his second outing and first of the Madriani set. Why not!

Some of the other reviews considered this to be a pretty poorly written book, but I found it to be very entertaining and the ending was a real surprise. The Simeon Chamber is not on the level of a Grisham or Turow novel, but I'd put it right there with a writer like William Bernhardt. It's a quick read and it is a page-turner. You may also learn a little about Sir Francis Drake that you didn't learn in high school or college. Give it a try.

Uh - what was that? One of the weirdest stories I've ever read, that's what. If you want a farcical story stringing together Sir Francis Drake, German Nazis, Chinatown, William Randolph Hearst, and a bunch of adventurous lawyers, then this book is for you. The ending was unexpected, and caused me to exclaim, "oh come on" out loud as I discovered who killed our hero's partner. For Martini fans, this one has none of the courtroom drama, but does weave in a lot of adventure. The story was well paced, but too incredible.

I was somewhat surprised that any publisher would consider this text a guide. Basically, it is formatted like a dictionary with various business-related vocabulary listings and their definitions. Usage applies to the spelling and capitalization of the listings. My expectations were that this book was similar to a Chicago Manual of Style within a business writing context that includes recently created words germane to the business world. Unfortunately, it isn't useful in this regard. For example, if you want to find out how to use colloquial business language such as "leverageable", you probably won't have much luck with this text as such words appear to be absent.

...

Lastly, the organization leaves something to be desired as the usage topics such as Abbreviations are mixed in with the vocabulary entries, which essentially is the entire book. I really see very little value in acquiring this book...

If you want to know the meaning of derivative claims, leveraged buyout, offshore buying units or Brady bonds, this is the book for you.

If you need to know the definition or usage of the words Amish, tort, girl or the location of Exxon, then, by all means buy this book.

But I don't know why anyone would want to spend $30 (the standard price) for this book, put together by the Wall Street Journal's Paul R. Martin, because it is uneven, moving from the obvious (the word girl, for example), offering up tidbits of definitions of rather well-known words (the Amish) and the obscure (offshore buying units.) It is a book of multiple purposes or no clear purpose at all to the public.

Internal stylebooks sometimes suffer from a fuzziness growing out of dual purposes, meant to fix the same errors that crop up regularly, to define the words most troublesome for that publication, to provide consistency in usage and presentation. Sometimes they are little more than a compilation of the memos issued by a copy desk or news editor, reminding people about the correct names of companies or the policies on datelines, or to remind editors on acceptable headline practices.

Other times, stylebooks grow out of a sense of mission to guard the language from silliness and doublespeak while allowing the language to grow, as English does.

What I didn't find in this book was the Journal's obvious ability to teach, as demonstrated in some other WSJ guides. While a stylebook doesn't have to take education as a mission, once it goes public, the educational component would seem to be essential.

Why else would anyone not worried about whether to capitalize executive director buy this book? As an internal publication, the stylebook is useful. It sets standards and clearly tackles problem words, I'm sure fed by repeated misuses of certain words or facts by its own staff. I'd be willing to bet that the items on defuse/diffuse, or bizarre/bazaar, for example, are included because someone(s) on the staff has demonstrated confusion on their proper usage.

This is no knock on the obvious effort that went into putting this book together. Virtually every editor I know flees in terror at the prospect of having to produce a stylebook for the company. But once it went public, it needed some more thought. I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes to collect style and language manuals, or people who need more sources of information on certain business terms. But I wouldn't rush out to buy this as a first choice on either language or business.

As its title says, this book is The Wall Street Journal's *style* guide and, to a lesser extent, a usage guide. A style guide is something specific to the book-magazine-newspaper publishing world: a volume that tells the writers and editors for a given publisher how they should handle certain recurring situations. ("Style" in this context refers to the mechanics of prose composition, not to a writer's individuality of expression.) Any style guide's main purposes are to promote consistency and to save the time that would otherwise be wasted in continually rethinking issues that the house has already decided. Whether the guide also promotes "good usage" in the sense of Strunk & White or Fowler is almost irrelevant. A style guide is thus a series of more or less arbitrary decrees from the boss -- don't use a serial comma, don't put a comma before "Inc.," capitalize "The" in "The Wall Street Journal," etc. It's not the job of the typical style guide to explain why one usage is preferred over another or to give its user choices; rather, its job is to set forth the rules followed by a given publisher.

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage is exactly what its title suggests and a bit more. It tells you how The Wall Street Journal has answered the questions that, experience has shown, arise when writing about business. It doesn't debate the wisdom of hyphenating fractions, for example, but simply tells you, "This is how we do it at WSJ."

In addition, it contains helpful definitions of business terms and (much less frequently) of grammatical terms. But, if you want a business dictionary or grammar book, then this should not be your first choice. You should buy this book if you write, or edit writing, about business, and you want to know how the world's foremost business publication handles the same problems you face.

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.

This book contains too many errors to consider it as an accurate history of American crime. The corrupt New York City police commissioner, Grover Whalen, is renamed "Grover Warren". A picture supposedly showing the murdered gangster Dutch Schultz is really that of one of his henchmen. John Dillinger is shown handcuffed to "Sheriff Holley". Unfortunately, the person pictured is a man and the sheriff of Crown Point, Indiana was actually LILLIAN Holley. Those are just a few errors that I caught, and I have no idea how many more are hidden within this book's pages.

That anyone could take this bit of literary garbage seriously is incredible. It consists wholy of speculation, lies, and propaganda promulgated by small-minded people. Don't waste your time on this rubbish.

It is amazing how some will prostitute the truth to sell a book. Books such as Born in Blood are more accurate speculations of the nature and roots of the Masonic fraternity, which is all that the organization is. What is truely sad is that these falsehoods take on a life of their own. The book was written from ingnorance and has only perpetuated ignorance.

The book should be boot, it is a sinister evilness that try's to hurt and offend a socieity of brotherhood thru the all seeing eye of God.

I wasted my time reading about lies.

The book serves as good checklist for the North American species. It should not be construed as anything more than that. The photos are subpar.

I have been awaiting the publication of this book for several months after I discovered it was forthcoming. If you are looking for a checklist of wild orchids with sharp color pictures then this is for you. For myself it lacked detailed information of the various orchids. This is likely not possible or the book would be too large to easily carry with you into the field. My suggestion is find an orchid book for your region that can concentrate on the local varieties. In my area of the Midwest, I would suggest "Orchids of the Western Great Lakes Region" by Frederick W. Case, Jr. That book is an older book but contains some very useful information.

I wouldn't give the book even one star, if there were a "no stars" category. Reading it is sheer drudgery. I'm a quick reader and very fond of true crime, so plowing through it for two weeks was quite unusual and quite unsatisfying. There are few facts - instead, lots of "if", "maybe", "perhaps", and "might" - the author has built an air castle on his own conjecture. Finally I just checked the back of the book for the verdict (normally verboten) and threw it away. What a total waste of money and time! I'm going to be allergic to the name Carlton Smith from now on. Too bad he shares the first name of a good true-crime writer!

Working at this book was sheer drudgery. I'm a quick reader, and I love true crime, so taking two weeks to plow through the first half of the book was most unusual. Most frustrating, too. Finally, I gave up, checked the back of the book for the verdict (normally verboten) and just threw it away. The author built an air castle on conjecture. "If", "maybe", "perhaps", "possibly", are the main words. There's hardly a sentence without one of these, and a notable scarcity of facts and evidence. It was a big waste of money and time, and I'm going to be pretty allergic to the name Carlton Smith from now on! (Too bad he shares a first name with another true crime author who's consistently good!) Yuk.

True crime is tough to write about, but filling page after page after page ... with complicated legal wranglings and accounting practices that no one but an accountant could understand or even care about takes this book from about 10 pages of interesting information about the lives of these people to however many it ended up being. Sorry, I ramble.