This book contains all the latest information on preparing for surgery and increasing the liklihood of a successful outcome. It is written in an easy-to-use workbook format. Recommended for anyone who is facing a surgery

Are you an Architect and don't know the parts of a traditional double hung window? Forgot how stone was detailed? Could not draw a lug window sill to save your life? Then this book is for you and your staff. Great drawings (real drawings, not CADD), all hand lettered and illustrated. I use this book to size masonry fireplaces. It is the ultimate resource on all types of wood burning fireplaces and masonry dimensioning! Although there are some things that are out of date (plumbing & electrical)this book tells a story about buildings in the emerging market of historic rehab and historic tax credit project.

The collection covers a wide variety of drills, from fitness to fundamental skills to tactics. The authors have made a serious effort to index the skills being emphasized, and in large part were successful; it would be possible to plan many, many practices using no other source. The drills are presented clearly, with the text and diagrams interacting to make each drill easily accessible. My only complaint -- and it's minor -- is that there is some repetition; some of the later drills are variations of the earlier ones.

I have been coaching for six years and playing for 20, and I found this to be a very valuable source.

I have owned a copy of this book for over a year. I would rate this book essential for beginning to intermediate soccer coaches. I have coached youth soccer for 4 years (ages 5-10 rec. and select) and have found this book to make selecting drills simple. The drawings are plain ("X's" and "O's") and clearly illustrate each drill. I looked at several other books that utilized nice graphics and photos to show how to run each drill. However, the clear, simple and concise use of diagrams makes the most complex drill easy to understand and run. In addition, each drill is listed by primary area of emphasis (passing, defense, passing, shooting, etc.) so that you can select one or more drills to emphasize the part of the game your team needs to work on. I highly recommend this book as a supplement to coaching soccer to youth players.

This book shines in many different areas. The most important being its ease of use.

This monumental collection of first person accounts from World War II was the perfect antidote to the chilled feeling John Keegan's "Second World War" gave me. With his "ghost units" and "divisions of less than the first quality," Keegan turned my stomach. I kept thinking of the human stories behind those stock phrases. This book is a collection of those stories.

I would strongly recommend this as a book for the general history reader. It might occasionally lose a reader who isn't familiar with the skeleton of the war's events, as the personal diaries from which excerpts are taken sometimes fall between the cracks of the great events that might appear on a timeline. That isn't a weakness; it's a strength. Those passages often bring the reader most fully into the confusion and the real human experience of the war.

The great events are well represented, at any rate, in a highly personal and emotional way. Where the usual general history concentrates on the innovations of blitzkreig, this book gives us the diary of Rommel - and another journal by a 12-year-old belgian boy, waiting in an air raid shelter for his mother to come back and trying to comfort his steadily more anxious younger brother.

No book could tell this whole story, and of course this one isn't perfect. There are times when the narrative pauses to 'fill in' some big event in an editor's voice, and when that happens I'm jarred by the shift in tones. As a starting point, though, and just as a read, this is without question the first book I would recommend on World War II. The strength of the bibliography makes it a fantastic resource for other choices later, too.

Very, very highly recommended.

This is an edited collection of first person accounts of World War Two. I turned to this book largely because I'd just read Keegan's "Second World War," a strategic level, numbered-units-crossing-important-rivers retelling of the war. I was left cold by Keegan. This smattering of excerpts from first person accounts was the perfect antidote to the chilled feeling Keegan gave me with his "ghost units" and "divisions of less than the first quality." I kept thinking of the human stories behind those repeated stock phrases. This book is a collection of those stories. I would strongly recommend this as a book for the general history reader. It might occasionally lose a reader who isn't familiar with the skeleton of the war's events, as the personal diaries from which excerpts are taken sometimes fall between the cracks of the great events that would appear on a war timeline. That isn't a weakness; it's a strength. Those passages are sometimes the ones that bring the reader most fully into the confusion and the real human experience of the war. And the great events are well represented, at any rate, and in a highly personal and emotional way. Where the usual general history concentrates on the innovations of blitzkreig, this book gives us the matter-of-fact diary of Rommel - and another journal by a 12-year-old belgian boy, waiting in an air raid shelter for his mother to come back and trying to comfort his steadily more anxious younger brother. There are times when the narrative pauses to 'fill in' some big event in an editor's voice, and when that happens I'm jarred by the shift in tones. No book could tell this whole story, and of course this one isn't perfect. As a starting point, though, and just as a read, this is without question the first book I would recommend on World War II. The strength of the bibliography makes this a fantastic resource for other choices later, too. Very, very highly recommended.

This is an edited collection of first person accounts of World War Two. I turned to this book largely because I'd just read Keegan's "Second World War," a strategic level, numbered-units-crossing-important-rivers retelling of the war. I was left cold by Keegan.

This smattering of excerpts from first person accounts was the perfect antidote to the chilled feeling Keegan gave me with his "ghost units" and "divisions of less than the first quality." I kept thinking of the human stories behind those repeated stock phrases. This book is a collection of those stories.

I would very highly recommend this as a book for the general history reader. It might occasionally lose a reader who isn't familiar with the skeleton of the war's events, as the personal diaries from which excerpts are taken sometimes fall between the cracks of the great events that would appear on a war timeline. That isn't a weakness; it's a strength. Those passages are sometimes the ones that bring the reader most fully into the confusion and the real human experience of the war.

The great events are well represented, at any rate, and in a highly personal and emotional way. Where the usual general history concentrates on the innovations of blitzkreig, this book gives us the matter-of-fact diary of Rommel - and another journal by a 12-year-old belgian boy, waiting in an air raid shelter for his mother to come back and trying to comfort his steadily more anxious younger brother. There are times when the narrative pauses to 'fill in' some big event in an editor's voice, and when that happens I'm jarred by the shift in tones.

No book could tell this whole story, and of course this one isn't perfect. As a starting point, though, and just as a read, this is without question the first book I would recommend on World War II.

The strength of the bibliography makes this a fantastic resource for other choices later, too. Very, very highly recommended.

The book is fine. ()It only contains standards from 1932.This book is not very usefull to anyone building to current standards.

It has 154 more pages than the 9th edition, so it has new information, but as you page through it you will find it seems almost identical. They need to keep most of the old data, so I wouldn't take off points for that. You can see the publisher's review for all of the new features: I noticed that the Historic Preservation chapter has been shortened a bit.

Potentially, the biggest addition is the CD-ROM, which has CAD files ready to use, and includes pretty much everything from the book. You might think that you are getting all that for the cost of the book, but...no. The "demo" CD comes in a sleeve inside the back cover, and is noted: "Full functionality, Limited data." You can access a drawing of a bar joist, for example. It exports a DWG or DXF file with layers based on line weights. The interface is pretty clear; you don't have to read any instructions to start using it. The CD actually has all of the data, but you have to pay another $425 online to "unlock" it. That could be a bargain, but I suspect that most firms will feel that their own detail library is more applicable to the work they do. Still, $425 represents less than a day's worth of billable hours.

Every architect knows the value of this book, and most every architecture firm (in the U.S. anyway) will want at least one copy just to stay current, and because the old one is getting worn out. You might as well get it now, and decide on the CD-ROM later. I'd love to have a special edition set with each page ever published in all of the AGS books, or even just the last 3 or 4. I'd give that 6 stars.

A good reference book but of limited use, Its tables of materials is quit limited, especially sections dealing with steel,wood and concrete structural properties. The book tries to touch on all things at the expense of specificity in regards to basic materials and building techniques, The book would be fine for Architectural students but would be of limited use as a reference book for design. Severly over priced.

Thomas Reeves deserves kudos and credit for a very fine biography of a man much admired by millions. The high points of this book are as follows: the meticulous gathering of much information simply unknown by his admirers; the careful balancing of sanctity and human frailty of Sheen's character; the fascinating recreation of the Golden Age of Catholicism in America; the personal relationship between Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Sheen; a superb ability to synthesize and bring new insight from the wide variety of materials cited; a great bibliography and excellent notes. The weaknesses are minor: a tendency to repeat some stories, and the maddening tendency of Sheen himself to destroy and misplace correspondence or simply not document his personal life. Despite these minor drawbacks in the book, I was deeply moved by much of this biography and, indeed, brought to tears by the account of the last years of Sheen's life, his meeting with Pope John Paul II, and his funeral. Few will be disappointed in this book; it is a true accomplishment. Many thanks to Professor Reeves for this profound and necessary commentary on the life of a truly great person of the 20th century.

Yes, Fulton Sheen had problems. None of them, mercifully, overshadowed his greatness, although they all had the potential to. His fake degree alone could have brought him down, embarrassing a leader of the Church and horrifying his followers. Reeves is very smart in focusing on these problems, and thus, understanding that hey! Sheen was a man too. He wasn't infallible, he was a man like us. But it's hard to avoid writing glowing stories about a man who helped so many people (he wasn't one for possessions-or keeping track of his cash). The story of his death is one that should inspire people looking for a modern role model. Reeves, who is Catholic, manages also to keep the book respectful about his problems, instead of attacking the Church. Why is this good? The actions of one man are not generally representative of an entire institution. It would be a logical fallacy for Reeves to do such a thing. In short, Reeves has written a fine book on an eccentric, loved figure.

This is a book that has been ignored by the media which does not want to hear about good Catholic clergy. The media only wants to know about scandal in the church - because the Catholic Church and that which it really stands for(as contrasted with the deeds
of the fallible priests,and lay Catholics that can be found within it) is the mortal enemy to secular humanism, sexual license, abortion and the "if it FEELS right, do it" philosopy that is held so dear by much of the media.
The book is a great inspiration because Bishop Sheen, with all his human failings, is an inspiration to us all.

GURPS: Who's Who I - the first volume of a (currently) two volume set of some of history's greatest and worst characters, make 52 people from history come to life for your GURPS and gaming campaigns.

Although another reviewer has listed all the characters that are covered by this book, it should be noted that they are not in alphabetical order in the book. Rather, they are in time period order, making it slightly harder to find a specific character unless you already have a good idea of when that character lived. Admittedly, there is a good Table of Contents and a good Index should you wish to find specific people who were written up using the GURPS RPG system for this book.

The book covers people who lived in the Ancient World and Dark Ages, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance, and the modern era. There are two small appendixes in the back that cover a few other characters and how the GURPS game mechanics were used to recreate these famous and infamous people.

And that is the strength of this book. These people were real people from history. It is very enlightening to see how real people are seen when measuring up to GURPS standards. Most people, when making themselves as a player character, or when creating historical NPC's for campaigns, tend to overestimate the amount of points that would be necessary to create that character.

There are also adventure seeds for each character, as well as a small group of people who never were that changed the history of their worlds. These "alternate earths" make a wonderful addition to this book, showing how history could be changed in strange ways by only one person.

I'd highly recommend this book to GURPS GM's that have historically based campaigns, and recommend this book to any student of history that might want to try to recreate a historical figure for another campaign. Non-GURPS GM's wil find the character stats fairly easy to convert to their favorite systems.

Note that these are 'most intriguing', not necessarily 'most influential', although many of them were pivotal historical figures. This book is interested in characters who would be fun and interesting in games - not just 'remove this person and the world would change forever'.

The book lists them in chronological order. In alphabetical order, they are: Akhenaten, Alexander the Great, Alexius I, Aristotle, Boudica, Tycho Brahe, Aaron Burr, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Byron, Julius Caesar, Chaucer, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, Clive of India, "Two-Gun" Cohen, Constantine the Great, Cortes, Cromwell, Cyrus the Great, Darwin, David ben-Jesse, da Vinci, John Dee, Catherine di Medici, Alberto Santos Dumont, Einstein, Elizabeth I, Harald Hardradi, Ibn Battuta, Joan of Arc, Justinian I, Kipling, Leif Eriksson, Lovecraft, William Marshal, Mata Hari, Lola Montez, Mozart, Emperor Norton, Paracelsus, Peter the Great, Richelieu, Bartholomew Roberts, Shakespeare, Sei Shonagon, Tesla, Theodora, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Harriet Tubman, Vlad the Impaler, Xenophon, Shaka Zulu.

On the front cover of this edition are shown (clockwise from upper left, starting below the title): "Two-Gun" Cohen, Ahkenaten, Lovecraft, John Dee, Bartholomew Roberts, Mata Hari, ?, ?, Kipling, and Justinian.

Each character is profiled at a specific point in his or her life, with character generation information as well as a brief (usually 2-page) biography. The authors are careful to note which statistics need to be modified if the character is to be younger or older, or if you choose to use a different spin than GURPS did. A sidebar is generally included as well, speculating on how tampering with this character would change history.

For instance, the basic profile of Akhenaten just states that he's ugly. (The picture on the cover is incredibly flattering, compared with some statues.) Some of the alternate possibilities then listed are: Marfan's syndrome (add Bad Sight), Froelich's syndrome (add Sterile and figure out who fathered his children), a woman (add Secret, account for the kids), eunuch (possible Secret, again account for the kids). If you've never heard of him, he is the legendary heretic pharaoh, husband of Nefertiti; Tut succeeded him. If he had never lived, or had died young, Egypt might have continued as a strong empire for a much longer time, but the history of the world's religions might be quite different.

The GURPS basic profiles here are fairly neutral and objective (for instance, while they'll tell you how to put an Illuminated conspiracy-theory spin on a character, the base profile statistics don't make that kind of assumption).

Other books that might interest you:

- For examples of a *really* Illuminated Burton and Ch'in Shi Huang Ti, try Robert Doherty's _Area 51_ novels.

- For Emperor Norton (the first and only Emperor of the United States), see Neil Gaiman's _Brief Lives_ and (for a cameo, not mentioned in Who's Who) Barbara Hambly's _Ishmael_.

- Terry Pratchett's Leonard da Quirm is an even closer parody of da Vinci than he seems, once you've read about da Vinci's eccentricities. (See especially Pratchett's _Jingo_.)

- For a time-travelling spin on Caesar, try _The Cleopatra Crisis_ by Simon Hawke.

- For women in the Montez mold, try Rex Stout's _Under the Andes_.

This is another great resource book for GURPS. You know, if you are a medium-time GURPS player, it is often intriguing to figure out a normal person or even a historical one in atributes, advantages and disadvantages, skills, etc. This book just hands you out lots of information on those historical figures so you can know how much you should fear them (or not!). Well, anyway, i just loved this book, and i sure would advise you to seize the opportunity!

As an immense fan of Michael Moorcock, I picked this graphic novel up as a completionist tendency. Comics are not my usual choice of reading, yet it was written by Moorcock, so I really did not know what to expect. What I found was something doomed to failure from the beginning. It is the comic format that kills this experiment in mediums. The story itself is actually three initially insular tales that ultimately weave together. If written as three separate short stories and published in a pure textual format they would have constituted rather typical Moorcock "Eternal Champion" tales. In one story we have Rose from his novel "Revenge of the Rose", and Sam Oakenhurst from "Blood". In another we have Sir Seaton Begg heralding from Moorcock's much chronicled von Bek/Begg family histories. In the third we have his most famous character, Elric. And tying them all together in a narrative frame we see Jack Karaquazian (once again, from "Blood") and Moorcock himself. If one were not already intimately familiar with Moorcock's vast works chronicling the many facets of the Eternal Champion, I am not sure any sense could be made of this rather opaque telling.

The prominent flaw of this work is the miserly allowances for textual explanation in the comic format. Moorcock is a rather verbose author with a tendency for flourish and poetry. When reduced to word balloons on a handful of panels per page, all of his stylistic strengths are annihilated. The end result is quite frankly a mass of confused hokum. It becomes impossible to understand what he was really attempting to communicate as the story panels sweep us along much too expeditiously. Compounded with the maelstrom of psychedelic artwork, I found myself unable to take it seriously as a narrative. The three stories as told by the narrative frame seemed more the destruction of a skilled raconteur than an entertaining romp through the multiverse. While I am not a connoisseur of comic art, I felt that the images by themselves were often striking and powerful statements, but failed as proper tools of story telling. Often I wished that one of the more striking images could have been painted in a more serious manner and used as a frontispiece for one of Moorcock's novels instead of as another page in a confounding comic.

My frustration with this work perhaps stems from the fact that I do not read comics and thus found it bewildering. I would be very interested in reading a review from someone who picked this up because they are a fan of the graphic novel medium, and not necessarily Moorcock. And more so, I would be interested in knowing if someone without prior knowledge of the Moorcockian Multiverse could actually make heads or tails of this. I hypothesize that one could not, and that those who can will not like it because of the medium. And that leaves no real audience.

This is a classic Moorcock irony, to bury much of the core material of his multiverse theories in a graphic novel. Where another might have written a philosophical text, or at very least a novel, Moorcock decided that the place to set out the fundamentals of his multiverse theories was in a monthly comic book (collected here without the letters and features, which is a pity). The final sequences are faultlessly coherent as they move towards the central redemption, showing how, why and where the Cosmic Balance is at last restored. And there's some wonderfully off-beat humor -- the vast battles which involve different types of music (rock and roll versus Andrew Lloyd Webber) -- the London trams on which the aliens arrive for the Final Game -- the introduction of Moorcock himself (and Walter Simonson -- here with his best work to date -- though his current Orion work is also superb -- maybe even better) into the stories as the game within a game within a game is played out. This is RPG for keeps! Great, stuff. Moorcock will hide the key to a theme in a rock and roll song, a comic book or a throw-away newspaper piece but sooner or later, if you read for long enough, you'll come across it -- or it won't matter, because sometimes you didn't even know there WERE answers to those questions. Or that the questions were there to be asked! Check out the WW2 Lancaster bomber crewed entirely by existentialist philosophers (including Wrongway Heidegger); check out the rhyming couplets frequently found in the dialogue. Read in conjunction with The War Amongst the Angels and the books in that sequence, this is the work of a brilliantly original mind as able to draw characters as he is able to come up with stunning scientific notions! Brain candy, maybe. Addictive, maybe. A bizarre stimulant, maybe. But nourishing, through and through. A metaphysical meal at Mr Moorcock's Terminal Cafe always leaves the customers satisfied!

If you want to sample some of the artwork before you buy, please visit my website, where I have a few scanned in images of the comic. But I'm not making it easy on you; you'll have to hunt them out on the official Michael Moorcock website.

This, folks, is the reference book for my A Level Students.

A Level is the main exam route taking in the UK for entry into Universities.

The continual rapid development of computer technology means it is a nightmare trying to keep up with terminology and acronymns. This glossary has the defintions the examiners will accept. Very useful when different text books all have their own definitons.

The 4star rating rather than 5 is a reflection of the date of issue of this glossary. There must be another one on its way soon, we sure need it.

In Jewish Lore..., Reeves posits an intriguing theory concerning the influence of Jewish mythological traditions (dating from the 2nd Temple Period and even earlier) and how those traditions influenced Mani as he constructed his "universal" religious tradition. The book is divided neatly into five main chapters, each building upon the earlier. In chapter one, Dr. Reeves traces the extant history of Manichaean texts in the ancient near east and even China and India. In Chapter two, Dr. Reeves provides a detailed discussion of the contents of various Qumran texts and texts from the Manichaean Book of Giants; here, the emphasis is to illustrate the similarity in content between the two. Chapter three is devoted to various quotations from an unknown Manichaean source by Severus of Antioch in the sixth century. In chapter four, Dr. Reeves gets to the crux of his argument: that the fundamentals of Manichaean cosmogony are directly linked to the Jewish renderings of Genesis 6:1-4 and how Mani may have been exposed to these applicable exegeses. In chapter five, Dr. Reeves summarizes and concludes his findings: that the beginnings of Manichaeism are greatly indebted to pre-existing Jewish lore. This is an excellent work for the reader who is already quite experienced in the academic field of religious studies. Exhaustive foot-noting and referencing make Dr. Reeves' propositions all the more credible and supply the serious reader with extra potential readings. This is not a book, however, for the beginner religious studies student. Dr. Reeves uses large amounts of transliterated Hebrew, Aramaic, Chinese and Coptic text. He also utilizes numerous instances of inserted Greek, German and Arabic script. The use of these languages, of course, presupposes a knowledge of them. Less experienced students will have difficulty. This is the only reason a five-star rating is not warranted: because its readership is somewhat limited. However, the content of the work remains compelling. This would be an excellent text book for graduate level classes in religious studies or an intriguing read for religious studies professionals concentrating in the area of the ancient near east.