I have been familiar with both the Robertson biography of Geroge Mallory and its contents since well before its first appearance a generation ago becasue I belong to the Mallory family. With respect and appreciation for all the risk-taking, adventuresomeness and care shown by the 1999 explorers, I think that the Mallory cannot be fully understood without knowing about the family and personal context of George Mallory's life, and this biography, wirtten within the family, provides that larger persepctive.

The precise language of logic has so many uses in computer science, it is sometimes surprising that it is not more widely used. Ambiguity is a recurring problem in writing everything from the initial specifications to the final documentation. The formal statements of logic are by nature unambiguous, which would eliminate most of the problems of imprecision. However, there are two major obstacles to the widespread adoption of the language of logic:

1) Very few programmers understand the formal language and most do not have time to learn it.
2) If logic were to be used, it would require the writing of almost another complete set of specifications. Most programmers don't have time to write or won't write standard documentation Expecting a formal set is asking for more than can normally be delivered.

Despite this stiff mass of resistance, there are uses for formal logic, and many of those uses are described in this book. Most of the standard structures of software modeling are described using formal logic structures. If you do not have some experience in formal logic, then you will find most of this book very difficult to understand. However, if you have had the pleasure of some study in logic, then you will appreciate the conciseness and precision of the models that are constructed. To the initiated, they allow for the creation of some very elegant descriptions of what software is supposed to do.
All of the fundamental areas of logic in application to computer science are covered. Each chapter concludes with a set of exercises and solutions are included in an appendix. This book would be an ideal one for an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course in logic applied to computer science. To the extent that programming is mentioned, the languages are Lisp and Prolog.
Formal logic is sorely underutilized in computer science. Writing formal descriptions of your models and code demands a degree of intellectual rigor that cannot be achieved any other way. It is clear that the only true path to correct software is to be intellectually precise and the models in this book will help you do that.

Prejudiced and unobjective account of the CAMI joint venture in Ontario. The authors, (two sociology professors and a union bureaucrat) are guilty of sloppy research and pro-union bias. Their much emphasized "unlimited access to the shop floor" was apparently wasted. This book is a golden example of a wasted opportunity. Still, it serves as an example of why transplants usually stay non-union.

Excellent book, very informative and readable consideration of CAMI Automotive and the implementation of "Japanese" style management. Clearly considers the worker responses over several years while describing the basics of the management approaches used. This is a a very solid and informative work.

What a pity! I had heard great things about this book and was hoping for an evenhanded historical tale worthy of the subject matter. What I got instead was an obviously well researched study that inexplicably refused to consider a number of critical points. How did Vesey's deliverance from bondage play into his evolving perception of the world around him? While Robertson speculates on less relevent material, this event is hardly noted. How about the evidence against the existence of a well planned, well backed rebellion? Virtually no weapons were found, few dedicated participants identified relative to the 9000 soldiers claimed to have been proselytized by Vesey's vision, and amazingly, no apparent incorporation of the female slave population! In fact, from the evidence provided by the author it can be argued that this rebellion was simply a violent plot hatched by a small group of unusually autonomous black slaves under the leadership of an ever increasingly unbalanced leader.

The best evidence favoring the view put forth by Robertson are the cultural identities exploited by Vesey and his captains and their ability to effectively communicate in any number of languages. This point has been noted as a key factor in the successful slave rebellion in Haiti and cross comparisons between these events were noticibly absent.

All this said, the book does bring forward an important sociological event in American history. I just wish the author had taken a more rigorous historical approach.

Probably the biggest obstacle to writing a biography of Denmark Vesey is the wealth of rumors and legends and a dearth of facts. All the greater is the loss as Mr. Vesey was a fascinating part of the history of Charleston and the history of this nation. Some of these legends survive even to this day and appear below in some of the reviews. A closer look implies that the plot almost certainly did not include the massacre of all whites in Charleston. Instead any whites seen coming out of their doors in the areas under attack, such as the armory, or seen to be assembling would be killed. Also, there were plans to put fire to parts of Charleston to create greater confusion if need be. These would be strategies necessary to the success of such an insurrection. In fact, the in-depth planning, organization and strategy of this attempted uprising is what sets it apart from other slave revolts in this country. I would strongly suggest reading this book as well as Egerton's to help get a clearer picture of the man and the insurrection.

The subject of Denmark Vesey and his slave revolt is interesting and required reading for anyone who desires to know what pre Civil War America was like. The book does an excellant job generally describing the interaction of slaves and masters in 1820's South Carolina; espically in how slaves dealt with their opression. However, the book falls short in the specifics of planning and failure of Vesey's revolt. This could be because the information is scanty, but the book left me with the feeling that there was more.

Vesey organized a revolt that if sucessful would have devestated Charleston, including the massacre of the white population. How Vesey came so close to suceeding is not adequately discussed. It is left to generalizations.

On the whole the book is very worthwhile reading. However, it is only a start and suceeds in wetting ones appetite.

One man involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln was acquitted. Based on contemporary diaries, reminiscences, and court transcripts, biographer David Robertson attempts to tell lowly John Surratt's story in the historical novel Booth, set in 1916 and in the last days of the Civil War.

The action begins as D.W. Griffith is premiering his 1916 movie "Birth of a Nation" in Washington, D.C. where he arranges a meeting with the aged Surratt, who has long kept silent about his role in Lincoln's death. Griffith, a publicity hound, would like to get Surratt on film sharing reminiscences and photographs of the Civil War. For Griffith, Surratt is pure gold: a chance to further claim the spotlight and publicize his film.

But Surratt is torn, having lived most of his adult life anonymously after the tragic events surrounding Lincoln's assassination. Through his diary, we learn exactly how he was drawn into the conspiracy in 1864, and the tale takes some exciting and even grotesque turns before reaching its predictable conclusion in 1916.

Character development is not Robertson's strength and the book is filled with stick figures, including Surratt's own as an ingenuous young man. More importantly, until near the end, Booth himself is pretty much an enigma in the book. Though he is supposed to be charismatic, Robertson hasn't demonstrated that by giving us a rich, living character.

The author's skills as a writer lie elsewhere: He brings to teeming and fascinating life a Washington DC (Washington City in the book) as distant to us in its own way as Ancient Rome. It's a city with a half-finished Washington Monument and a Capitol dome under construction. A city where a traffic jam is caused by troops in transit colliding with cattle being driven to market; where the smell of produce and corpses mingles; where officers (but not their troops) enjoy nudie tableaux vivants in grimy saloons.

Since the beginning of the war, Washington City has been flooded with prostitutes who offer momentary forgetfulness of the horrors of war, and with mediums who offer contact with the dead. "In the midst of so much death, shipped from the battlefields by the Union army in the tens of thousands each year.... and the daily arrival in the city of so many distraught family members and spouses desperate for contact with a loved one, these people made a very good living." There's a dramatic and intriguing scene of a medium being unmasked as a fraud here.

The novel's most gripping sequence is a trip to the nearby battlefront in Virginia to photograph Confederate dead. Most fascinating of all, Robertson brings us in on the contemporary craze for portrait photography that reaches even into the White House. We learn a great deal about the mid-century art and science of working with a camera indoors and in the open air. By taking some clever liberties with the historical record, he makes photography central to his story. Booth is unexpectedly full of evocative details and insights into what the craze meant and how it changed Americans. Lev Raphael, author of LITTLE MISS EVIL, the 4th Nick Hoffman mystery (www.levraphael.com)

Most (though clearly not all, judging from previous comments here) Civil War and Lincoln buffs will applaud David Robertson's debut novel, which rescues a friend of John Wilkes Booth from obscurity and places him at center stage. Robertson brings to life John H. Surratt, tried as a co-conspirator and acquitted -- two years after his mother was convicted on the same charge and became the first woman to be hanged by the U.S. government. But "Booth" is a book for even readers with no special interest in the Civil War. It opens a fascinating window onto those turbulent times and offers insights -- though, granted, fictional ones -- into a story whose ending everyone already knows.

The novel opens with Surratt's 1916 New York Times obituary and then shows us diary entries he had written a few days before. In his initial entry, Surratt reveals that he has been plucked from shipping-clerk obscurity by none other than D.W. Griffith, who wants to put the reminiscences of the long-forgotten historical figure on film for an epilogue to his new movie, "The Birth of a Nation." He considers Griffith's proposal: "Perhaps," he writes, "it was time to tell the full truth about the Lincoln assassination." And with that, the septuagenarian opens up his diaries from the fateful months of 1864-65, offering up the observations and narrations of his younger self.

At 21, already a failed playwright, Surratt has just landed a job as a photographer's assistant that both affords him gainful employment and helps him avoid the draft. It was a strong recommendation by his friend Booth (one of the country's most popular actors) that got him the position, and, as he finds out, the favor comes with strings attached. According to Robertson's somewhat defensive five-page essay on his sources, Surratt wasn't actually a photographer, but the author's invention is welcome -- it enlivens both the novel and Surratt's character and allows for some remarkable bits about the Civil War photographer's art: the metal rack that painfully hol! ds subjects' heads and bodies still; the delicate glass-and-chemical work to produce photographic plates; and "the bane of the photographers' art" -- the light-absorbing fabric called bombazine. Surratt's boss complains that "with the fashion in ladies' dress, a pretty maiden of twenty who comes to my studio in her best bombazine outfit becomes . . . a fleshy blob of a face swimming in an inky darkness."

The truly fascinating element of the novel, though, is the relationship between Booth and Surratt, who is torn between obligation and independence, struggling for control over "Booth's presence in my life." Robertson's Surratt is a reluctant cipher, a humorless man searching for a cause; it's all too easy to fall under Booth's sway. He's aware of this influence, disturbed by it, fights it. He frets about his place in Booth's shadow even as his friend worries that "he is not the great man onstage" that his father, Junius Booth, was. At times Surratt reflects upon "how lucky I was to be able to call a man like John Wilkes Booth my friend." But he's fully aware that Booth is a "subtle manipulator and egotist"; even as he marvels at his friend's generosity, "I couldn't help wondering what Booth wanted."

It turns out that what Booth wants is help with a wild scheme: He intends to kidnap President Lincoln as a prisoner of war, to stop all the killing; his primary concern is that the Union army is bent on humiliating the South. His safety compromised, Surratt turns against his friend: "Booth has reduced my life to comical farce, and a low bumbling comedy. . . . I fear he is a loose cannon, and sure to get me killed -- and over something about which I am utterly disagreed with him on. Why did I ever think Booth was my friend? How can I now disassociate myself from him?" He tries to disentangle himself, deciding that "with the return of peace I will back away from Booth, and turn once again to my own hopes, my own future." But, of course, eventually it's too late, and Booth commits "the one act that would write! my name forever in the history books, and, I prayed, make the South whole again."

This last bit is from Booth's diary, written during his flight after Lincoln's murder. Booth's entries are by turns contemplative and thrilling -- and, considering the harried circumstances of their writing, a little too glossy to seem genuine. Indeed, both diaries read more like meticulously edited historical fiction than contemporary journals. They're far too nuanced and accomplished, laced with italicized flashback phrases and artful foreshadowing. The entries conclude with teasing cliffhangers. There are no missteps, no unsurety, no spontaneity. They don't *sound* right. Surratt's recollection of even throwaway dialogue is too pitch-perfect to be real, as when Booth tells a colleague: "Lewis, there is also a sideboard at the bar with pickled eggs, oysters, and beefsteaks for sandwiches. . . . You must get yourself something to eat. It's all right." Not even Truman Capote would have remembered these lines! Many readers have trouble when an author gives us an unreliable narrator, but sometimes a narrator can be *too* reliable.

The upside to the writing's shininess is that "Booth" is very smooth reading -- though I can't resist pointing out a rare stumble, when Surratt describes his dread: "I felt a cold shiver in my bowels, as if the shadow of death had sent a chill wind through them." Somehow I doubt Robertson was aiming to instill an image of wind in Surratt's bowels. But this type of lapse is unusual. "Booth" is a gripping, enlightening read that's well worth the time of even those who don't often pick up historical fiction. And for Civil War aficionados: Don't miss this one.

An enjoyable book to read, and one that is hard to put down. Robertson admittedly takes some liberties but sticks pretty much to the main facts. Telling the tale through diary accounts, we see the relationship between John Wilkes Booth and the POV character, John Surratt, develop much like that of Steerforth's and David Copperfield's in the Dickens novel. Robertson interestingly enough has the aged Surratt meet with film maker D.W.Griffith and uses this to begin the novel, to great effect. An interesting tale with historical tidbits thrown in, and some insight into early American photography techniques as well. I hope to read many more novels by David Robertson in the future.

There should be a choice "zero stars." I expected this to be a simple book. What I did not expect is many factual errors. A "D" size flashlight battery is not 9 volts, but rather 1.5 volts just like an "AAA" cell. Engine capacity is not "the volume of the piston chambers." A conceptual method to determine the engine capacity is to remove a spark plug, rotate the engine to bottom dead center on that cylinder, fill the cylinder with water, turn the engine to top dead center and measure the volume of water that came out of the spark plug hole. Multiply this volume by the number of cylinders and you have the engine capacity. Of course you wouldn't actually want to do this procedure, but this is an easily understood mind experiment that correctly gets the concept of displacement across to the reader. Power is not "potential motion" but rather a measure of how fast work is performed. A tappet is not a lever. There is no excuse for these errors; they are not the result of simplification.

I have read this from cover to cover and am so amazed at how Mr. Robertson has made it a dream instead of a nightmare to own a car. I recommend anyone who owns a car, to buy this book.

I am about to send the book back, for the following reasons : - a large part of the book is not concerned with food, but is an account of the author's travels. I think the presentation of the book should have made this clear. - Many recipes rely on meat substitutes. It has always struck me as the sign of a sad lack of imagination when vegetarian food tries to mimick meat-based cooking. It is particularly regrettable when one writes about Turkish cuisine, which has some of the most delicious NATURALLY vegetarian dishes.

It's a good book it brings me back to some great family recipes from my Nana. I wish it had more pictures! Its one forth tour of turkey and three forth recipes.

I find this book disappointing. Firstly, one fourth of the book is taken up by the author's travel accounts. It's a different story when an author gives some background to each recipe. But it is not the case here and I find the result of those two books rolled into one very awkward. Second, and more annoyingly, many recipes rely on meat substitutes. I have always found it sad and the sign of a certain lack of imagination when vegetarian cooking tries to mimick meat-based dishes. It is particularly regrettable in a book on Turkish cooking which has a rich tradition of NATURALLY vegetarian dishes. Which is why I ordered the book in the first place !