Why would anyone write a biography of a historic figure and use a cartoon of a baboon on the cover? Can that be the face of the author?

I doubt that the greatest general and statesman of ancient times looked like a baboon. More likely it's a leftist biographer.

Don Norton

What's wrong with the Education of Julius Caesar? In a word, Arthur Kahn can't seem to keep his Leftist political biases from coloring his evaluation of the Late Republic. His prejudices seep in on virutally every page in which the Senate is discussed. This is not to say that the Senators where saints; far from it. But they were men of their time, who had been raised in a political community that indoctrinated them into it's beliefs just as every other society does. Kahn seems to ignore this in his zeal to paint the "oligarchs", as he calls them, in a bad light. This is illegitimate, as anyone who understands the structure of the Roman state in that era must know. The Romans had a nomialist theory of the state. Rather than thinking that Rome as a poltical community was some kind of larger whole, over and above it's citizens, the Romans believed that Rome was nothing but the assembly of the Roman people as private persons. This is the reason they based citizenship and voting rights on wealth. Since they did not have a very sharp and differentiated notion of political as opposed to private life, they could not find a basis for evaluating one apart from the other. Thus, a rich man was literally more of a citizen than a poor one, because he had more of the Republic than the poor man did, due to his extensive property. We regard this as bizarre, but no one in Rome seems to have thought twice about it. A result of this identification of the personal and the political is the radical fusion of the personal interests of the rulers with those of the state. That is why the Senators reacted so violently to reform attempts - they knew no vision of politics that would enable them to see any degradation of their posiiton as anything other than an attack of Roman society itself. They simply could not differentiate their own positions of power from the State. This is what Kahn ignores. In page after page, he portrays the Senate as a gang of cynical, ruthless misers out to strip everyone else to the bone while hiding their crimes under the name of patriotism. In truth, these sad little men just didn't know any better. Kahn ignores this, and thus projects his own class-warfare ridden politics onto men who lived two millenia ago.

If you want a good biography of Caesar, try Christian Meier's "Caesar", availble at Amazon.com, instead.

I found Kahn's book fascinating, although I agree with an earlier reviewer that I regret he could not keep his personal politics more out of his book - irritating, but a small caveat when there is so much of use here. It's as if Kahn is too prone to project Rome in 60 BC onto the U.S. in, say, 1935. I've read many books on Caesar (including C. Meier's rather romantic German version) and in many ways, I enjoyed Kahn's more than any except Gelzer (who is still the best). Kahn has his finger on almost every significant event in Caesar's (and the late Republic's) life and is able to work through the facts both thoroughly and logically. In fact, the book is almost overwhelming in its detail. Agreed, he is one of the "pro-Caesar" faction - which seems almost by definition to mean, he's anti-Optimate. Well, it's the rare historian of Caesar who can manage not to take sides on this subject, the very issue that tore the Republic apart. Read the book with the realization that you have a fine bio of Caesar here, accurate and thorough, but more than slightly prejudiced against the Roman Senate that so thoroughly detested and tried to destroy Caesar and you will do very well.

David W. Cloud is the pastor of a tiny "independent fundamental" Bible chapel in rural Michigan who thinks that every well-known Christian leader is in league with the Pope to get rid of the King James Bible, which God inspired in 1611 to replace the Hebrew/Greek originals, with the NIV.

(...) If Cloud wasn't such a turgid and unimaginative writer, he'd give Jack T. Chick a real run for his money in the category of Paranoid Fundamentalist Fantasy.

Cloud never presents the Gospel, or even gives any indication that he understands what the Gospel is. All of Cloud's Biblical quotes are drastically out of context and wrong.

His defenses of the KJV are even more twisted. He denies the existence of the Septuagint and the Vulgate, says that the Roman Catholic priests who editing the KJV Greek text were "orthodox believers...men of God," and basically regurgitates all of Peter Ruckman's and Gail Riplinger's bizarre ravings. (...)

Does anyone really believe that today's Evangelical Church is in league with the Vatican to usher in the Reign of the Anti-Christ? The charge is preposterous. Throughout Latin America and Europe, evangelicals are winning those who failed to find Christ within Rome. The Pope is so worried that he has set up commissions to stop Evangelicals in Latin America, Estonia, and other nations. Does this sound like cooperation to you?

According David W. Cloud, Bible-believing Christians are evil. Everyone who wants to serve God must leave Christianity and embrace Cloud's King James Only cult (this cult group, by the way, denies orthodox Christian teaching on the nature of Christ and the Trinity, and teaches that God added new revelation to the Bible in 1611 A.D.)

David W. Cloud is a twisted, sick individual. His writings have contributed nothing to the advancement of the Gospel. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find David Cloud saying ANYTHING that is in itself constructive or affirming - all he does is distort the records of reputable Christian leaders, slandering men of God. The only people who read Cloud are radical King James-Only Fundamentalists who are bitter that Bible-believing Christians rejected their heretical teachings. I've looked over most of what Cloud has on his website for kicks, and Cloud NEVER presents the Gospel, NEVER quotes Scripture in its proper context, and NEVER talks about Jesus. Cloud says that helping the poor is wrong, because this is "social gospel." Cloud DOES do the following: negate the clear teachings of the New Testament with distorted quotes from the Old - call medieval Papists who edited the Textus Receptus "good Christian men" while condemning modern Evangelicals for sins such as watching TV - endorse violent Northern Irish extremists - the list goes on. When facts fail David Cloud (as they usually do), he simply makes stuff up (the supposed Unitarian Universalist endorsement of the NIV is sheer fantasy). Fortunately, Cloud is such an atrocious writer with such a poor grasp of web design that nobody stays on his site for long.

Cloud is in good company - other King James Only cultists (like Gail Riplinger) say that we must work for our salvation, that demons have sex with us, that the government is taking samples of DNA to clone us after the Rapture, etc.

It IS true that Evangelicals recognize that some Catholics may be saved, thanks to the grace of God and the leading of the Holy Spirit. Luther thought this, too. So did Calvin, Smyth&Helwys, and every other Protestant reformer you can name. But does the fact that Promise Keepers admits that some Catholics may go to Heaven, and that some Evangelicals cooperate in political matters with some Catholics (of course, politics is something quite outside religion) mean that the National Association of Evangelicals is about to accept the authority of the Pope? Of course not!

Any student of the Bible knows that the end-times Apostacy will be the unscriptural yoking of believers and unbelievers. Anyone that denies this is not only ignorant of Bible truths, but also unwilling to see current events in the Biblical light! Brother Cloud is right on the mark. Excellent resource. Thank you Brother Cloud.

Considering the fact that Dr. Castriota wrote this book while neglecting the well-being of his children (we saw him for about fifteen minutes a day because he locked himself in his office to write) it really ought to be better than it is. His language is nearly opaque and completely inaccessible to anyone except maybe six old germans sitting in the berlin museum and they know everything anyway. Definitely not a must have. it's right up there on my reading list with Finnegan's Wake, it being long boring, confusing and when you get done reading it all you can think about is how much oxygen you wasted reading it.

There has been a good deal of scholarship in relation to this monument (The Ara Pacis Augustae), but few scholars have spent much time on the extensive vegetal friezes that are at eye-level on all four sides of the altar. Only a handful of scholars have written more extensively on this topic, and have put forth varying and interesting theories about their greater meaning in the context of the altar. David Castriota is one of the most thorough.
Castriota's major argument is that the friezes are an extremely important and integral part of the message of the monument as a whole. They represent through their vegetal imagery and the animals within this vegetal landscape the gods that best exemplified the pax Augustae and the restoration of the mos maiorum, the old Roman values and traditions on which Rome was thought to have been built.
In order for this message to convey the intended meaning to the majority of the Roman people, it had to be easily understandable. Both the educated and uneducated should have been able to quickly identify the basic concepts of the imagery it contained and understand what these images stood for without extensive study. Castriota looks first at the precedent for the vegetal friezes and what these earlier works meant to the people who commissioned them, and second, he discusses the widespread use of this type of decoration and how familiar the Roman people were with it.
Anyone who has an interest in Augustan history should read this book. The Ara Pacis was not just another piece of beautiful Augustan art. This monument stood as the epitome of the Augustan message of peace brought forth and solidified by Augustus; a peace that had never truly been seen in Roman history to that point.

I'm an utter Battlefield 1942 addict, maintaing a FAQ, annotated maps, an extensive tips and tactics page, and a weapons effects page for this game. My feeling about this book is that it's a mixed bag.

The good: the book is surprisingly long (336 pages) and thorough. It covers the basics of how to move around and do things (swim, parachute, use the various vehicles), gives a complete listing of all important objects in the game, and gives detailed maps and tactics for all battles, including The Road To Rome expansion. It points out things you might not have realized, and might never realize. That, to me, is the best thing a strategy guide on this game can do. There are various tactics, such as hitting the "walk backwards" [S] key while sliding down a hill to avoid falling damage, that I personally would have never figured out myself and am happy to have learned from others. This guide gives a lot of ideas for new players to try out, which makes the game more enjoyable. The layout is straightforward and readable. The first 68 pages are an extended manual, then each battle is covered in depth.

The bad: there are some disappointments for me with this guide. It would have been helpful to at least point the reader where to go for fixes to well-known technical problems, i.e. at least send him to EA's support site and fan sites like Battlefield Central, BF42.com, or Planet Battlefield. There's no mention that I could find describing how to set up a joystick for flying, a very common question. While it's possible to use the mouse for flying, a joystick is much simpler (this game convinced me to buy one, in fact). The large variety of console commands are not touched upon at all - these are important, as they're the only way to attempt to kick off a team-killing player, they're how you can show the frames-per-second rate, along with a number of other useful functions. The All-Seeing Eye, a program which efficiently finds servers for multiplayer games (much faster and more flexible than the in-game server browser), is not discussed. The book does mention clans in passing, but does not talk about things like modder developments. For example, Desert Combat is a mod about the US vs. Iraq, is free for download, and is very popular - no mention of it here. A number of important tactics are also not covered, e.g. the "walking backwards" tactic for hills mentioned above is missing from this guide (though in its defense the guide does describe many other tactics). There are also errors, such as the belief that the only way to enter the driver's seat of the US destroyer is by entering the rear position and switching to the front (you can enter by the front turret, even though there is no doorway).

The ugly: there are a number of problems with layout. To begin, the table of contents is incorrect. Wake Island was accidentally left out, but its page number was used for the next battle listed, so every battle listed after that gives the page number for the battle preceeding it. There is no index. The maps of the battles that come with the original game were mostly created from my own online annotated maps, as they contain the same mistakes my maps had until I corrected these a week ago. Unfortunately, the author does not credit my site for the information, so readers do not know to look there for updates. His Road to Rome maps (which he did not copy from me) look to be complete, though there was some printing problem with Anzio that moved flak guns from the island to the east shore of the river, and put a number of US vehicles as starting in the bay. Opportunities to provide the player with useful reference sheets were ignored. For example, there is a radio button command summary, but it was split over two non-facing pages when it could have fit on a single page.

All in all, there's a fair bit of chewy material in this guide. Some might consider such a guide as a spoiler, but for this game it's about strategy and tactics, there really should be no hidden secrets that only expert players know about. On this level the guide generally succeeds, though it sometimes misses some key tactics and also sometimes states the obvious. I was disappointed at what the guide left out: support and fan websites, console commands, joystick setup, All-Seeing Eye, Teamspeak/Roger Wilco, etc. Four pages listing these and pointing at the relevant web sites would have helped many players enjoy the game more. The author knows the game well, but ignores anything that was not included in the box itself.

I wanted to like this translation after all the nice things that D.S. Carne-Ross said about it in the useful and enjoyable "Horace in English." But this is a translation that is made more for image-by-image accuracy than for the ear. Often you read Ferry describing the right word rather than saying it. (Phrases like "too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune" read like a dictionary entry.) In the difficult-to-render i.5 he ends up phrasing things like Yoda - "Hapless are they enamored of that beauty." Too academic this one is.

David Ferry's translation is simply undeservedly popular and is absolutely NOT the best Horace in English currently in print!

I defy anyone to find Ferry's Horace superior to the wonderfully readable translation done recently by Sidney Alexander and published in Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. Richard Howard, translator extraordinaire himself, has written a short Preface for the volume, in which he compares a passage from Alexander's work to other versions of the same passage done by Pound, Michie, and Burton Raffel, and Howard justly judges that Alexander's is the "far superior text."

Ferry's language is too often simply muddled, the syntax unclear. Do yourself a great favor, buy the Sidney Alexander translation, and you'll be rewarded with a vastly more enjoyable reading experience!

No doubt, that a command of Greek and Roman mythology adds immeasurably to the enjoyment of Horace's Odes but in many cases the context explains the reference. Horace's commonplace themes are deeply imbedded in our culture and he illuminates them with uncommon insight and poetry: love is cruel, seize the day, greed wants more, death equalizes, happy the one who wants nothing, don't be beguiled by past success, luck changes, accept your place, beauty fades, death comes, money can't buy peace, a friend is our other half. I love Horace the man, the Odes and the Ferry translation which brings a contemporary idiom to the poems without seeming contrived.