Michael Netzer's art is very good, particularly in his depictions of Green Arrow and Poison Ivy. The story, by Dennis O'Neil, is solid and stands comfortably outside any of the usual Batman, Green Arrow and Justice League monthly titles. Highly recommended.

I looked up this book to judge Oneil's take on the Dark Knight & to read a rare team-up involving two of my favourite heroes, Batman & the Green Arrow. Both crusaders share the fact that they have no super powers but rely on wits & detective work to solve their mysteries...

The story respects that. The plot is coherent & the atmosphere is deadly serious & the characters are well drawn. You feel that Green Arrow has more to say to his dark friend but your desire for the stars to interact is left unfullfilled.

That was a good read, all in all, and could serve a primer for those two fine characters to meet up again & defy evil. Whether you get the full comraderie thing out of it is not certain...but the ending is dark & well deserved.

Here's for seeing them together again...

Mr. Satterfield's guide to the Chilkoot has the ring of authenticity: a reader is convinced that he has been over every inch of the trail. It is well-written and thorough, and offers the right blend of historical minutia (though not so detailed as Pierre Berton's writing) and practical hiking advice. My own copy is well-worn from many Chilkoot miles.

This is a novel about a character named Doug who was just released from prison and the stigma attached to him. It turns out that the consequences of his past is inextricably intertwined with his racial identity and the division in his Australian community between black and white. This novel moves very fast. The rapid pace of the narrative matches the speed with which Doug spirals down toward his inevitable doom. The tone is largely based on a quality of fatalism. For each moment of peace and release, Doug finds an intrusion that prevents him reaching a sense of fulfillment. At times, the author makes this too explicit. The relationships between the characters are what make the story so moving. There is such a strong sense of haphazardly drawn communities between Doug's friends and lovers, but which, for the moment, seem so tremendously real to the characters that you want to believe in their permanence. Doug is plagued with a heritage of divide between his helpful mother and his broken father. This is built in the context of a racially divided community. His parole officer doesn't have any hope or, seemingly, any desire to see Doug become successful. With all these conspiring influences, he cannot achieve any lasting stability. It becomes obvious that there is something unstable that has been built in him that leads him, almost unconsciously, toward his own destruction. This is a short, sad and poignant tale.

In the first sentence of "The Gorbachev Factor," Archie Brown tells his readers that his work "is neither a history of the Gorbachev era, nor a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev." On reading that, this "country boy" had to ask..."well what is it?" Well, by the end I knew: Brown's work is an outstanding analysis of Mikhail Gorbachev's influence on Soviet history in the 1980's. It is a well written, well researched and well documented account not just of Gorbachev's role during this time, the the myiad factors that influenced Gorbachev. Now, there "ain't" no doubt that Brown likes Gorbachev. While Brown points our more than ove of Gorbachev's faults, the lion's share of Brown's work tend to vindicate his actions and elevate his intent. But this is no simple apology for the leader of a regime that fell. Rather, it is an in-depth look at the incredable challenges and paradoxical results of Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union.

This was the first-ever totally computer generated comic graphic novel, and it was done in the late 80s when computer technology was a piddly fraction of what it is today. One must be aware of this going in, or you'll be a bit disappointed. Nevertheless, technology lovers will salivate at the copious amount of tech talk between its pages. The premise is as follows: an aged Tony Stark is about to sell some of his most prized inventions to a Japanese competitor, against the wishes of one Nick Fury and SHIELD. Fury's concerns turn out to be valid, and Stark-Iron Man, along with a robotic Iron Man, set out to make things right. Unfortunately, the bad guys' contingency plan results in the robotic armor gaining sentience (current Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada must've gotten ideas from this), and Stark has no choice but to let it be free. Leaves the door open for a sequel....?

Why or why not submit to (techincal) battery in the name of better health? Because intervention always works? Because we patients deeply want to believe intervention will help? Because providers want us to believe it will help? Because it's faster? Because it's better?

This book lays out the pieces of medical choice-making in the context of the probabilities that underlie all desision making. It suggests that principled gambling is seminal to medical choices and makes suggestions, via numerous clinical vignettes, of how medical practice needs to change so that patients and practitioners can make better choices rather than those based on blind faith, short-term clinical efficiency, and shamanistic egos.

In short, this book deconstructs the mechanistic (know-it-all) paradigm of medical practice and replaces it with a probabilistic (don't know it all) paradigm that would, in most cases, be fairer and kinder to all.

Medicine would be a better place if the suggestions in this book were adopted.

An extremely thorough listing of lakes and streams in Western Montana. A must-have if you are adventurous and tired of visiting the same lakes everyone else visits. This book gives you the location of the body of water by township/section numbers, directions for how to reach the trail or get closest to the lake, and what you'll find to catch once you get there. If you want to find the lakes which no other book mentions, some of which aren't even on the maps, this is your passport to many weekends of fine hiking and fishing. My dad had a 1970-something version of the same book which we used to explore the Jewel Basin. I just got this updated release this summer, and my kids and I love to find a lake in the book, locate its position on a map, and then go find it. Brings out the explorer in everyone. From my experiences, I've found the directional information to be very accurate, fishing information is good, but changes with each Montana winter. Enjoy the hunt!

This is a book about financial economics, not day-trading. The techniques used is advanced econometric analysis, not technical charting. The purpose is to clarify some common myth about efficient market theory and the random walk hypothesis, not to show one how to pick stocks. Just like the authors' other book ("Econometrics of Financial Markets"), this one is of the highest high quality, and does a superb job on what it set out to be.

Some readers seem to be disappointed at this book by naively assuming what the title implies, as shown by some of the reviews here. They really can't blame anyone but themselves. Just because Burton Malkiel's classic didn't show us how to day trade doesn't mean a book with the opposite title will do so, nor did the authors ever claim that, either.

The other reviews are right...this book is definitely not a how-to guide for personal investors looking to "beat the market." It's essentially an academic tome, so its theme is tightly circumscribed (so they do not and should ask about all asset markets that might possibly be relevant to investors -- only the stock market over certain periods). The exposition is extremely sophisticated and makes use of cutting edge mathematical and especially statistical modeling to make the case.

The punch line has two important parts: (i) the "random walk" hypothesis is false -- day to day movements in stock prices are not random bouncing that many extant models claim they should be; and (ii) most of us will never have the capabilities to employ these modeling techniques to put the rubber to the road and find out WHICH way stock X is going on December 13.

So it's fascinating in regard to the mechanics of asset pricing, but totally useless as a practical investment guide. But that doesn't mean it's a *bad* book or that it warrants a 3-star rating (the average at the time of this review). Blame _Business Week_ if you expected something else. The book is exceptional and does no more and no less than what it claims to do.

There is no indication anywhere that this book was intended
either as a follow on to Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down
Wall Street or as a primer for day traders. Hence it is
rather disappointing to read the reviews of those who
somehow managed to reach one of the preceding conclusions.

Several statistical studies have made it clear that the
markets are not completely random as asserted by much of the
academic economics community. It is impossible to prove or
refute the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, because, as Farmer
puts it, the EMH, by itself, is not a well-posed and
empirically refutable hypothesis. This book tries to
rigorously analyze the markets as they are.

The average investor could easily reach the same conclusions
as Burton Malkiel strives for, namely that he is best off
investing in an index fund. However, they do it in a more
interesting fashion than simply asserting that, on average,
one cannot beat the average.

Despite all of the hype, NIGHT CRIES is a vastly overrated, artistic mess, placing Batman in the middle of a crisis and trying to make a statement about child abuse. While I'm one of the greatest advocate for comics having adult themes, this one fell flat on its face from Page One. Besides that, the artwork (coloring, especially) is horrible. One sad day in Gotham.

The art in Night Cries is cut from the same cloth as Arkham Asylum. If you liked the latter, then there's a good chance that you'll like the former. I personally found the art in both unappealing and uninspired, but to each their own. Night Cries is also drug down by a poor story with too many confusing elements that get further muddled by the poor art.

Goodwin and Hampton create a beautiful graphic novel. And when these two collide it makes a graphic novel on a problem that is timeless. Child abuse. A very important topic that is taken very seriously in this graphic novel.

Commissioner Gordon faces this problem with his son while trying to solve a child abusing case. While Batman is being accused of being the insane homecidal killer of the child abuser. His only hope is a young girl that has been so afraid she won't talk.

This book has overwhelming pictures that push the boundries of comics. As you can see on the cover. I recomend this book to anyone (mature enough).

I was totally amazed by the author's capability to write 700 pages of text and still have nothing to say. People that would normally buy books on directory services want to increase their knowledge in that particular area. If that is your objective, don't buy this book because it is very unlikely that you will learn anything new. I don't consider myself as having a strong technical background, and did not learn much.

I found this book pretty disappointing. There is way too much unstructured text; often it's not clear why one chapter follows another. It's too technical for a management's perspective and has too much abstract blah-blah for a techical perspective. It doesn't really qualify as a beginner's book (not enough background information, real-life or imaginary problems directory infrastructures are supposed to solve), but doesn't have enough specifics for an advanced reader.

I think there is still quite a lot of useful information in this book; however, a reader's patience is tested to the limits if he tries to extract it from this mass of text. The author could use some more time in extracting the useful bits and thus shortening the book (and making it a bit easier to carry too!)

In additions there are faults in this book's layout. The figures have no titles (it seems they are named with filenames they were stored in). There are also typos and grammatical mistakes (then instead of than etc.). All in all, nice idea, way too little work put into production.

This book is a great place to start for anyone wanting to get to grips with the implementation of directory services. It may not hold all the information you will need, but it gives a balanced view of the issues, the solutions and the technologies. Just what I needed; a great place to start....thanks Archie.