This book is an original, combining the stories of discoverers, hard science, and masterful photography. It is a true feast, leavened by odd humor and genuine love of the subject. For example, there is a section on coprolites - petrified dino scat - that goes into what they are revealing about the ecology of the dino era. In addition, it features a lovely photo of a smiling scientist, as she preside over her coprolites like a baker advertising her wares: it is funny, informative, artististic. The stories in it are also fascinating, telling of their quirky personalities, inexplicable talents, and fanatical drive.

Reading it helped me to re-live my childhood love of these great and mysterious beasts as well as to update my knowledge on the state of the art today. Now I am introducing my children to them through this book.

Highly recommended.

Psihoyos, a photographer for National Geographic, has written a tremendous book about dinosaurs as we understand them today. Central to the book, of course, are Psihoyos' terrific photographs: Of fossils in museums, of individuals in their workplaces, of the beautiful landscapes to which paleontologists travel to search for bones, and of the bones themselves in varying states of discovery and repair. All by itself, this book gives you a deep respect for what really good photographers can accomplish with their craft.

Psihoyos also turns out to be a lively and witty writer, and the book provides a good general background on what we understand of dinosaurs and how they lived, as well as a history of dinosaur hunters dating back to the mid-19th century. I've been a casual "fan" of dinosaurs since childhood, and much of what's related here was completely unknown to me. Psihoyos outlines several of the controversies in the history of dinosaur digging, including the discovery of the reptile-bird archaeopterix, and the wars between the two great bone hunters of the late 19th century.

Along the way he also caught a few big breaks, such as discovering that there was no "type specimen" (defining example) for homo sapiens (humans), as well as getting caught up in the Tyrannosaur Sue controversy which resulted in lawsuits and jail time for some of those involved.

Anyone with any amount of interest in dinosaurs - from casual to deep - should find this book entertaining, and maybe even enlightening. For the pictures alone, it's a steal.

This is a wonderful book for amateur paleontologists and those who just like dinosaurs. The authors visit all the famous locales, where the big finds were made (you know the names--the Badlands, Mongolia), and talk to those who are currently working in the field. You learn some of the interesting stories from behind the scenes. Beautifully photographed as well. Accompanied by the skull of Edward Drinker Cope ("the Man" when it comes to North american paleontologists, along with his nemesis, O.C. Marsh), this is the ultimate dinosaur roadtrip. Maybe it will come back into print soon, with the ever present interest and appetite for dinosaurs and dinosauria.

Librarians--while this was published as an adult book, Amazon's suggestion of YA is right on--glossy photos, some irreverant humour, nice layout with just enough white space, and a subject that is always in demand somewhere make it just right for a YA non fiction collection.

This was my first Lefcourt book. I was too cheap to buy the 11 Karens in paperback, so here I was looking at an old (1991) novel that I could buy and be happy with. As old fan of Hollywood books and novels, this ranks among the funniest I've read. It is a quick read, but more satisfying than the typical Hollywood farce. It tells you more than you wanted to know about Benjamin Disraeli. However, the satire does not get out of hand and somehow you could almost envision the plot twists actually happening in real life. The book is well written and funny as can be. I hope the reprint wins Lefcourt new fans. I'm one. The book really gets Hollywood. Bravo!

If you're looking for a fast, funny read, you will not be disappointed with The Deal. The plot is intricate, the action is non-stop, and the characters are outlandish, especially the industry's movers and shakers-the extras-that Lefcourt takes great delight in lampooning.

Peter Lefcourt could've given us a savage portrayal of studios meanies. Instead he gives us a fun world of open minded, flexible studio outsiders who make anything and everything happen on the way to producing what is supposed to be a blockbuster film. You'll like the characters - they're a little sweet and goofy even though Lefcourt shows that they can be vapid. It's a lot of fun.

Azevedo's 1890 book depicting life and death in a Rio de Janeiro slum is one of Brazil's early masterpieces. It follows the fortunes of Joao Romao as he expands his business interests from small-time shopowner to upwardly striving slumlord. Dozens of neighborhood denizens wander in and out of the story, fighting, singing, working, copulating, and dying. The characters, dialogue, and scenery are vivid -- the slum comes alive as blacks and mulattos scramble with Portuguese and Italian immigrants to climb off the bottom of the social food chain. Women's roles are fascinating: virgin/prostitute, submissive head of family, object and subject. Race relations are critically examined. For modern readers seeking a developed plot line, the story might seem to slip off the rails. Identified with the Realist/Naturalist literary schools, Azevedo's slum seeks to broadly describe and illuminate a social setting rather than the stories of particular characters. Even so, the imagery is colorful and the language powerful. Brazil's slums don't seem to have changed much in the century since Azevedo wrote about them.

This book is a masterpiece for several reasons. It is filled with complex and interesting characters, none especially likable but all interesting. Some of the passages, including the scene where Jeronimo stands, hypnotized, watching Rita Baiana dance for the first time, rank among the best prose I have ever read (I hope the translator does it justice). Structurally it is unusual because no individual person is the main character. The main character is the Slum itself, which is treated as an organic unit. This fact brings me to my next point- Azevedo's idea of treating a neighborhood as an organic entity predates Chicago School Sociologists like Wirth and Zorbaugh by 40 years. People interested in Urban Studies will be fascinated by Azevedo's description of the birth of the slum and it's growth to the point where, towards the end of the story, it begins to fill up with students and artists and starts to gentrify. It also serves as a valuable historical document, showing what day to day life was like for poor Brazilians and immigrants in Rio de Janeiro during the twilight of the Empire. Apparently, one of the main differences between then and now in Brazil is that in those days, slums actually had owners. Today, most Brazilian slums are formed by squatters and this (judging from this book) seems to be an improvement. All This is not to say that the book doesn't have its flaws. One thing that I find troublesome with a lot of naturalism, including the Slum, is that it focuses almost entirely on sadness and tragedy while giving the appearance of objective storytelling. In any event, evil characters are often more interesting than good ones and the slumlord Joao Romao is one of the great literary hypocrites of all times.

I read about this book in one of the many book review publications I read. The reviewer correctly called it a masterpeice. Apparently only one other person read that review or perhaps she found it on her own. We were both lucky. It is a book so well worth reading that it is hard to find enough suitable words of praise yet it is unknown. This book throbs with the colors, odors and sounds of a Brazilian slum: the excitement, the perfumes, the sexuality and the despair. It is deceptively easy to read. In fact, it almost finishes too quickly. One wants to continue to bathe one' senses in the luxurious words. This is not to say that the reader's morality and intellect is not also engaged. It is a scathing commentary on Brazilian attitudes towards race and the poor during the early 20th century. The reader cannot help but recognize that thhese attitudes are still with us in the early 21st century. However, Azevedo does not preach to us. He simply presents us with the issues, quietly, even deceptively. We do not know how deeply we have thought and felt until the last page.

Children will enjoy having this humorous tale read to them about a runaway beard's attempts to find a home. Adults will enjoy the simple, well illustrated storyline, especially while wearing the fake beard that comes with the book. A particulary good choice for anyone who enjoys reading to children.

My kids (ages 8 and 2) and I got a real kick out this book! First the beard escapes off dad's face and is befriended by the kids. Then the beard tries out all sorts of very silly new homes until it finally lands on man's bald head, and they both live happily ever after!

I like the drawings very much--they are fresh, clever, and amusing caricatures of more or less famous people seen as alligators. The poems are wonderful--original works of wit, which complement the drawings but go beyond them in subtlety and humor. Good book!

Whether it is Oprah Winfrey, Alligator Commentator or Lorena Bobbitt, Penile Amputator, Noel Miller gives the reader much more value than the minimal cost of this amusing book. This publication will amuse your friends, family, and dinner party guests for years to come. It is a classic! I am sure that the author's work will far surpass the fame of the Blue Dog. Louisiana should be proud of this great combination of art and poetry

Jan Morris has been everywhere, seen everything, met everyone, and tries to see the good in all of it. She seems happiest, though, among the young. She is surprisingly forgiving toward some of the hollower booster-driven cities of North America, while often coming down hard on New World cities that seem too full of themselves. (She memorably describes Washington, DC as seeming designed for nuclear annihilation.)

Not surprisingly, then, Morris is generous toward Sydney, honoring its brief history but focusing on its childlike present. Since the book was completed, of course, the child has become an adolescent, frantically acquiring attractions that will make it seem more adult -- preening itself for its moment on the world stage in the 2000 Olympics. Like many books about childhood, this one should be read wistfully, with the knowledge that the city it describes is only a snapshot, circa 1990, of a place that seems to be disappearing under its own need for approval.

Of course, during the inevitable post-Olympics hangover, this book may be useful in another way. When we lose track of who we are, when the purpose that has obsessed us suddenly evaporates, it's sometimes helpful to recall what gave us pleasure when we were children. At such a moment, Morris's portrait of Sydney in its last moments of childhood may offer the city a route back to its core, and thus forward into a happier adulthood.

I bought this book in Sydney and found it a wealth of information on Sydney's beginings. The first time I read it, I savored every page...I couldn't put it down. As I got to the end of the book I felt bad that it was over, so I re-read it every few years. Jan Morris's style of writing is so entertaining and makes for a easy read.

This is a *reference manual*. You will want to read the Xlib Programming manual published by O'Reilly first. And you will only want this book if you want to program X11 directly, as opposed to using a toolkit such as GTK or Qt.

Having said that, this is a *good* reference manual. It contains none of the usual boilerplate text all too common in badly written manuals. It explains every feature of Xlib and the X11(R5) protocols in detail, and how to make best use of them. It is concise, well-organized, and to the point. And the index is actually quite useful.

The book is not entirely up-to-date. It would be better if it also covered some of the newer standards and extensions. There are some minor typos that might be corrected in the newer versions, but none that will give you any trouble. As the book focuses only on core protocols, you must look elsewhere for information on how to interoperate with Motif, Qt/KDE or GTK applications.

In short, if you are going to write some program that uses Xlib or the X11 protocol directly, this book will help you. And the differences between X11R5 and X11R6 are relatively minor and of little interest to the kind of applications most people would write without a toolkit. But still, if you are a toolkit developer, I would consider buying a newer book.

This book has been updated and split into three books:

X Window System: Core Libraries and Standards (1996, 700pp)

X Window System: Core and Extension Protocols (1997, 700pp)

X Window System: Extension Libraries (1997, 400pp)

Each of the new books covers through X11 Release 6.1.

I own this book, but I do not own the three newer books (I didn't know that they were replacements for this book). I contribute to the XFree86 project, an implementation of the X Window System, and I find this book to be useful in understanding the operations of X; I have not written a program that uses X11 directly, but I can see that this book (or its replacements) would be very useful when doing so.

I found this a harder book to wade through than Fatherland.
I suppose this was partially due to a darker tone to the book, maybe this was imparted by the fact that much of the book take's place in the middle of the night. I am sure another aspect was that the some of the subject matter was a bit redundant to me, having recently finished the lenghty tome Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I was also put off by the now familiar, having read FatherLand and Archangel previously, literary and thematic twist that Harris employs of couching the revealation of historical pogroms and monstrostisties as the cause of the books mystery. All of these three books employ this same device, so that by the end of Enigma I was not that surprised by the historical cause of the "enigma".

Having said all of that, I did enjoy the book, especially the insight into the accomplishments of Bletchley Park as well as the mystery Claire's dissapearance. I guess it was just not as enjoyable as Fatherland, and it was probably a mistake to tear through three of his books in so short a time period.

'Enigma' is a story of intrigue that takes place at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. There are two main storylines: cracking the enigma code before a shipping convoy is destroyed, and discovering the motives and intentions of the mysterious Claire Romilly.

Both these storylines revolve around the main character, Tom Jericho, a cryptanalyst working on breaking the german naval enigma code.

'Enigma' starts off very slowly, and after 90 pages, I was about to put the book down and move on. However, Harris really starts getting to the heart of the action about this time, and the book really takes off. Perhaps he could have condensed the first 90 pages and made this book five stars, but taken as a whole 'Enigma' is quite entertaining.

If you enjoy books about wartime codebreaking, you will definitely want to read this book. If you read and enjoy 'Enigma', you should check out Neal Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon.'

This book is a must read for anyone who likes smart, savvy adventure mysteries.

The main character is Tom Jericho, a mathematician and cryptoanalysist who works in a government building in Britain, trying to crack the Nazi Enigma code known as Shark. Tom and his team manage to crack Shark a month ago, but the Nazis have set up a new version that makes Shark, which already has several million ways of encoding, just 26 times harder. Jericho is overworked and tired, and distraught over his girlfriend, Claire, dumping him, but he is sent back to help the team crack the new code. The Nazi U Boats are planning an attack in 4 days, and the code is virtually impossible to crack in that amount of time. To make things worse, Jericho finds that Claire is missing under very strange circumstances. Jericho must deal with the constant memories of Claire, and team up with Hester, Claire's roomate, and his many co-workers to solve the mystery of the Shark.

The book is very intelligently written. Harris knows exactly what he is talking about, from historical facts to every little detail of the Enigma machines and codes. He delivers these facts to you in an engaging style that keeps you riveted. This book is NEVER boring. Even the long passages about the codes and mathematics are so interesting the pages just fly by. I'm a person who detests math with all my heart, but this book manages to capture my interest and hold it.

I'm amazed at how the characters are portrayed. They're all superbly characterized, even the very minor ones, each with their own unique speaking style and actions and motives. The characters are so realistic that you're able to see all them and REMEMBER all twenty or so main characters as if you've known them all before.

The pacing of the book is fast, but manages to deliver romance and deep thinking without dragging the book down. The superb, complex plot, the characters, and the intriguing details make you want to go back and read it again.

Note: you'll probably need a dictionary or at least some knowledge of WW2 to fully understand all the terms and references in this book.

One thing is for certain, you'll put down Enigma enlightened to a lot more about WW2, in addition to having read a great book.

Mike Bryan's sincerity is evident in almost every word of this heartfelt account of the author's term spent at the evangelical-fundamentalist seminary Criswell College in Texas. With no detectable trace of ulterior motive, guile or superiority, he became a part of the life of this small (about 350 students) Christian college in the heart of the Bible Belt. The book takes us through his many experiences, including conversations with college faculty and students, chapel services, a trip to the Southern Baptist Convention and a mission to El Salvador. Interspersed with these recollections are his own reflections on faith.

He is disarmingly honest, and one would be unusually hard-pressed to rake up evidence that he had any particular axe to grind, or that he set out to do an expose of Protestant fundamentalism: Indeed, he is candid about the inadequacies of his own particular agnosticism, and does not try to set them against the often seemingly naive and foolish world of fundamentalism. What he discovers are real people who don't fit the stereotype, and his genuine intentions towards these people (who became real friends during his time at Criswell) are clearly visible.

His most interesting observation is that the apparent distance between these fundamentalists and unbelievers - the former are heavenbound, while the latter are wicked sinners destined for hell unless they repent - is only intellectual; on a deeper, more human and heartfelt level the author finds that most of his evangelical friends and acquaintances are accepting, and there is little sign of any real distance in their relations.

Bryan is gifted in that, although he is no Christian, and remained unconvinced by the arguments and claims he was faced with at Criswell, he can see others first and foremost as human beings. Thus, Chapter and Verse is no anti-fundamentalist polemic; rather it is one man's account of what he really found - minus all the trappings of labels and stereotypes - when he got to know a group of fundamentalists for themselves.

As is common with books written about theological, biblical or ecclesiastical issues by people who are foremost journalists (I am reminded of Bruce Bawer's far less charitable Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity), the author reveals himself as something of a dilettante on some religious matters. He makes a number of elementary mistakes: His definition of the Chalcedonian formulation of the two natures in Christ is misleading; He wrongly includes premillennialism as one of the five fundamentals published by the earliest fundamentalists; there were a few others.

He also draws one or two puzzling conclusions, such as that fundamentalists (apparently) are uniquely representative of "biblical" Christianity; that non-evangelicals cannot lay claim to following the Bible as closely and consistently as evangelicals. Such an inference is only true within the fundamentalist scheme of interpretation; nevertheless, Bryan is so transparent and genuine that one can overlook a few errors made in good faith. Chapter and Verse is one of the more nuanced portrayals of fundamentalist Christianity in recent years, and Bryan's compelling manner had me hooked from start to finish.

Mike Bryan, enrolled in Criswell College, a bible college, this book tells of his learnings while there. And the works thereof. I am so glad I purchased this book. All should read this. K. Foster, Oklahoma.

This is an entertaining account of a skeptical journalist who spent a semester as a student at the staunchly evangelical/fundamentalist Criswell College. Bryan tells of his encounters with: - Paige Patterson, now the prez of the SBC but then the head of Criswell various 'Green Berets' - very evangelistic students - who did their darnedest to win him to Christ

- Jim Parker, the philosophic ethics prof, who presented the intellectual case for Christianity

- Danny Akin, now dean of School of Theology at Southern Seminary, then theology prof at Criswell, who taught Bryan the evangelical view of the Bible and Biblical doctrine

In the process, Bryan sat through numerous chapels and evangelistic meetings, met hundreds of believers and heard their stories, attended a preaching conference in Florida, and tagged along on a missionary trip to civil war-torn El Salvador.

Throughout this fascinating book, a journal of sorts really, Bryan gives a sketchy autobiography of his disbelief. In the end, Bryan, though challenged mightily by the witness of the sold-out Criswellians, chooses to stay in the comfort of his 'soft agnosticism.' He made this decision not ultimately because of intellectual difficulties - indeed, he couldn't come close to answering Dr. Parker's attacks on atheism/naturalism - but because he valued his current lifestyle, what he calls the lifestyle of frozen margaritas and R-rated movies.

Bryan is surprisingly objective and very generous in his portrayal of Criswell and the Christianity represented by its students and faculty. It is obvious to any reader that he enjoyed his time there and learned quite a bit as well. The book provides numerous insights into the unbelieving mind, especially as it comes into contact with the Gospel and thus is very useful reading for apologists and evangelists.

Altogether, a good read.

Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf have written a book that is filled with irony and fun. It's meant as a dictionary for politically correct terms, and some of them are pretty well thought up, such as "optically challenged, hair disadvantaged and pharmacological preference, but unfortunately, the subject of ridicule, political correctness, is a fun but far from large subject, and in my opinion, the authors have written a much too large book on a much too small subject. At first it's pretty good entertainment, but it just gets old and corny, and it isn't funny once you reach page 40.

When I first bought the book, I was expecting high quality entertainment, providing razor-sharp satire on a society rapidly increasing its speed into the chasm of death. I got that, but I got so much more.

The book does an excellent job of providing a realistic look at the language the few schmucks in power have forced upon us.

Of course I laugh at everything, because it all seems so stupid. But, after finishing the book and going back out into the real world, I was shocked at exactly how true the book really was.

What has happened to this country? Have we become so paranoid about the remote possiblity of offending someone that we've really created a euphemism for the word dead? I mean, how many dead people are going to be offened if we call them dead? Answer: None.

This book helped me realize exactly how pointless the whole process of political correctness is. When are these people going to realize that changing the word does not change the condition? It's not only pointless, but it's hurting this country. All these people are doing is sheilding people from reality. Political correctness is a stupid idea which needs to be eliminated (I'm sorry, neutralized).

Good book, bad idea.

Far from being entertaining this book is scary stuff! Words whose meaning has been redefined, new incomprehensible words, ambiguous combinations of words, all in the apparent belief that we shouldn't upset anyone at anytime has a deadly seriousness about it! It reminds me of the Wolf Biermann song "Das Hoelderlin Lied", the first three lines of lines of which translate as: "in this country we live like strangers in our own house / our own language which we encounter we no longer understand / yet they who speak our language understand us"
The authors should be congratulated for producing this book and I think it should be made compulsory reading for all!