This book is great for those of us who like stories with a twist, stories about Mardi Gras, or just plain good reading. Overall, I think it is a great collection of short stories that, for the most part, are entertaining to read.

Here's one of the main problems that I have with the book. If it's a collection of stories about New Orleans Mardi Gras, why do most of the stories appear to be written by British authors? If you look, you'll see some traits of UK vocabulary and spelling, such as using "realise" when a US author would have spelled it "realize". That doesn't give these authors as much credibility to me, but, who really cares?

I think the last story of the book was DEFINITELY the best. If you've ever been to New Orleans and done one of the Haunted History tours, you'll surely recognize the characters in this story. Wonderful!!

Mardi Gras Madness is a collection of eleven stories by as many authors, the topics ranging from the light-hearted to the macabre. All of the stories are set primarily in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy dark tales of murder and the supernatural. The stories will send delightful chills of terror down your spine, and make you want to sleep with the lights on.

This book would make a good purchase for those with a-- twisted-- sense of humor. All eleven are short stories, but there are elements in many of them that will have you going back to read it again.

One of my personal favorites out of this book was "The Invisible Woman's Clever Disguise", one of the more light-hearted pieces about a middle-aged woman from Portland who discovers she's become invisible, and decides to have a bit of fun. She goes to New Orleans for her first Mardi Gras, where she gets an surprise invitation from a new and rather unorthodox krewe.

Two more of my favorites are "Farewell to the Flesh", a decidely darker tale about a vampire who gets involved with a group of cultists; and "Down in Darkest Dixie Where the Dead Don't Dance", another dark story about the spirits of New Orleans and the ones that return to do their evil work, year after year.

I highly recommend this book, all of the stories are absolutely wonderful!

As a Scottish mother-of-four, I have found no better role model for my children than Mr T. This book was enjoyed by all my children, although I do wish they'd skipped over or at least tone down some of the stuff from the early A-team days; I had to explain to my eight-year-old what 'freebasing' meant, which was definitely an uncomfortable experience for all concerned! Aside from that, it's great to see that Mr T still has a career, with the many new movies he's working on that are mentioned in this book.

In the words of the great man himself, "There's no way I'm gettin' on that airplane, and I don't wanna drink my milk!"

I think there's something in that for all of us.

Martin's book is a good rendering of the planning, construction, completion, and opposition to the Glen Canyon Dam. The book is a good historical work, though I didn't find it a compelling read, like "Cadillac Desert". Martin's best prose is when he descibes life in the town of Page during the construction of the dam, with rich details about life in a government town in the middle of the desert. Very enjoyable read even if you wish Glen Canyon Dam would fall back into the canyon. Can make you appreciate fully the people who built it and the people who opposed it.

THIS is a thoroughly gripping history of a great and fantastically beautiful river of the American Southwest, and of the powerful human beings locked in a bitter struggle over it, all their massive efforts to control it and equally determined efforts of those who did not want it controlled. Its climax is the completion of the monumental Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell, with a water storage capacity of 27 MILLION acre feet an a power-generating capacity to supply the needs of vast numbers of people and businesses over a vast range of our country. It is wrong to sugests that there are any villians in the story, but clearly, there are many heroic figures in a collosal struggle of competing interests, from the Sierra Club's David Brower, conservationist turned environmentalist, to the Bureau of Reclamation's Floyd Dominy, to prime contractor Merritt, Chapman Scott's chief engineer, Lem Wylie who got the job done despite the fact that the corporation went belly-up at the end. And it has politicians and statesmen-politicians from Colorado's Wayne Aspinall to Arizona's Stewart Udall and Barry Goldwater. Even Holywood with Charlton Heston and John Wayne, mercifully in bit sub-plots, grace a page or two. Every person even remotely interested in the history of our country's development and the beauty of the place it unfolded, should read Russell Martin's, "The Story That Stands Like a Dam."

this book suffers from the lack of a central character to carry the story. young martin chuzzlewit, the book's namesake, only appears in about a quarter of the book. old martin chuzzlewit appears in even less. seth pecksniff and sairey gamp are both amusing, but their characters are not central to the story. jonas chuzzlewit is central to the story, but he doesn't show up until halfway through. without a character to draw the reader's interest, a character the reader can follow the fortunes of, the book wanders. it's not a surprise that the installments of this novel didn't sell well.

the prose is gorgeous, as usual, but the story drags. worth a read, but not if you're new to dickens. best to start off with nicholas nickleby which doesn't suffer from the same defect.

If nothing else, one can come away with images of use in your daily lives. Read this book to understand the hypocrisy of Pecksniff and Mrs. Prigg's interesting friend, Mrs. Harris. These two things pop up as literary references all over the place. Now I finally understand the "Harris" reference in Murder on the Orient Express!

There are all sorts of deceptions and selfishness going on in this book, but by far, Seth Pecksniff is the most perfect character to be found of all Dickens' comic characters. There is a darkness in the profile of Mr. Pecksniff, but he is made to ridiculed, and Dickens does not let a chance pass to ridicule Pecksniff.

I want to digress a moment, for Dickens did as well -- there is a section where young Martin Chuzzlewit tries his fortune in America. And there is quite a bit of anti-American sentiment to be found in these parts (a fact which caused emnity between Dickens and the American public until he made his 2nd and final tour in 1870 or so). There are two reasons for this: first, Martin Chuzzlewit simply did not have the sales figures of previous novels. Anti-American books seemed to be "the thing" (just like diet books are popular today) in Britain, so he went for that. Secondly, Dickens had just been on a rather contentious tour of the U.S. in which he had been trying to make a case for international copyright. You see, the U.S. was the China of that day -- infamous for pirating works of people from other countries. Publishers in America had been printing their own copies of Dickens novels at cut rates (because they weren't paying Dickens or his British publishers anything!) When Dickens tried to make his plea for intellectual property rights, these same publishers of newspapers did a hatchet job of Mr. Dickens' reputation. So, basically, Dickens had an axe to grind.

In any case, feel free to skip all the Chuzzlewit in America bits. There is a moment of self-realization for young Martin, but it's not essential. All the essential action is going on in England, and Martin will return to finish business. There's also a pyramid scheme-like scam going on as part of a subplot, so now we've got two things involved in this novel that people think are debates of modern origin: intellectual property rights and bad financial info. Just remember, Napster and Internet stock tips are only the latest manifestation of old themes; at the very least, this book will remind you of that.

With this novel, Dickens left behind the shallow characters that sometimes marred his early works, and developed full-fledged people. Pecksniff and his daughters are marvelous creations that make one cringe with embarassment while laughing at their incredible selfishness. Tom Pinch is another character in a distinguished line of "too good to be true" Dickensian personalities, but he is shown to suffer and grow into a believable human being. The American episodes are biting in their satire, but overall they are on the money. Dickens' contempt for American armchair philosophers and "freedom-loving" slave owners fueled some of his most pointed social commentary. As always, there is a happy ending, but the plot is more complex than anything Dickens had written before. I have read Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiousity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit ranks right up there with his best.

Mostly well done; the others are noted as I come to them.

Bischoff, David: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice's Apprentice" Coarse, elderly Vincemole Whiteviper, apprentice to the dishonest adventurer Sir Harry Springraff, is narrating his memoirs to his own much-abused apprentice: how he lost what little fourteen-year-old innocence he had on a quest for a suspect wizard's treasury. The plan was for Vincey to seduce Relfalyn, the wizard's beautiful 18-year-old apprentice. Funny how things work out...The physical setting reminds me of an AD&D-based computer game.

de Lint, Charles: "Sign Here" Unusual style: entirely dialogue, without even "he/she said", 4 characters (2 appear only once), only 2 characters per scene. A stranger in a bar offered Peter enlightenment regarding the structure of the world - magic - if he'll sign over his soul. Peter's friend Robert employs unusual tactics to try to free him. The dialogue suffers from *too* much realism.

Friesner, Esther: "Homework" Parody by someone who's read the Evil Overlord checklist. Prince Gallantine is having trouble with his captor Morbidius, who's finally wised up. Then Morby's nine-year-old nephew Andy, seeking to avoid his villain apprenticeship homework, turns up. :)

Helfers, John: "Blood and Scale" A wizard's apprentice, offered only death as an alternative, agrees to become the apprentice of the dragon who wiped out the rest of his party.

Hoyt, Sarah A.: "The Muses' Darling" Shakespeare, as a young struggling playwright, is an apprentice to the meteoric brilliance of Kit Marlowe. This story takes Marlowe's treatment of Faust as having a personal application. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's quite different treatment of Marlowe and Shakespeare in _Sandman_, a subplot starting with "Men of Good Fortune" in _The Doll's House_.

Huff, Tanya: "When the Student Is Ready" Oddly enough, *this*, rather than de Lint's contribution, is an urban fantasy set in Canada (Toronto, not Ottawa, though). Sixteen-year-old Isabel has been encountering a mysterious street person a lot lately - but is it just poverty and homelessness that seems to cloak him in invisibility? (Even complete with smart-aleck talking crow.)

Levine, David D.: "Zauberschrift" is the complex, legalistic Latin in which spells are written, instructions for the immensely powerful but mindless daemons (spirits) forming the basis of a wizard's magic. (The author's note says he based this story on his first summer job; he must have been a programmer. The analogy between the magic system and programming is interesting without being heavy-handed.) The protagonist quit his wizard apprenticeship when he inherited the family dye business on the deaths of his father and older brothers, but his native village has asked for his help after his old master's death. The weather spells that have protected the village for years have been corrupted, and no affordable wizard can be brought in to fix the problem.

Lindskold, Jane: "Final Exam" Narrated by Danny Bancroft, whose Talent killed his mother to save his life at birth. When his family spoiled him as a child, he felt undeserving, because he could remember what happened. Since this manifested partly as bullying, he landed in counseling - with a Talented counselor who may ape Nero Wolfe's body language, but not the rest of his style. (After all, imagine Wolfe as a counselor.) But Danny's been coasting as an endless undergraduate, and with his dangerous abilities, if he fails the senior magicians' test, his magic will be sealed.

Patton, Fiona: "What Has to Be Done" After the events of "The Svedali Foundlings" (_Assassin Fantastic_), Coll has begun his personal crusade to rid Cerchicava of the Trade (necromancy) in earnest, "apprenticing" himself to old Mona Masaccio, despite the fact that as a retired Death Mage, she considers him a traitorous fool, while she represents everything he hates. The latest series of mutilated corpses, however, interest them both, as they carry signs of non-standard organ collection - as though someone's trying something new.

Reichert, Mickey Zucker: "Flanking Maneuver" Amazingly unrealistic story of a young conscript - a blacksmith's apprentice - in a tribal war, and what happens after he meets the captured daughter of an enemy chieftain.

Smith, Dean Wesley: "The Last Garden in Time's Window" The narrator doesn't believe that his grandparents died from a gas stove leak in their trailer. Having just returned from their funeral, he doesn't care about the danger of using his half-learned magic. *Very* rushed.

Waggoner, Tim: "Till Voices Drown Us" Braided non-linear style, following Michael back to his childhood home to learn one last lesson from the great-aunt who taught him to bear his mediumistic powers, when one spirit shows him something disturbing he's never seen before.

West, Michelle: Camille, like all apprentices to "The Augustine Painters", is a foundling - one thread of the story follows her present, in which she faces her do-or-die test of mastery, her best friend apparently having come to grief only days before; the other follows the discovery of her talent. They aren't wizards, as such; in their art, they depict possible futures that, with hard work, may never happen. Not only is this cool - for instance, while they can work more quickly in pencil, they need color to identify strange people, places, and battle standards - but deeper mysteries are revealed even as the story unfolds.

clear text and good arrangement of information made it easy to get a grip of what ent realy is .
great as a companion in your clinical round .
and for speady revision before your oral exam .

Russ Martin is as good as it gets in the scary world of sex, sadism and the sexual delights of evil. His women are some of the most alluring and evil creations in this genre. The guys? Mere catspaws. In this case, Sally Wing is a lovely young lady blessed (?) with the ability to taste the flavor of other people's emotions. Sally also is a young woman with a taste for the exotic emotions--not love and joy, but those emotions that plumb the horrifying depths of the human soul. To satisfy her tastes, Sally must CREATE the emotions through a judicious blend of sexuality and terror. Eventually, her victims die as she crushes the life from their psyches. The thrill of the tale lies in watching this happen. Ultimately, Sally gets her comeuppance. Her ravenous appetite puts at risk the secret organization of evil for which she works and which granted her this power in the first place. This is mere last-chapter moralizing. The charge in this story lies in what comes before. I wonder whatever came of Martin, whose books all seem to be out of print. Maybe some lethal lovely devoured HIS emotions.

Russell Martin writes a very intriguing story that interweaves elements of Beethoven's times and his contemporaries, Danish efforts to help persecuted Jews emigrate to Sweden during the Second World War, and Forensic medicine. The vehicle that keeps these stories together is a locket containing some hair of the composer, and how it is passed on from one owner to another.

If you know a lot about Beethoven, or have read other books on his life, you will likely find the first third of the book redundant. It really picks up in the middle section, the strongest part of the book in my view. That part tells the story of how the locket surfaced in the midst of a heroic effort to protect Danish Jews under Nazi pursuit. Martin effectively creates the sense of danger that both fleeing Jews and their covert assistants must have felt.

The last part of the book offers new insight on what may have caused Beethoven's terrible suffering and eventual death. However, it is not necessarily a startling finding; only one that hasn't been suggested yet. The book's "mystery solved" subtititle is a little misleading in that respect.

Getting back to the real strength of the book, it lies in telling how the boy who originallly clipped Beethoven's hair propehtically expressed concern of the pending "bloodbath" to come in Europe, how his family strove to hide their Jewish identity, and how Beethoven's relic of hair played a role in saving a number of Danish Jews. I only wish the author would have explored more fully the question of how contemporaries of Beethoven (like Wagner and Liszt), who were so moved by the humanity-affirming 9th Symphony, could allow creeping anti-Semitism to become part of their lives. To me, that is the even bigger "musical mystery" to be investigated. Martin does, however, provide enough historical context and sharp insight to point the reader in the direction of some answers. In that respect, reading "Beethoven's Hair" will be just the beginning for those who ponder the darker side of human nature. The book serves as a fascinating take-off point for further investigation. It is well written and keeps a good balance between the three elements of the story. Just don't expect it to be a great biography on Beethoven nor a revelation of startling discoveries about his death. Again, the strength of the book is in the middle section.

"Beethoven's Hair" is quite simply an intriguing masterpiece. Russell Martin has masterfully written a tale that captures your attention and does not let you go. With the overriding story of a lock of mysterious hair, the content is most beautifully presented. In balancing the love of Beethoven - the man and his work, history, and modern day medical science, the author has created very interesting literature. Just like Beethoven's masterpieces, this book is a treasure. I wish I could read it again for the first time.

"Beethoven's Hair" is a wonderful book. A little fascinating piece of history that keeps keeps the reader interested for it's entire length. What works so well about Russell Martin's book is that it combines so many story threads into one work. It convincingly explores the life of the musical genius Ludwig van Beethoven, the effect of his music in the hearts of millions, the power of music and art in general, and in a thrilling way it follows a lock of his hair through it's journey in history. There is true suspense when Martin writes about the people who tried to fight against the evil swelling up against them during World War 2 and how Beethoven's music played an important role in that struggle. Like a great detective story, "Beethoven's Hair" never reveals its secrets too quickly and keeps the reader fascinated. But the best chapters are the ones about Beethoven's life where we realize he was one of the few authentic geniuses music has produced. Fun, memorable, and sometimes moving, "Beethoven's Hair" is a great book.

Of the various confessional documents contained in the Book of Concord, the Smalcald Articles has been the most neglected in scholarly studies. William Russell, campus pastor at North Dakota State University, offers the first book-length study of the SA available in English. Russell's central thesis is that the SA represents Luther at his most essential. Russell provides ample evidence, both from internal and external sources, that Luther considered the SA to be an extremely important statement of his theology. Luther wrote this document at a time when he was convinced that his death was near. He was having severe problems with kidney stones and apparently also had experienced heart attacks. Elector John Frederick, who ordered the preparation of this document, was also aware of Luther's poor health and wrote: "It will be highly necessary for Dr. Mar-tin to prepare his basis and opinion with the divine scriptures, indicating all the articles upon which he has written, preached and taught. He should do this for the sake of the council, but also in view of his final departure from this world to the almighty judg-ment of God. He should indicate what he thinks, maintains, and where he remains in order not to offend the divine majesty-the points we must maintain without regard to body or possessions, peace or conflict" (p. 36-37). The Elector was anxious to have something for the church council that was ex-pected to be held in Mantua in 1537. As we know, a church council did not meet until the year 1545, in Trent, and lasted until 1564. As far as Luther himself was concerned, the council was fast approaching and the Lutherans needed something to take with them, upon which they could stand, and from which they could argue their case be-fore the Pope and the Roman Catholic theologians. Luther therefore prepared this document for a meeting of the German estates in the city of Smalcald that was held in February of 1537. In light of the above, it is interesting to note that the SA was not adopted by the various German estates that had gathered in Smalcald. Russell offers three reasons why this was so. First, Luther's health prevented him from attending the meeting and thus he was unable to present the document himself. Russell speculates that had Luther at-tended, the articles would have been discussed. Second, Elector John Frederick consid-ered the SA to be a theological statement, not a statement of political rulers, as was the AC which was presented to the Emperor at the meeting of the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire in 1530. Third, Russell feels that since the Smalcald gathering decided not to attend a church council, they did not consider the SA necessary to take up. However, Luther it seems was totally unaware that his articles had not been adopted, for in 1538 he was still operating under the incorrect assumption that the SA had been formally adopted by the political states in Smalcald. Russell sides with Friedrich Bente who as-serts in his historical introduction that the SA was adopted de facto since the majority of the theologians gathered at Smalcald did subscribe to the SA, and the SA did reflect the views of the majority of the political rulers at Smalcald. The SA was not actually published until the Spring of 1538 after Luther had prepared a longer preface, and made some changes to the text proper. It was incorporated into the 1563 Brunswick Corpus Doctrinae, and then later made a part of the Book of Concord in 1580. Russell provides an ongoing dialogue with Volz's and Ulbrich's Urkunden und Aktenstücke zur Geschichte von Martin Luthers Schmalkaldischen Artikeln and in many respects this book is a reaction, both in agreement and disagreement, to this work. The footnotes reveal that Russell has engaged in a thorough study of pertinent secondary sources, impressing the reader with Russell's desire to anchor his comments within the stream of scholarship on the various issues that are raised in the SA. He walks through the SA, noting the key theological concepts Luther raises and providing appropriate references from secondary sources that illuminate the points he is making. Russell's discussion of Luther's assertion in the SA that the pope is the anti-Christ is objective, and therefore useful. Russell refrains from grinding an ecumenical ax at this point, and thus permits Luther's position on this matter to stand without intrusive editorial commentary. Russell disagrees with the commonly expressed view that the SA merely reflects Luther in a pugnacious mood. Of course, the state of Lu-ther's health can be used to support the position that his polemical tone in the SA is not to be taken too seriously. Russell however states that even if the harsh remarks made by Luther about the pope do reflect some personal emotional frustrations with the progress of the German Reformation, simply to dismiss Luther's comments about the pope as anti-Christ "risks missing what Luther (and those closest to him) thought to be the main issue at stake in their efforts to reform the church. For Luther, the gos-pel of the forgiveness of sin by grace alone, apart from works of the law, is the distinc-tive feature of the Christian proclamation. Any theology (be it Roman Catholic, Ana-baptist, Reformed, or Evangelical) that violated this sine qua non of the church's mes-sage was open to the charge of being labeled by Luther as "anti-Christian" (p. 95). Russell is careful to observe that Luther's discussion on the Lord's Supper was purposefully concrete. Luther's realistic description that "the bread and wine in the supper are the true body and blood of Christ" was controversial (p. 104). By doing this, Luther moved a step beyond the language of the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, an agreement that had been signed by representatives from both southern and northern Germany. Russell indicates that the WC was meant to be a compromise statement, noting that the WC was "rather ambiguous at the very point it was supposed to clarify" (p. 105). Luther purposefully avoids the slippery word "with" when discussing the bread/wine and body/blood connection in the Lord's Supper, choosing instead to re-main with the much stronger copulative verb "is" - our Lord's language. Luther's wording apparently did not please Melanchthon, who was afraid that this matter would cause controversy at Smalcald. He went so far as to recommend that the estates pledge themselves to "the Augsburg Confession and the Wittenberg Concord" (p. 106). We see here a clear foreshadowing of Melanchthon's later compromising position on the Lord's Supper, which took full form only after Luther's death. In light of the impending ecumenical agreements between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a number of Reformed churches, Luther's position in the SA are all more relevant to our present day and age. Will Luther have the last word in the largest Lu-theran church in America on the subject of our Lord's presence in the eucharistic bread wine, or will Melanchthon and his heirs? Russell's book is actually quite brief, with the text proper taking up only 116 pages. The rest of the book is devoted to three appendices. Appendix A is Russell's translation of the Smalcald Articles. This reviewer is given to understand that Russell's translation, with editorial modifications, will be used in the new Book of Concord translation now in progress. Appendix B is a list of names and terms from the age of the Lutheran Reformation. Appendix C is a topical index to Luther's Works and Lu-theran Confessional writings, indicating where an interested reader might find other Luther documents on a wide range of theological topics. In light of the fact that this book is the only one in English devoted to the SA, one hesitates to be critical. But it needs to be said that the book is somewhat disjointed and repetitive. Key themes and concepts are repeated within a short amount of space. This is probably due in part to the genesis of the book as a series of lectures to students at Luther Northwestern Seminary as part of a regular gathering called, "Friends of the Lutheran Confessions." It is unclear if this book is

This is an excellent (and rare) exploration of the Smalcald Articles of the Lutheran Confessions. The author makes the case that these articles offer key insight into the mind of Luther because Luther thought his death might be imminent and the Smalcald Articles reveal what was most important to him. For example, Luther's thoughts on the Lord's Supper indicate that he was not close to the Reformed camp on communion but remained convinced of the "Real Presence" doctrine to the end. Mr. Russell deserves credit for an interesting work on this key neglected Lutheran Confessional document.

Russ Martin has created a world in which the forces of evil are capable of enslaving men and women by increasing sexual desire to the highest possible level. Many of the characters in this book have been introduced to us in Martin's previous books, and it is probably a good idea to read The Education of Jennifer Parrish only after reading the earlier books in the series. If you are turned on by stories of sexual domination, you will probably like this series.