Foster is great at painting images of NASA, the Senate, and the workings of a shuttle mission. He goes even further with surprising the reader with the looks of the inside of the mysterious asteroid, and the grand climax of the asteroid sailing away at the speed of light to an alien planet called Cocytus.

The descriptions of the ancient alien machinery is uninspired, and the beauty of the world that comes across in the game is noticeably absent. Brink's crystal madness is understated, and instead of becoming a raving, screaming madman, as he does in the game, he sort of states that he has a problem with Boston Low and lets it go at that. I was extremely disappointed in this book.

This book is a nice piece of science-fiction. The Dig has all the characteristics of a space opera with enough information to keep your feet on the ground along with enough mysterie to keep you holding the book in your hands instead of putting it down for a break everyonce and a while. However there was one draw back, this entire book was based on a computer game! I played the game befor I read the book and I ended up with not enough surprise to keep my eyelids open, The entire expierence was almost ruined for me if it wasn't for Foster's originality. I would recomend this book for whoever hasn't played the game. It is a very mysterious novel that is definately a five-star. I hope I see more of Alan Dean Foster.

When I first started the book I thought the story line was a of juvenile theme, but after about 30 pages you soon find out that there is an underlying mystery that is the basis of the book. The story is an adaption of a PC adventure game that Lucas arts of Star Wars fame produced, and it wonderfully gives the best of both worlds, the discriptive imagery of Alan Dean Foster and the cunning puzzle of the game. The story is a first contact book that revolves around the adventures of the three main charecters, Boston Low, a NASA astronaut, Dr. Ludger Brink, a scientist, and Maggie Robbins, a reporter. Thier adventures exploring an alien planet are the premise of the novel. The book is a good story that holds the reader and leaves you wanting to play the game to see if you are as good as the charecters

If you are familiar with John Gregory Dunne only through the novel and movie "True Confessions" you owe it to yourself to find a copy of this underrated, bleakly funny novel. Dutch Shea, Jr. is a down-on-his-luck lawyer with a bitter ex-wife, a beloved daughter murdered by terrorists, and a few secrets he would rather keep private. Over the course of a few days his existence is turned inside out when the true facts of his life are unburied (quite litterally, in the case of his dead father.) You will come to feel for Dutch as he struggles to keep from going under. Dunne makes despair comic, and when you finish this dark story, perversely, you will feel much better.

I normally don't understand nor appreciate poetry and I don't believe in the efficacy of prayer (surely a Divinity knows what we want and need before we ask!) but these books touched both my mind and my soul. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a deeper experience of the human condition.

These are good representations of furniture used by average Americans during times past. Shea stays away from 'high style' pieces and deliberatly picks plain furniture that is either taken directly from museum pieces or 'new' designs based on this style. Everything from craft projects to a complete bedroom suite.

The author is quick to point out that the best wood for most of these projects is pine, or native North American hardwoods. This is in keeping with the origin of these pieces - country workshops far away from the fashion centers of the day, and even further from the mahogany importers.

Includes: A short history lesson, lots of line drawings, 'how-to' sections on building and finishing with hand and power tools, and a section on how to replicate a complete colonial room.

The greatest falsification of history is finnaly demystified.By reading this book,everybody can learn truth about glorious history of Macedonians and painfull aspects of their denial by Athens.Ancient Macedonians were not Greeks-it is adoption of certain Greek customs that was cherished by Hellenophilic historians as prove of their Greek belonging,but that is just as logical as saying that James Joyce was Greek because he is author of book named "Ullisius".Here,all important aspects of Macedonian History are blended into coherent and extremely well documentated essay-this book will leave speachless anybody who dares to falsify Macedonian history with its power of arguments.

Thanks to the author many facts unknown to the wider audience related to Macedonia, its history and the Macedonians are finally revealed. The author takes trip back in time, 2000 years ago to start his book with the relations of Macedonia and Greece at that time. Mr. Shea goes through the centuries and unveils many things from the sad Macedonian history : supression, genocide and expulsion. The book concludes with the modern relations of Macedonia and its neighbors, as well as with the sad situation of the Macedonians in the neigboring countries. Must read book.

This book examines all aspects of the dispute between Macedonia and Greece ranging from ancient history to the present. John Shea analyzes such topics as the Greek government's refusal to recognize its large ethnic Macedonian minority, the Greek myth of ethnic purity, and the Republic of Macedonia's struggle for international recognition. This is yet another example of a non-Macedonian author being able to conduct research and come to his own conclusion that Greek claims about Macedonia simply are not valid. Highly recommended for people searching for a non-biased examination of Macedonia.

A beautiful financial whiz gets more than she bargained for when she agrees to help bring Pan Am back from airline oblivion. (the real Pan Am had just gone under when this book appeared, and hardcore aviation enthusiasts were finding it hard to let go). The new Pan Am has a novel idea - fewer passengers per flight, leaving more room for lounges. Unfortunately, the idea is a dangerous one (more on that), and somebody has now set their sights on grounding PA for good. A series of elaborate accidents - so effective that heroic and quick-thinking piloting just barely save the day - plague PA planes in the air. On the ground, the mysterious conspiracy works to undercut PA's financing, requiring equally heroic and quick-thinking accounting methods. Will PA survive?

Will anybody care? "Phoenix Rising" is the typical example of a book that tries to come off as gripping and edge of your seat even as its prose and marketing are aimed comfortably within a well-established market (the market for readers who cares about an airline being named Pan Am; readers who know that there is a "big three" of US airlines; readers who care about the inner workings of aircraft financing). The premise itself has a big hole in it - why would somebody care enough about Pan Am to ground it? The heroine's explanation is utterly illogical: because it would prove you could fly planes with fewer passengers and with greater amenities and still turn a profit. Forgetting that that's pure wish fulfillment, were it true, the other airlines could just copy Pan Am's idea and profit just as easily as Pan Am. (Because the other airlines' position couldn't be as precarious as Pan Am's, they'd be even better positioned to profit from the idea than Pan Am, so the idea is simply illogical). The mysterious conspirators could also simply buy Pan Am outright. What really kills the book is...who cares? This isn't a book about a horrible air crash ("Final Approach") or some doomsday weapon ("Medusa's Child"). This is a book about airplanes flying with sleeper seats and treadmills - hardly earthshaking, and not worth anybody's time.

I listened to the audiobook and my question is: "what factory makes the robot who read this book?

Airplanes get de-icing treatment when there is a risk of icing. Not simply because it's cold.

At cruising altitude the temperature is colder than 50 degrees below zero. Is every flight de-iced? No.

As a commercial pilot, maybe the author knows more than you think.

I just completed a course that used this book as a...reference. Granted, it is a first edition, but it reads like a rough draft. The presence of three authors is all too obvious in the inconsistent writing of proofs, paragraphs, and even exercises. Some proofs are just plain wrong, and many have gaping holes in them. Notation is confusing, and changes without warning or explanation. I will say this much in its favor: many important results are presented, although the proofs are absent. It makes a good source for named theorems, but that's about it.

Once thought to be high-brow estoeric mathematics, algebraic geometry is now finding applications in a myriad of different areas, such as cryptography, coding algorithms, and computer graphics. This book gives an overview of some of the techniques involved when applying algebraic geometry. The authors gear the discussion to those who are attempting to write computer code to solve polynomial equations and thus the first few chapters cover the algebraic structure of ideals in polynomial rings and Grobner basis algorithms. The reader is expected to have a fairly good background in undergraduate algebra in order to read this book, but the authors do give an introduction to algebra in the first chapter. Many exercises permeate the text, some of which are quite useful in testing the reader's understanding. The Maple symbolic programming language is used to illustrate the main algorithms, and I think effectively so. The authors do mention other packages such as Axiom, Mathematica, Macauley, and REDUCE to do the calculations. The chapter on local rings is the most well-written in the book, as the idea of a local ring is made very concrete in their discussion and in the examples. The strategy of studying properties of a variety via the study of functions on the variety is illustrated nicely with an example of a circle of radius one. Later, in a chapter on free resolutions, the authors discuss the Hilbert function and give a very instructive example of its calculation, that of a twisted cubic in three-dimensional space. They mention the conjecture on graded resolutions of ideals of canonical curves and refer the reader to the literature for more information. Particularly interesting is the chapter on polytopes, where toric varieties are introduced. The authors motivate nicely how some of the more abstract constructions in this subject, such as the Chow ring and the Veronese map, arise. The important subject of homotopy continuation methods is discussed, and this is helpful since these methods have taken on major applications in recent years. In optimization theory, they serve as a kind of generalization of the gradient methods, but do not have the convergence to local minima problems so characteristic of these methods. In addition, one can use homotopy continuation methods to get a computational handle on the Schubert calculus, namely, the problem of finding explicity the number of m-planes that meet a set of linear subspaces in general position. There are some software packages developed in the academic environment that deal with homotopy continuation, such as "Continuum", which is a projective approach based on Bezout's theorem; and "PHC", which is based on Bernstein's theorem, the latter of which the authors treat in detail in the book. My primary reason for purchasing the book was mainly the last chapter on algebraic coding theory. The authors do give an effective presentation of the concepts, including error-correcting codes, but I was disappointed in not finding a treatment of the soft-decision problem in Reed-Solomon codes.

In general this is a good book and worth reading, if one needs an introduction to the areas covered. Students could definitely benefit from its perusal.

This book is one of the smoothest books i've ever ridden.

As an ardent Susan Isaac fan, and like most of her admirers, I was excited to find she had finally written another novel. I bought the book and looked forward, with relish, to the usual great read. The first (and major) part of the book dealt with the ancestry of the two (supposedly) main-characters-to-come. It was interesting, but just as I became involved with each new group of characters, they were gone. When we finally got to Charlie and Lauren, it felt as if everything moved along way too fast so the author could finish the book in the publisher's alloted number of pages. The fact that they were in bed together in a flash was very disappointing. I did not relate to them at all. And where was the tie-in with the first section of the book? What was the point??? It would have been nice if Charlie and Lauren had, at the very least, discovered their common ancestry. By the end of the book, I didn't care if they lived happily ever after or never saw each other again. The whole storyline about the white surpremacy group, Wrath, seemed very contrived, innocuous, and open-ended.

My advice to readers new to Ms. Isaacs is to start with one of her other novels. After reading "Shining Through," which I LOVED, I couldn't get enough of her wit and great writing style and read all the rest of her published books in succession. This one was such a letdown.

Ms. Isaacs, PLEASE go back to your former style!

I have been a fan of Susan Isaacs and have read all of her previous books. However, what was she thinking with this one? or two as it were? The first half was about so many generations of these two families it was so hard to keep straight, and quite frankly, what was the point? The second half was a completely different story. Granted, these two main characters of the second half were related (third cousins???), but it was not an integral part of their story. I was very disappointed by this book. I would tell anyone who wants to read it to just start halfway through because that is where the real storyline begins.

I loved Red, White and Blue for the same reason I loved Almost Paradise by the same writer...that beside the two main characters lives, you get their families' history. You literally know where they come from and what formed them.

Lauren, the NY reporter, and Charlie, the FBI agent from Jackson Wyoming couldn't be more different. Yet as the book shows, they share values and the past (tho they don't know it). I couldn't get over how they are descended from the same people who came to America 100 years earlier. Lauren and Charlie are investigating a bombing and I was so caught up in their lives! In large part, I think it's because I knew so much about them and their families it's as if my own relatives were up against the radicals who set the bomb. But I guess that's the point of the book, that we could be family, that one way or another, we Americans are all related. One more thing: The ending was one of the best I've read. So many times you read a good book and the last pages let you down. Not here!

If you're an avid fan of the collectable card game version of Steve Jackson's Illuminati: New World Order, you may enjoy this book. If you've never played the game, or are a casual player, you may not enjoy it quite as much. Still, it's useful for some details and strategies that are not readily apparent.

The main benefit of the book by fans is the designer's notes; while there isn't as much on the creation and the rules of the cards, there's a good bit about production and sales that's surprisingly interesting. There's also a note-by-note analysis of each alignment and attribute, as well as Personalities and Places. There's also game variants, beginner's tactics, and assorted tricks to pull with your friends.

The biggest disappointment is the catalog of cards--not that it isn't nice to see the text of all the cards (especially if you don't have that many), but that it eats up a good chunk of the pages. Fans would rather see rules clarifications, notes on creating your own balanced cards, tournament details, card creation stories, interviews with artists and originators, etc. None of these things are present.

Unfortunately, those things in the book can pretty easily be seen on the internet--on the INWO home page, no less! But there are plenty of nuggets that aren't in the web pages.

Not a bad book, if you're a fan, though it may leave you feeling a bit empty. Otherwise, you might be better of looking elsewhere on the 'net for info.