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Book reviews for "Sommerness,_Martin_David" sorted by average review score:

Training Distance Runners
Published in Hardcover by Leisure Press (1991)
Authors: David E. Martin and Peter N. Coe
Amazon base price: $32.00
Average review score:

Avoid this at all costs . I'd like to give it a zero.
You'd think that an accomplished physiologist and the father of one of the 1970s greatest middle distance athletes could get together and write THE definitive training manual for runners, right?

Wrong. While Martin's material here is reasonably useful in some respects, Coe's contributions are so over-the-top awful as to defy description (but I'll try).

Coe is guilty of what, for a 'scientist' like himself must be the most heinous fallacy of all: the hasty generalisation from the particular; i.e., he egotistically trots out Seb Coe's workouts, and Seb's ONLY, as a basis for an ENTIRE TRAINING 'PHILOSOPHY' that, in the end, amounts to no more than a pile of pseudo-scientific claptrap and a surfeit of unnecessary hagiography.

If you think that having detailed access to the minutiae of Seb Coe's build-up to the nineteen-seventy-whatever championships of this-or-that will help you be a smarter runner or coach, go ahead and buy this book. Otherwise, get yourself Daniels' Running Formula, by Jack Daniels

The Bible for Long Distance Runners
Even though this book is a few years old, the information hasn't been supplanted, simply because the human body is the same as it was ten years ago, as it was a thousand years ago.

I learned a lot about training and running from this book. I recommend it to anyone who is serious about running or about training runners.


Nietzsche
Published in Hardcover by HarperCollins (1980)
Authors: Martin Heidegger and David F. Krell
Amazon base price: $20.95
Average review score:

who can read this stuff?
How anyone finished this book is beyond me. Stream-of-consciousness modernism became a literary cliche many decades ago, but it still survives to provide swanky intellectual cover for authors like Krell, who are unable to tell a compelling story. The flouting of sexual taboo is another tedious literary cliche, yet Krell attempts to use it as his meal ticket, with ridiculous effect: see his speculations about young Nietzsche sitting on his father's lap during a piano lesson and feeling an erection in Daddy's pants. Is this "novel" vile or simply ludicrous? Don't waste your time or money trying to decide which.

Out Of Control
Having immensely enjoyed Krell's "The Good European", my expectations were probably too high for this novel. The basic premise, an imaginative reconstruction of Nietzsche's inner life during his final years, is interesting, but the actual novel is nearly impossible to read. Krell's stream-of-consciousness passages are interminable, awkwardly written and rather tedious, unlike his elegant prose from The Good European, and I found myself skipping through the book just to read the excerpts from Nietzsche's letters and from the medical reports, which were quite astounding but arranged in a sequence that is more frustrating than illuminating. Oh well, you can't always hit the target, and I look forward to reading Krell's "Infectious Nietzsche" to give him another chance.

The death of tragedy
Krell is a major translator of Heidegger who, in addition, have contributed to fine books of interpretation on Heidegger as well as Nietzsche. Krell's previous Nietzsche-outing, "Infectious Nietzsche," is a bold, inventive and challenging look at Nietzsche and the discourse surrounding body, health, and disease.

In this fictional biography, Krell once again tackles Nietzsche, covering the last years of the philosopher's life as his body and mind became ravaged by syphillis. By combining Joycean literary techniques with snippets of Nietzsche's actual letters, Krell attempts to give voice to the impossible: madness.

At the hands of any other writer, such a project would be an utter disaster (and not in any good sense) but with Krell's depth of philosophical as well as philological understanding of Nietzsche as well as the languages and the cultures that meant so much to him, this book is surprisingly poignant, stirring and haunting.

The letters which range the entirety of Nietzsche's sane life, from adolescence to the very final scribblings before madness overtook him (some such letters have stains of lunacy), reveal a tender and fragile Nietzsche, that his own persistent metaphors of laughter, dance, and war often betray. These letters also reveal the inner core of Nietzsche: his passion for life despite the ailments and personal shortcomings--why he came to write such good books.

In the end, Krell's Nietzsche is not unlike the Nietzsche of 'Ecce Homo,' the half-mad self-invented alter ego of his former self. In dissolving the very boundaries between philosophy and fiction, Krell may have paid the ultimate tribute to the legacy of Nietzsche: for what is a biography about Nietzsche anyway, but perhaps a profound work of art?


Using Isapi
Published in Paperback by Que (1997)
Authors: Stephen Genusa, Bobby, Jr Addison, Allen Clark, Dean Cleaver, Kevin Flick, Thomas Leroux, Martin J. Norman, Tom Parkinson, Paul P., Jr Parrone, and Michael Regelski
Amazon base price: $49.99
Average review score:

Overpriced Shovelware
Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you like pain, ISAPI is for you
If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

Best of the available ISAPI books, has reasonable examples
ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.


Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Studies in Continental Thought Series)
Published in Paperback by Indiana University Press (1992)
Author: David Farrell Krell
Amazon base price: $34.95
Average review score:

Huh?
Farrell Krell is a translator and scholar of Heidegger (he is responsible for the English version of Hei.'s 4 volumes on Nietzsche). Alas, he writes like his master, with a bit of James Joyce thrown in for good measure. This text purports to deal with the influence of vitalism on Heidegger's work. Alas, it is so dense as to be almost incomprehensible. That, combined with the occasional use of some silly rhetorical tropes (notably the tactic of randomly inserting a sentence fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh into the middle of a paragraph) renders the book more trouble than it is worth for any but the most serious student. There is a point in there somewhere, and it may be important - but good luck finding it beneath the masses of pretension.


Designing an Employee Stock Option Plan : A Practical Approach for the Entrepreneurial Company
Published in Paperback by Foundation for Enterprise Development (02 January, 2001)
Authors: Ron Bernstein, David Binns, Marshal Hyman, Martin Staubus, and Debra Sherman
Amazon base price: $24.00
Average review score:

Totally Worthless!
This book masquerades as a comprehensive guide to developing a stock option plan. In truth, it is a very basic overview of some of the topics surrounding stock option plans. When it attempts to walk through how one would actually go about creating a plan, it uses a hypothetical company and an executive named "Charlie". Sadly, whenever Charlie comes to difficult questions, no answer is given. For example, when discussing the question of valuing stock in a private company, the author's answer is to hire an outside consultant....Gee thanks! Beyond the single basic example give, no discussion of how or why certain decisions are to be made and rationalized. Another great example of this is in determining the number of shares to grant to employees and management. The answer given in the case study is that Charlie had "no process to determine these numbers"....wow, really insightful advice.....No plan at all, so when the executives ask you how you came up with the grant allocations, you can just tell them that you winged it, just like Charlie.

As you can tell, the authors couldnt even tackle simple issues like how many shares to grant, or the appropriate strike price,
and this is not even to mention REAL issues like compensating employees whose options are underwater. I guess Charlie didn't have this problem. I am totally embarassed to have bought this book, save your money and search the web for real-world advice.


A Foundation Course in Statics and Dynamics
Published in Paperback by Addison-Wesley Pub Co (1997)
Authors: David Plum, Martin Downie, and Downie Plum
Amazon base price: $45.95
Average review score:

Waste of Money
This book was used as a text book for our community college in a Statics & Dynamics course for vocational engineering design students. The book left the teacher and students extremely frustrated. Examples did not closely follow the text. Math symbols and formulas were not well explained even though this book was intended for first year university students weak in the math area. I would not recommend this book for use as a teaching tool. The authors are British so the text was written in British English. For a 180-page paperback, the $45 retail price is a waste of money. Buy something else.


Search for the Doctor (Dr. Who-Find Your Fate, No 1)
Published in Paperback by Ballantine Books (1986)
Author: David Martin
Amazon base price: $2.50
Average review score:

A Search Best Left Abandoned
A quick cheap paperback written to cash in on two unique mid-1980s American phenomena -- the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, and "Doctor Who".

(By way of introduction, The "Find Your Fate" series seems to fetishize action-adventure heroes. The ads at the back of "Search for the Doctor" advertise similar "Find Your Fate" stories featuring G.I. Joe and James Bond. These were written by R.L. "Goosebumps" Stine, to boot.)

"Search" is authored (in the loosest sense of the word) by David Martin, who wrote several DW TV adventures in the '70s. It also makes no sense. From Los Angeles in the year 2056 (why?), to a space lab called "FERN" (indee), to the return of villains from two different Martin-penned DW serials (all the better with which to lure first-time readers, no doubt), "Search" is a boring and confusing morass. The Doctor is hardly to be seen, there's hardly any decision-making to be had, and the story only has one successful conclusion.

Basically, as both a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, and as a Doctor Who story, "Search for the Doctor" fails gloriously. It's easy to see why they didn't print too many more of these. And why copies are so hard to find. If you should see one, save your fifty cents and call your mom instead.


The Art of Special Effects
Published in Paperback by Amphoto (1990)
Authors: Martin Sage and Audrey David
Amazon base price: $22.50
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Dvorak's Guide to OS 2: Version 2.1: Learn to Navigate the Operating System of the Future/Book and Disk
Published in Hardcover by Random House Electronic Pub (1993)
Authors: John C. Dvorak, David B. Whittle, and Martin McElroy
Amazon base price: $31.50
List price: $45.00 (that's 30% off!)
Average review score:
No reviews found.

From Peepshow to Palace
Published in Hardcover by Columbia University Press (15 April, 1995)
Authors: David Robinson and Martin Scorsese
Amazon base price: $48.50
Average review score:
No reviews found.

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