Weighing in at almost 900 pages, this book holds just about all the Merrill you'll ever need outside of "Sandover." Merrill wrote exactly the kind of poems I used to think of as "real" poetry--stately, measured, clever & bittersweet, with lots of exquisite images to savor along the way. So why does this writing feel so stuffy and distant to me now? Reading a Merrill poem is somewhere between doing a crossword and shopping for antiques--you exercise the brain and always find something curious to enjoy, but even the most intimate ones left me strangely unmoved. I know Merrill has a legion of fans, and I can see why--these poems are among the best of their kind. But somehow they reminded me of the good chairs in my mom's living room--you could admire them, but you couldn't sit down. Still, the editors have done an excellent job and you'll enjoy going through this handsome book to make up your own mind.

Merrill requires no introduction. This is a splendid and comprehensive volume. It is a monolith, which commemorates the work of one of America's outstanding contemporary poets.

This collection includes some truly marvelous work: "The Drowning Poet," "Entrance From Sleep," "Poem in Spring," "Willow," "Walking At Night," "An Urban Convalescence," "The World and the Child," and "My Father's Irish Setters," to name a few.

I enthusiastically recommend this anthology. It serves as a means to remember that poetry of the Western hemisphere is capable of transcendent vision--that the Muses can still sing to twentieth century scribes.

Though occassionally less perfect, these poems scratch the edges of brilliance with every sweep of the pen. They are immaculate, dense, allusive, elusive, and always beautiful. Spend two days with "Charles on Fire" alone and you'll understand why Merrill was--no, IS --so widely admired. You should own this book.

It's nice having because it contains the complete King James Version of the bible as it was originally translated and published. It is one of only two published editions of the complete KJV that I have been able to find. Very few people seem to realize that the KJV included the books of the Apocrypha.

I wish that they made this available in a hardcover without the Michelangelo on the cover though.

I've read the Bible over and over and remain ever-amazed at the "life" of this book. Considering how the Bible was written over such a long period of time, it is amazing it how it all hangs together. It is truly inspired by the Living God through the hands of men. This is a book you can bank your life on. Read a good, modern translation of it. I read The One Year Bible every year.

"The fool hath said in his heart,"There is no god." That is what the Bible says. It is not a book to be interpreted by men, but one to be read and believed as it is written. What it means is not nearly as important as what it says. To better understand the whole Bible, one should begin reading in the book of John. You will learn more about the author that way

I am a great Julian Simon / Björn Lomborg fan, but this book has a limited number of mostly useless diagrams, especially from non-US perspective. But any other Simon book.

It is fashionable to bemoan the state of the world. The conventional wisdom is that global warming, Terrorism, drug abuse, crime, AIDS and all the rest of the crises threatening humanity lead us to the conclusion that the "good old days" were somehow better, safer and saner than today.

But, if things are so bad why is infant mortality going down around the world? If things are on the edge of anarchy why are proportionately fewer of us hungry, or sick today than one hundred years ago. If things are going to hell in a handbasket why is our life expectancy steadily improving?

These are inconvenient questions. The answers are tough on the prophets of doom.

Luckily, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Stephen Moore and Julian Simon prove this convincingly. Facts are often inconvenient. But, if you want to know the facts, this is the book for you.

It's Getting Better all the Time is an upbeat statistical reference consisting of factual text and colorful graphs.

Fascinating and fun, the book is an essential reference for authors and speakers. It is a treasury of statistics.

And the book has a great title.

As a publisher, author of 28 Books, 109 revised editions, six translations and over 500 magazine articles as well as a consultant to the book publishing industry, I spend much of my time doing research. I will refer to this book again and again.
Dan Poynter, Para Publishing.

This was the first book I've read on hypothyroidism, so I can't compare it to others. I found the book excellent in content; it went over many different health areas that could be affected by low thyroid activity. Even though I am taking Synthroid, and my levels are supposedly normal, I too have suffered extreme fatigue, memory loss, weight gain, hair loss, etc. My doctor attributed these to getting older, with no chance it had anything to do with low hormone levels or incomplete medication. This book gave me hope and a way to get help. I thought it was straightforward and easy to read. It was written by doctors who seem to have pioneered (or gone back to) the concept of believing in what patients feel and describe versus what only they (the doctors) think the patients should do.

A friend suggested I read the book because all my complaints point to Hypothyroidism. My rheumatologist did a complete blood work up on my Thyroid and everything came back normal. A few months later I complained to my regular doctor and he did blood work and it too came back normal...my symptoms prove otherwise!!

I am beginning to doubt the doctors who have told me I have CFIDS and FMS and I should leave things as such. I think there is so much more they are overlooking. My normally thick and healthy wavy hair is coming out in clumps and it could beard a man at the end of the week with what I find in the drain, my pillow, in between my fingers when I scratch my dry and itchy scalp and in my hair brush!!

Whenever I read the list of symptoms that are common with hypothyroidism, most, if not all of them are applicable to me. If your doctors don't listen to you the first time, take this book with you and stick it in his/her face. Let them know that it is possible to have a thyroid problem, even if the conventional ways of proving it, are saying you don't!! I am doing that and am hoping to finally get to the bottom of this medical riddle!!!!

I plan to take this book with me when I see the doctor next week and hopefully it will open his eyes to what is really plaguing me.

I consider myself very lucky for finding "Solved: The Riddle of Illness" in the amazon.com. Recently, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and only because I had enough guts to ask my doctor to check my thyroid for possible problems. Before the diagnosis, I had so many symptoms "without the cause" that, in late thirties, I thought my life is slipping away. The suggested cure was "lose weight and take it easy." In other words, it was indirectly suggested that "everything is in my mind." If I only had this book then! I could've escaped from much misery and anxiety that is hard to describe even in thousands of words! "Solved: The Riddle of Illness" is my best friend now. Stephen E. Langer, M.D & James F. Scheer discus hypothyroid problems and their symptoms clearly, thoroughly, candidly. (One author has the condition.) I admire the authors for showing respect to the ordinary people's medical intelligence and give the! m an incredible tool - the knowledge of illness - to better their lives. It is one of the best health books I've ever read. Five star scale is not sufficient to rate it. My visits to an HMO doctor's office last five minutes, and this book will stay with me forever. All the information shared gave me understanding of the debilitating illness. Now, I have hope that there is much I can do to control it and eventually to come back to normal life. Thank you, Stephen E. Langer and James F. Scheer, from the bottom of my heart! I recommend this book to everyone who has unexplainable depression, fatigue, who lost love of life, or who is simply genuinely interested in staying healthy. Not just 75,000 copies but millions should be printed and discovered by such lucky readers like me.

Mr. Johnston has an execllent voice, he should have just read the Bible with out the voice effects and background music. The volume of the background music changed often and is at times quite distracting.

The perfect spiritual companion when unable to read my Bible firsthand. Powerful, forceful narration, outstanding music and characters help infuse God's eternal Word in my heart and mind.

I spend 2 hours driving to and from work each day. Listening to this dramatized Bible puts me in a remarkably serene mood. The Word comes alive and it's like listening to live theater. I'm so glad I have this Bible. Thank you Stephen Johnston.

Having read the unabridged version I approached this abridgement. My experience can be described as comparing the painting of the Mona Lisa with a pencil rendition. The absence of the appendices and the explanatory footnotes together with the gouged text made less traumatic with artificial bridging (abridgement) results in nothing more than a mere pencil sketch of a true masterpiece. There is no substitute for the full version.

Puller carried a copy of these works with him throughout WWII and Korea. Enough said.

My uncle had read the three volume series of Mr. Freeman's work on Robert E. Lee's generals and wanted me to do the same. If I start something I like to finish it and I just didn't want to conquer the couple thousand pages in the three volumes so I opted for the one volume abridgement. It is well written, a classic of Civil War history, and gave great insight into the minds and actions of the Confederate military leadership. From reading the introduction this abridgement was made possible not by excising the main text, but by eliminating a majority of the voluminous notes and addendum material present in the three volume series. I don't know what I missed, but what remained was fascinating, extremely readable, and well recommended. At this point I would be very interested in acquiring and reading the three volume set.

I am a civil engineering student who just finished a course in stregth of materials with this text. I found the book fairly easy to follow with good example problems. My main complaint is that the authors consistantly referred to diagrams and figures that were on different pages, causing the reader to flip back and forth. Sometimes the figures were 5 or 6 pages back. This interrupted the continuity of the text, making it more difficult to read. Otherwise, I feel the book is excellent. (If you care, I got an A- in the course. Take this however you want to)

I guess I can see some criticism from a mechanical enineers point of view for lack of fatigue failure analysis. But this book is mainly written for the beginning undergraduate for stress and strain analyis. It is by far one of the handiest and most well written books on the subject that I have come across. If you want fatigue life buy a Shigley book. If you want the basic understanding, Timoshenko is wonderful.

I bought this book as a supplement to my old school text because an engineer can never have enough good resouces in the working world. I chose it after much research as it was well recommended as THE BOOK to have. I have found it to be an excellent reference book. Most all the homework problems have answers in the back as a check. The publishing and editing qualities are excellent.

This is a useful reference and particularly good for people who prefer detailed observation of objects. For people like me who prefer quantity over quality (i.e. if you don't spend an hour looking at the same object), I'd recommend Kepple's Night Sky Observers guide. Kepple's guides offer a combination of the most useful and comprehensive guides I've seen for intermediate and advanced observational astronomers.

The hardback format of this book isn't particularly good for the field, even though I've seen people referencing beaten-up copies with their red flashlights. It has good quality paper stock.

In sum, this is a standard work on the Messier objects and has substantial value despite its somewhat high price. However, I could think of other books I'd buy first -- Nightwatch for beginners, Kepple's set for more advanced users.

This book is the authority on the Messier objects. I have used it to successfully locate all but the faintest of the Messier objects. It is great because it includes a detailed sky map of the vicinity near each object and a drawing of what it should resemble when observed. iT also has the RA and Dec for each object as well as two written descriptions. It also has a great section on additional deep-space objects not on the Messier list. A must have for any amateur astronomer! This book more than paid for itself in time saved!

This book is a tremendous help to those of us setting out to find the Messier objects. The biggest problem with finding objects is figuring out what they should like like in a telescope -- sometimes I've got something in the finder or telescope and I'm not certain what it is. O'Meara solves that problem by providing photographs and his terrific drawings, not to mention is verbal paintings which could make a blind person see the objects. He devoted hours to each single object, waxing poetic at times about the merits and downsides to every single object. The first few chapters give some good history and background of Messier and other famous comet hunters. As a final plus, the book is printed on very high quality glossy paper so it's a pleasure to read. As a field guide, it would have been helpful to have it spiral bound, but that's my only suggestion for improvement. The author even includes a helpful appendix of other interesting sky objects that are not Messier objects, all of which are worthwhile telescope targets. A winner!

There is a lot of good stuff - for Oracle, Ms-Office integration and automation and some detail on ADO - But mainly the book is an overview. It covers all of the features of Access with low detail. I use it as a quick reference to a concept, but use other Access books for more detail and examples. At the time I bought it, it was the only source of ADO material. If you are looking for a detailed programming book or application development book - look elsewhere.

This book might be of interest for the people using MS Access with Oracle. Otherwise I could not understand for whom is this book written for - a Beginner, Intermediate, an Advanced user, or even for none?

I am a small business owner who just installed an order entry system written in Access 2000. I wanted to interface with Microsoft Outlook and was having trouble figuring out how. I went looking specifically for a book that addressed Automation with other Microsoft Office products and this book is the best one I found. I own the Access 97 version of this book which I had not found very helpful. This book has a terrific new chapter devoted to integration with Office 2000. I also found the chapter on application optimization very useful.

Certain dual-meaning tracts, or those with multiple possible translations, especially in the Acts and Gospels, are trimmed often and unneccessarily. If one is to understand the Word, it must not be edited for him.

The quality of sound is good. But a few words is cut by the end of every chapter. The read speed of Old Testament is little bit faster.

I have no idea what that reviewer from Canada is talking about! This audio Bible has been read word-for-word from the King James Version. I have listened and read along and there are no omissions or translation problems. It has been beautifully narrated and is a joy to have and listen to. You will love it!