A really interesting book with some great information. The main problem is the writers begin to think that their 'opinion' of the show really matters. The factual stuff is great but when their opinion of some of the seasons begins to cloud the judgement of some of these facts it becomes a problem- example being their description of why some seasons rated beter than others. Despite this it is better than a lot of DW related stuff. Long live the 5th Doctor!

This is a wonderful book which is complete with just about everything you could ask about Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor. The reason it got 4 stars instead of 5? No photos. To be truly complete it needed photos of the Doctor himself and also of his companions.

Nevertheless, this is a fantastic book which is well worth buying if you can get your hands on one. Add it to your collection.

When the hugely popular Tom Baker announced that he was leaving the role and show "Doctor Who", the producers of that show knew that they had a big problem. Both Baker's long tenure and strong personality had resulted in most fans thinking of him as the only Doctor, rather than the 4th. The producers, taking a rather risky move, decided to cast an actor that was the exact opposite of Baker's interpretation. Years later, many are still debating whether or not this was a good idea.

The "Handbook" series provide a detailed behind the scenes view of the Doctor Who show, including many insights into the development of the characters, and the difficulties faced. My favorite section is the scene by scene disectiion of an episode by the show's creative team.

A must for the serious Who fan.

Stephen Hero is part of the now-mostly-lost first draft of Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The legend goes that Joyce, in a moment of disillusionment, flung the manuscript on the fire and his sister Eileen rescued it. Odd, then, that the MS shows no apparent signs of burnmarks. Either way, the first few hundred pages are missing, so what we have here is a fragment of what would probably have been a very long and rather insufferable autobiographical novel about a clever young man realising that he's too good for the society into which he's been born.

The remarkable thing about it is that even though Joyce is basically transcribing the events of his own life, he's impressively objective. Stephen Daedalus (it became "Dedalus" in the later version) is presented as a bit of a prig, almost comically outraged when it looks like he can't read out a speech to a college debating society, and for all his erudition and genius a twit when it comes to getting his end away with the luscious Emma Clery. Joyce obviously realised this, because when he rewrote the novel he made it not more objective but less so, forcing us to see the events from Stephen's point of view, modifying his method as Stephen grows from frightened boy to disdainful young man. Stephen Hero is all told in the same cool third-person that Joyce used in his early stories. He abandoned it when he realised that it was quite inappropriate for the book he really wanted to write.

So what are the virtues of Stephen Hero? For one thing, it shows a lot more of the life around Stephen; Joyce has a lot of fun recording the inane remarks of Stephen's fellow students and the dimwitted inanity of the college president. The family is presented as less of a threat and more of a slightly baffling background hum (Joyce seldom wrote as kindly about his mother as he does here, even if he made her death one of the equivocal emotional centres of Ulysses). Stephen's artistic theories are _explained_, rather than being _demonstrated_ as they are in A Portrait (and while this is part of how much better a book A Portrait is, it's nice to see them set down, as well.) But in the end you have to admit that if Joyce had published this as his first novel, he mightn't have had the reputation he has today as being a man who published nothing but masterpieces. Dubliners is the best starting point if you've never read Joyce before and want to see what the fuss is about. Stephen Hero, on the other hand, is no masterpiece, but it's perhaps the only book by James Joyce that you could recommend to people going on a long train journey.

Stephen delves deep into the error-trapping loops of Jesuit doctrine, sounding its minatory hollows, vivisecting its repressive will-to-venom. A stately young apprentice, equipped with esthetic tools he himself has made, Daedalus spends precious little time studying for his exams, paying knee-tribute in the entropo-oedipal chambers of the chapel, nor allowing himself to be terrorized into stupidity by fiction-blind men of the Church. EXILE TEACHES ONE TO SENSE AND VALUE. Stephen's rejecting passion strives to evade the conflict-spirals of "Irish paralysis," the decades-dead mausolea of a distant Papal dispensation. For the eroded statuary of Doctrine has been subsumed by the zesty rind of the Epiphany, a crystallization of the fragmentary present into a seeing-place for the exilic soul. In a fine irony, Stephen must reconcile his aesthetico-ethical ideals with a grave intellectual debt to that greatest doctor of the church, St. Thomas Aquinas; can Stephen ever truly purge himself of the Irish Catholic gene-machine? --*Stephen Hero* is a great task but well worth it, much in the vein of Beckett's *Dream of Fair to Middling Women*, an apprentice-work with all its warts intact, a revelatory gem far beyond juvenilia. For here we are granted an unprecedented view of Joyce the youthful escape-artist, of the traumata which sustained his greater odes, the dark italics of literary Exile.

Stephen Hero, the latter half of a rejected first draft of Portrait (apocrypha: Joyce flung his manuscript into a fire only to have Nora save part of it), offers Joyce fans a glimpse of his literary style and development as a young buck of nineteen to twenty-four. Portrait, written ~7-12 years later, is a condensation of the initial thousand pages of Hero with several layers of symbolism and effects added. Portrait shines the spotlight of Stephen's intellect upon the dim world of his own perception; Hero sets an objective reality in the plain light of day in simple, effective prose. Hero's style allows Stephen's arrogance to come across much more clearly than in Portrait. His adolescent conflicts are more easily relatable to the reader, whereas in Portrait those conflicts are arranged dramatically to occasion his birth as an artist, complete with his moderately original neo-Aristotelian, applied Aquinas heuristic. This text is NOT suitable as an introduction to Joyce (Dubliners is obviously the way to go in that respect). Those who are already committed fans of Portrait should with a little patience find Hero an engaging read.

Time's Arrow Time's Cycle written by Stephtn Jay Gould is a book that takes human thought to a new level in comprehending geology's vastness of history... the discovery of deep time. Gould works this book's major theme in the role of metaphor in the formulation and testing of scientific theories as the directionality (narrative history) of time's arrow or the immanence of time's cycle (immanent laws).

This book is both an account of geology's greatest discovery and philosophical commentary on the nature of scientific thought. As this thought takes us from thought of time in thousand of years to billions of years, inspired by empirical observation of rocks in the field.

Gould follows a single thread through three documents that mark the transition in our thinking: Thomas Burnet's four-volume "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1680-1690), James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charle Lyell's three-volume "Principle of Geology (1830-1833). Gould shifts through these writings giving the reader a history and background needed for a progressive march to the truth of the geological history through an enlightened observation.

Reading this book will captivate the curious reader and helps the human mind understand the vastness of time and the struggle to understand it.

The title of the review is an homage to Gould's oft mentioned love of baseball. This book is a cogent explanation of how European scientists (natural philosophers) recounciled the narrative tradition of history inherited from the Judeo-Christian template with the eternal return perspective of the Classical civilizations. Both view points-as-metaphors shed light on interpretation of the geological record. There are both serial and cyclic elements in the history of the earth, so the scientific community found truth in spite of the fact that individual scientists tended to emphasize one perspective over the other.

Gould exposes the 'cardboard cut-out' Whig version of history that most working scientists have received uncritically as hurried historical preambles to their study of geology per se. James Hutton, for example, is held up as a paragon of the field geologist who supposedly preceded his assertion of the existence of 'deep time' with countless hours in the field. Not so, says Gould. In fact, Hutton did his field work after he conceived the idea of a lengthy earth history and merely used his field observations to bolster his claim. Thomas Burnet, author of the much made-fun-of Sacred Theory of the Earth, is revealed to have been a champion of uniformitarianism before Hutton even conceived of it. Burnet refused to advance causes for events described in the Bible that could not be explained by the laws of physics as advanced by Isaac Newton. Finally, Charles Lyell is exposed as a master of rhetoric who conflated methodological and substantive aspects of uniformitarianism in order to sway his audience. No member of the scientific community contemporary to Lyell clung to the Mosaic timescale. He merely used it as a strawman. It was Lyell who managed to mate the narrative and eternal return perspectives into a coherent view of Earth history. First he did so by insisting the apparent progress observed in the fossil record was caused by the immense scale of the cycles of Earth history. Eventually he conceded the reality of evolution and allowed for the existence of an arrow of time whose path did not curve.

Gould's book is modified from a series of lectures, which is probably why there is so much uncharacteristic repetition of themes and ideas in this book. It was the only aspect of this book that I found irritating. Gould is also candid about his pride at uncovering various inaccuracies in the received wisdom and unearthing original themes to explain patterns in the history of geology. I have heard other people complain about this personality trait. I have no problem with it and believe that his satisfaction with his own cleverness is quite justifiable.

Stephen Jay Gould's love of science history really shows through in this work, which focuses on changing ideas about time and geology. It's well-researched and makes some very intriguing points about science in general, but if you have no patience for geology you probably won't get that far - it's nowhere near as accessible as his essay collections, but that's only to be expected. Every science major should read this book, and so should anyone who likes to think of themselves as well-informed about history and science.

I couldn't make heads or tails of this book, then I got HTML 4 For Dummies: Quick Reference. With HTML 4 For Dummies I was able to understand the basics of HTML better. With the basics down this book, More HTML For Dummies, made much more sense. I have been able to add several great items to my sites that I wouldn't have been able to without this book. Just be sure you understand HTML before buying this book.

If You Know A fair amout about HTML and what to know more buy this book if u do know know much about html then i would recomend Dummies 101: HTML 4 This is a great book! buy! buy! buy!

Turnbull provides a very accessible and clearly written narrative of samurai history, including details about personal arms and armour, as well as political anecdotes. As an intriguing outline, the book serves as a guide for more detailed exploration of other sources by more demanding historians.

A fascinating read from an even more fascinating time period, Samuarai Warriors is an accessible history book for teachers and students alike. This book details various time periods and documents the "knights" of Medieval Japan. It begins with the period known as the Heian Period and the first known use of the term samurai and concludes with the end of the samurai as a seperate class in 1876, when it became forbidden to wear a sword. The urban samurai ceased to exist. The book follows a chronological order, dividing the book into periods of history concluding with the fall of the Tokugawa at the end of the Edo period. There are some interesting side excursions into history such as a section on the Christian Samurai. It tells the story of religious persecution both to Buddahists and Christians and how opposition to this intolerance arose and ultimately Twenty-Six Saints were crucified and became martyrs. It also tells of the banishment and expelling of all missionaries. Another interesting side bar is the discusion of the ronin or masterless samurai who was a renegade of sorts, the stuff of countless legends and even the subject of some films, most noticeably by Kurosawa. The information is a good steping stone for further exploration but typically for the novice it is suffice.This book is authoritative but not overly dry or pedantic as Turnbull teams up again with James Field for some of the best illustrations I've ever seen on the subject. The illustrations are superb and the photographs enhance the subject matter. This is a perfect book to compliment a teachers course on Japanese History or for the interested student of Japan or it's samurai.

This book is required for our Chemistry of Materials class at school. I found this book to have a lot of information in it... but it was hard to follow. Many times the book did not explain what we were supposed to learn for the class. I thought it was a hard book to read

This book is an excellent text for undergraduate general materials science or a review book for PhD qualifying examinations. It is better balanced with respect to material classes than most general materials science texts, which tend to focus almost entirely on metallurgy. This book is slightly slanted towards semiconductor applications. The chapters are organized in an industrial product driven manner beginning with fundamentals and proceeding to properties, structure, processing, and failure analysis. The chapters contain excellently drawn, three-dimensional figures in blue and grey. Each chapter ends with a large number of study questions that test an in depth understanding of the material and really require students to put A and B together. If you don't use it as a text, then buy it and use the study questions for your exams.

This was a typical textbook, but more involved and interesting than the average. I would not read it for fun, but since I had too, I am happy that it was not incredibly dry and boring.

With this rendition of The King James Old Testament, Stephanie Beacham lends dramatic vocal talent and passion to the most ancient words of God. Certainly worthwhile, and again, beautifully done!

Children of the Wind and Water is an excellent book that helps to teach today's children about Native American Children of long ago. James Watling's illustrations are very nice. They are water-colorey (soft and fuzzy), which adds to the realism of the stories. Each story focuses on a child in a particular tribe and the chores and trials that face that child as he or she is trained to become a productive member of the tribe. This and it's companion book, "Children of the Earth and Sky" are excellent read alouds to grades 2-4, especially during Native American studies time.

If ever there was a case of stories in a collection getting better as they go along, this is it.

Ten stories, seven Doctors, one enigma. But it's all pretty formulaic, and kind of goofy, until 'The Book of Shadows' by Jim Mortimore, featuring the First Doctor, Barbara and Ian (barely Ian; accent on Barbara). This story is a bit of a re-working of the TV tale called The Aztecs--once again Barbara is mistaken for greatness and is bowed down to alot--but there are some nifty temporal oopsa-daisies going on here, and some powerful emotional content. Then, it's a fairly successful uphill ride as the stories stay fun and imaginative in the back half, the sole exception being a Fifth Doctor-and-Peri story called 'Fascination' that seems too magical, and sexual, for the Who universe. The highlight of the collection is the next entry, 'The Golden Door', which involves the Sixth and First Doctor untangling a bizarre and dangerous mystery from opposite ends (but will they meet??). I also liked the hard-hitting 'Prisoners of the Sun', plus 'Lackaday Express', which is successful even though it revisits some of the themes already dealt with in 'The Book of Shadows'; I'd rather have two interesting stories that are thematically similar than what is presented in the first few tales: zippy, forgettable ideas that may offer variety, but nothing of much consequence.

The final part of the book is the resolution of the framing story called 'Playback' which involves the Seventh Doctor visiting a private-eye, in 1947 LA, to get his memory back. This, in fact, is the ploy used to thrust us into the various short stories, once a medium is consulted to help the Doctor remember all his past lives. 'Playback', also the name of a Raymond Chandler novel, wraps up with a nice twist. It's also unexpectedly great at pulp detective-story mood--feels like a left-out portion of Hammett's Red Harvest, with the Doctor involved. Four stars for about half the contents of this book.

For the record, the First and Third Doctors shine best.