by TT reviewer Anita Jo Stafford [full review on our website]

The Black Orchid from Aum is an anthology of stories by Gerard Houarner. "In the City of Aum anything can be bought. But you must always pay the price." All of the stories focus on the inhabitants and travelers through Aum, the reason they have journeyed to Aum and the price they pay for their desires.

All travelers must pay for Aum's tongue, a parasitic bug that works as a universal translator. Without the translator the travelers to Aum cannot communicate and are destined to become less than the human population. People can only travel to Aum when their planets are aligned. When the convergence occurs, travelers can leave Aum for the planet that is aligned with the gateway. The city is dark, violent, decadent and in many ways beautiful. It is a multifaceted world in which danger lurks on every corner.

The first story involving the debt collector draws the reader into the heart of Aum. It is an excellent way to introduce the reader to the realities of Aum. Cray's story shows the reader the first of several stories that provide the reader an excellent view of life in Aum. As collector, Cray settles unpaid debts. After suffering through an abusive marriage, she no longer desires love. While she collects debts for others she is accruing one of her own. As the debt collected from Cray is revealed, the reader is drawn deeper into the book just as travelers are drawn to Aum. Kings, Princesses, rulers of all shapes and form pay for their desires in Aum. The title story, Black Orchids from Aum is riveting. Like the rest of the stories the Princess gets what she desires most. However, the price that Aum takes as payment again has a profound impact.

The Black Orchid from Aum is an excellent anthology and an insightful look into the human condition. The stories are well written with excellent imagery and plotting. This book is a good one to start with as a sampling of the work of Gerard Houarner. It catches the reader's attention. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Aum is a place where anything within the imagination is possible for a price. The price that the inhabitants pay is often everything. This book is unique and ingenious. Depending on what the reader wants to take from the stories, they can be anything from dark fantasies to warnings of what could be in a world with too much excess. This book is highly recommended.

In The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, Helen Vendler theoretically outlines the ways in which contemporary writing styles remain true to traditional literary form, while at the same time morph to fit "a new sense of life" pressing "unbidden upon the poet" (1). Focusing on the "material body" of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Jorie Graham, Vendler pushes these works against predecessors such as Wordsworth, Keats, Lowell, and Donne to demonstrate, through formal and stylistic critique, the way in which "breaking" standard literary tradition reflects epistemological changes in the writers themselves, which are brought into existence by societal forces external to the poets and manifested by gradation in the poetry produced: "The micro-levels of stylistic change...need to be attended to quite as much as the macro-levels...such micro-levels of change from poem to poem reflect changes of feeling, changes of aesthetic perception, or changes of moral stance in the poet" (4). What emerge in the poetic lines of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham are amalgamations of styles old and new; "espousals as well as rejections in the invention of the new stylistic body" (3). When analyzing the works of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham, Vendler distinguishes each author's literary modification by the way in which (s)he manipulates metrical stresses, epistemological settings, and linear units, then illustrates the "perceptual, aesthetic and moral implications" that are demonstrated by their respective violations of standard, Modernistic literary conventions. Divided into three basic critical sections, The Breaking of Style discusses the principles surrounding the literary innovations of Hopkins's use of sprung rhythm, Heaney's manipulation of readerly phenomenological perception, and the societal implications surrounding the bricolage of human experience that is captured in the "cinematic freeze-frame" of Graham's later work (80). Using terminology reminiscent of postmodern critical theory, Vendler demonstrates that the stanzaic mimesis produced by the sensually assaultive affects of Gerard Manley Hopkins's use of the spondaic crush is designed to elicit an epistemologically reflective "psychic shock" in his readers: "When the mind becomes one gigantic cacophony of groans, in eight-beat sprung rhythm lines prolonging themselves into one undifferentiated monosyllabic vocal disharmony, we have come to the last agony of the stylistic body of poetry" (40). Hopkins's poetic innovation, Vendler states, reflects this phenomenon with "mimetic accuracy." When discussing Renaissance mnemonic theory in relation to established literary form, Vendler attributes Seamus Heaney's narrative arrogation to omniscience as being distinctly influenced by the literary styles of the Wordsworthian speaker, changed to reflect subjectivity through and in the sensual phenomenological setting. No more is the speaker the deliverer of allegorical reflection, but rather the speaker becomes a vehicle of "clairvoyant perception" through Heaney's employment of adjectival and adverbial innovation (42). This "reanimation" of the past in Heaney's poetry serves to create a new found ontological zone or "third realm, neither one of pure memory actively revised nor one of present distanced actuality, but rather one of the past remembered as prophesy" (48). Likewise, Vendler demonstrates Jorie Graham's liberties taken with poetic line length as a means to lay bare the traditions of Modernism by foregrounding, for example, the setting of a work, or that which was traditionally viewed as literary back-drop. This creation of a separate ontological zone through asymptotic gesture on the part of Graham serves to redefine the aim of verse as an "earthly, terrain-oriented lateral search" (78). The Keatisian "fine excess" present in the poetry of Graham now serves as a way, Vendler demonstrates, to illustrate Graham's "Dream of the Unified Field"; to represent "the luxurious spread of experienced being, preanalytic and precontingent" (84). Written in a narrative prose style rich in alliterative crafting and stylistic construction, Helen Vendler's The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham offers an alternative and well-supported insight into the makings of the postmodern ideological perspective. By demonstrating the similarities and differences of the works of Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham in relation to their contemporaries and predecessors, Vendler delineates without the hindrance of elevated postmodern literary jargon the ways in which these authors transform canonized literary form into a more pliable arena designed to reflect their ever-changing sociological realities. Through the literary innovations of writers such as Hopkins, Heaney and Graham, as well as semi-tacit adherence to the inspirations behind such formalistic construction, Vendler states convincingly, "the style of our own inner kinesthetic motions has...been broken and remade" (95).

Breaking Open the Gospel of Mathhew ia an outstanding addition to any library. This book focuses on the Gospel of Matthew in a way that just about anyone can understand. It allows one to act as if they are conducting an interview with Matthew and questioning his reasons for writing things and what the Beatitudes really mean. This book spoke to my spiritualy deprived soul and brought out all the questions that I had about his Gospel. I also enjoyed the other three books in this series. I purchase the group to give as gifts to all my family and friends. This one is a must!

I found this book at a used book store, and I didn't realize it was out of print. It is the best "cheesy romance" novel I've read in a long time, and I read about one a day.

I absolutely laughed my way through it. The story makes sense, and while I'm not normally impressed by blond men, I found myself adoring the hero of the book, J.D "Blue" Hazzard. Some of the best humor is at the end of the book, but you've got to read the book to find out!

Ms. Gerard is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. I've read other books of her's and liked all of them.

The use of C*-algebras in operator theory is known as a "soft" technique, in contrast to the "hard" techniques that use deep results from analysis. The blending of algebra, topology, measure theory, and analysis to study operators has resulting in breathtaking advances, and this trend continues. Applications to physics, especially quantum field theory, has also resulted in fruitful collaborations between mathematicians and physicists. The author has given an introduction to C*-algebras in this book from the purely mathematical standpoint, but those interested in applications can gain much from the reading of this book.

Spectral theory is introduced in chapter 1, with a definition of Banach algebras immediately given on the first page. There are many advantages is presenting spectral theory in this general context, and the author illustrates these advantages throughout the chapter. For Banach algebras with a unit, Gelfand's theorem, giving the non-emptiness of the spectrum, is proven. The author also discusses the Gelfand representation, that says essentially that abelian Banach algebras act like continuous functions. He then restricts his attention to compact and Fredholm operators, and discusses their index theory. It is here that the reader can see the origin of the idea of a compact operator acting as a "zero element" in algebras of operators. This is readily apparent in the definition of the Calkin algebra, which is the quotient algebra modulo the compact operators.
By defining an involution on a Banach algebra, the author introduces C*-algebras in chapters 2 and 3, and proves the famous Gelfand-Naimark theorem. The latter allows one to view any C*-algebra as a collection of bounded operators on a separable Hilbert space. In addition, the spectral theorem for normal operators is proven. These two theorems give one confidence in the power of the theory of C*-algebras to study operators, but their nonconstructive nature sometimes is not of much use for calculating explicitly the spectra or to find the Hilbert space that serves as a representative example in the Gelfand-Naimark result.The author also introduces the concept of a hereditary C*-subalgebras, which is a generalization of the concept of an idea, and, like the algebra of compact operators, are always simple if they are subalgebras of simple C*-algebras. Also, the author introduces the important class of Toeplitz operators. These are intimately connected with "hard analysis" and have important applications in physics and cryptography. The author also uses them, via the consideration of the Toeplitz algebra, to introduce concepts in K-theory.

The theory of von Neumann algebras, or W*-algebras as they are sometimes called, is discussed in chapter 4. His viewpoint of them is characteristically modern, as essentially a noncommutative measure theory. This viewpoint meshes will with current research in the field of noncommutative geometry. Proofs of the double commutant theorem and the Kaplansky density theorem are given. The presence of the weak operator topology makes these objects of primary interest to applications in quantum physics, as it is this topology which is physically relevant. The famous "type" characterization of projections in von Neumann algebras is given in an addendum to the chapter.

The representation theory of C*-algebras is considered in chapter 5. The author shows that topological irreducibility is equivalent to algebraic irreducibility for C*-algebras. The reader can see the role that ideals, especially the "primitive" ideals, play in the representation theory. The author also discusses CCR algebras, but he calls them "liminal" algebras. The theory of liminal algebras is of upmost importance in applications to quantum physics (physicists still call them CCR algebras).

Chapter 6 is an introduction to the construction of C*-algebras using direct limits and tensor products of given C*-algebras. And here again, the physicist reader will find a useful class of algebras, namely the AF-algebras, which are used heavily in mathematical statistical mechanics. Nuclear C*-algebras, which are the most well-behaved class under the operation of tensor product, are discussed briefly.

The last chapter of the book is the most interesting, for it deals with the K-theory of C*-algebras. The Brown-Douglas-Fillmore theory was briefly mentioned in an addendum to chapter 2. This theory could be considered a precursor to latter work on K-theory of operator algebras. The author explains the origin of the K-groups K0(A) and K1(A) assigned to a C*-algebra, and how they can be used to study some properties of A. The K-groups are constructed by first forming the set P(A) consisting of the union of all projections in the collection of n by n matrices over an arbitrary *-algebra A. Then for a unital *-algebra A, a notion of stable equivalance is defined for elements of P(A). The reader familiar with the K-theory of vector bundles will see the similarity in this definition. Here the two projections are stably equivalent if they are equivalent under the direct sum of the n x n identity operator. The equivalance classes under stability are then enveloped via the Grothendieck group, giving the K-group K0(A). Then the K0-group shown to be a complete isomorphism invariant for unital AF-algebras, i.e. two unital AF-algebras are *-isomorphic iff there is a unital order isomorphism between their K0-groups. Three fundamental results in K-theory are then discussed: "weak exactness", which gives an exact sequence of K0-groups given an exact sequence of C*-algebras; "homotopy invariance", which shows that mappings between the K0-groups of two C*-algebras are equal if the mappings between the C*-algebras are homotopic; "continuity": which gives a notion of continuity for the K0-functor. Then after defining a notion of stability for the K0-functor, the author proves an analog of Bott periodicity. This involves of course the construction of the K1-group, which is done in terms of the suspension of the C*-algebra, in complete analogy with the vector bundle case.

Thought holiness was stiff, legalistic and restricting? This book will change the way you see yourself and the way you see God. Holiness is explained the way it has always meant to be. Enjoy it. You won't regret owning this book.

An excellent text on Career Management. It is well referenced and an extensive number of case and experiential studies. The text focuses on four key areas in career management : (a) career management as a process; (b) a developmental approach to career management; (c) additional demands on career management and (d) career management for the individual can be assisted by the organisation. This book is ideal for everyone who needs to deal with careers. The first part addresses the concerns of the individual who wants to learn about career management as a process as well as trainers/facilitators, etc who are helping others to learn about the career management process. The send part is ideally suited to coaches and counselors who may be guiding individuals with their careers. The third part is vital for anyone you wants to understand the consequences of the 'turbulence' impacting careers and strategies to adopt. This section addresses concerns like work-life balance, work stress, lifestyle issues, entrepreneurial careers, etc. The fourth part is ideal for human resources practitioners and consultants who assist organisations in the planning, development and management of careers of their employees. Learning exercises help users of the text practice career management skills, too. An invaluable investment not just for corporate and public library but those actively engaged in the career management industry. It is more than a university study text - it is vital resource handbook on careers.

Since this book is about my fathers life, I am a bit partial. The story is a fast paced story about the life of a con man with a big heart. He experienced life as a electronic genius and lived in a time of mobsters and prohibition. His many escapades are both interesting and funny. My father is now 91 and lives in a nursing home. He still has ice blue eyes and is smart as a whip. I recommend this book for those who are too young to have known those days, and for others who would like a trip down memory lane.

Nerval's work brings us to a moment when the Western mind was losing faith and seeking a way out. Drifting through the "forest of symbols" in the mid 19th century, Nerval anticipated everything from Symbolism to Surrealism. Baudelaire and his children may have found many dark visions, but Nerval first illuminated the hidden path. "Chimeras" is a work that is both romantic and bitter. Goddesses are profaine and unattainable. The muse bestows a bitter blessing, for one of the great themes of this sonnet sequence is the inability to reconcile the real and the unreal. Many poets have mined this idea since, but this trailblazing work still holds its power. Few poems can match the unforgettable closing sonnet, "Vers Dorees", a fierce message to modern man. "Freethinking" humanity must humble itself, for it cannot control "life that bursts in everything". So charged is this poem, that the final line, "a pure spirit lies beneath the skin of stones", pushes the reader to the limits of reason.

Tolkien, Lewis, L'engle, all of these writers wrote the fantasy books people enjoy. But Jordan has taken it a step further. With this series, he has introduced us to a world of imagination and glory, a place where a tale may never end. The charectors, including Rand, Perrin, Matt, Elayne, Aviehenda, Egwene and others, are so detailed and thorough that you believe you know them in real life. The details of the surroundings, the way things are described, all are Jordan's ways of painting the oh so perfect picture of the story in our minds. The series dosn't seem to tell about a made up fantasy, but instead of a historical invent witnessed throught the eyes of the author then relayed back to us, the readers. In every book, Jordan seems to know just how to add things in, and create a richer world for the charectors to explore. But the deatils arn't all of Jordan's talent. The plot itself is a unique tale. Many other authors have written fantsy stories, with wars and magic, but Jordan seems to do more than just tell a story, instead he allows you to enter it. The plot follows many main and non-main charrectors, each contributing a part to the story's patteren. It follows Rand, as the Dragon Reborn, with magical abilities, and trying to controll himself from going mad. Or Elayne, queen of Camylen. Or Matt, whose unusuall talent of gambling tends to get him in trouble. And Perrin, a wolf brother, and so many more. Jordan seems to let the charectors write they're own story, while he acts as the supervisor. All in all, this series is one no fantasy reader, correction, any reader, can put down.