I finally bought it, and I'm more than glad I did. This book is not at all what I thought it would be about --- it is so much more. Initially, I thought it would be another book about the life of St. Francis which, of late, I've been quite taken with. This book, though, has more to do with how we can make our faith real --- how we can really respond --- in light of a needy world around us. This is just what the doctor ordered. I say this reluctantly, but reading a chapter is almost better than going to church. I close this book at night with the understanding that I've got to get out there and DO something; I feel like I CAN make some small difference in this world, and that means so much to me. I'm at that point where I WANT to change, WANT to make sacrifices, WANT to be conformed to what God wants me to be. I want desperately not to be an 'average' Christian who longs for the same dusty, lifeless, rusting things the world does. This book reminds me that Francis, in his life, was not afraid to give up personal comfort and familiarity. When he finally overcame the greatest personal obstacle for him --- learning to love the leper -- he was freed from within, freed from that nasty monster that can entangle so many of us. Reflecting on his unique experience, I am compelled to look at my own prejudices, those things about people that keep me from loving them completely. I can't remember the last time a church sermon so compelled me. I highly recommend this book, and encourage you to grow in ways far outside the box.

St. Francis and the Foolishness of God is not just about St. Francis, but about themes that touch all of our lives. There are reflection questions at the end of each section and an invitation to share stories. I recommend this book for personal and group reflection.

I am intrigued by the continuing controversy over Aosdana's election to the office of Saoi of my cousin Francis Stuart, author of Black List. Francis is the cousin I didn't know I had, at least until last year. The family black sheep, the skeleton in the cupboard, he has been the family member that everyone found so hard to deal with that it was easier to deny his existence completely and since the war he has been written out of the family history, both in Burke's 1958 Landed Gentry of Ireland and in their 1978 Irish Family Records. It was not until I found the rather obscure 1930 family history "Three Hundred Years in Inishowen" by our mutual cousin Amy Young (nee Stuart) that I started to fill in the gaps and realised who he was. Francis has said (Irish Times,November 14, 1996, "Nothing But Doubt") that "the Stuart family, however, never forgave Francis's mother and blamed her for Henry's death." That's probably only a partial truth; rather, Henry's suicide shattered the family in ways that have resonated down the generations. The collective failure of the Stuart family, including, but not only, Francis, to integrate the trauma were surely a factor in the 1993 suicide of his and my cousin, travel writer Miles Clark, and so it continues. I confess I read Black List Section H at least in part neither as a literary masterpiece nor as a justification for Francis' wartime actions, but as a family history. Where he writes of how "he'd imagined his cousin Stella coming to his room at night to initiate him into the sexual mystery" I read of my godmother, later Stella Greer, who used to send me 5 quid at Christmas, and was said to be a bit of an old dragon. I presume she was the cousin whose love-letters Francis kept in the pigeon-holes of his roll-top desk at Rugby (Things to Live For (1934) ,page 17) and mentions again on the first page of Black List. And I suspect that, despite two marriages and a divorce, her cousin Francis was in some ways the unrecognised love of her life. I didn't meet her until she was eighty, but as Francis confirms, she must have been young once!

The claims against Francis of anti-semitism are a malicious nonsense. Francis's biographer J.H.Natterstad (Irish Writers series, 1974) notes that "There is no evidence whatever that he saw the Jew as part of an international conspiracy or as the incarnation of evil. Although he was not sympathetic to what he saw as the Jewish obsession with money, the Jew was, as the archetypal outcast, a natural ally and was treated as such in "Julie" (written in 1938, a year before he went to Germany). Natterstad also notes that at Rugby, "There were others, he discovered, who felt themselves outsiders, and they formed their own clique, which insulated them to some extent against the life around them: 'Well, we Irish and a Jew and a Pole,' he recalled, 'we made a little group, and it was good.' " Francis has said that "I have spoken and written several million words in my life. No one could ever point to a sentence of mine that was or is anti-Semitic." In fact he could go further than merely denying any expression of anti-semitism; he has firmly nailed his colours to the mast and they contain nary a shred of racial or other prejudice. The only circumstance in which I could imagine Francis being anti-Jew is if he went to live in Israel, when he would no doubt quickly identify with the downtrodden Palestinians.

But it should be remembered that Francis was not the only member of his family to spend the war in Germany, the other being his cousin's son, my uncle Bob Stewart-Moore. Bob,brought up on the same Queensland sheep station where Francis Stuart was born, and traumatised not by the suicide of Henry Stuart but by the accidental death an elder brother Henry Stewart-Moore, was in bombers, shot down over Germany and,rather than being "passionately involved in my own living fiction", as Francis Stuart claims to have been, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war at Lamsdorf, some fifty kilometres from Auschwitz. He then walked 500 miles in three months through Poland and Germany in the middle of winter to freedom at the end of the war, eventually being picked up by American troops near Muhlhausen. The group of Australians with whom he was imprisoned recently published a book on the experience, titled "The RAAF POWS of Lamsdorf", which is certainly anything but fiction, and in it Bob recounts the experience of being shot down, crashing in the Elbe canal, getting out of the plane underwater, and being imprisoned by the Germans. Certainly a different way of entering Germany to that chosen by his cousin Francis! One can only hope that the account in Black List of Francis's meeting with a POW at Frankfurt is not a (heavily disguised) description of a wartime meeting with his cousin. The age is wrong, as is the nationality and the rank. In fact the flying boots are about the only thing that is right. But the overtly and quite unnecessarily sexual references he ascribes to Captain Manville are something that this encounter has in common with Francis's descriptions of his cousins Maida and Stella: Are they a device he has used to distance himself from a connection uncomfortably intimate? Do I read too much into this encounter, or are there some subjects too tough even for Francis Stuart's brutal brand of honesty? The Aosdána award seems richly deserved, awarded as it is on literary merit, and I congratulate him on it. But now that he has done the easy bit and made his peace with Ireland and the world, perhaps it's time Francis tried something a little more challenging, and started to reintegrate with his family, starting with Bob Stewart-Moore in Sydney? I would have given Francis a ten for a book that I found to be quite enthralling (and not only for the family connections), but subtract one point for what appears to be his apparent failure to confront this most difficult of issues.

This is a very imformative book with alot of general facts as well a alot of specifics about the deer family. It includes habitat,diet and species information.

The corrupt period during the reign of King James in 17th century England saw many villainous characters get into power or plot to get into power. Sir Francis Bacon, visionary philosopher, philanthropist, statesman, scientist, poet, politician and judge had to contend with many of them during his lifetime. Perhaps this is why he intuited at the end, "For my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable speech's in foreign nations and the next ages; and to my own countrymen after some time be past." He seemed to realize that his reputation would grow like that of many other visionaries who were best appreciated well after their death. Sadly, to this day Bacon's rich legacy contends with villains in the form of unjust literary critics, commentators and biographers who have left a deeper stain on his name than any of his contemporaries.

Nevertheless, Bacon's star appears to be rising with the publication in 1996 by Yale University Press of Nieves Mathews' book Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination. In one long fell swoop she offers the interested reader a reevaluation of the poignant politically-charged events during Bacon's life by allowing all of the prejudiced detractors and spiteful critics that ever had an ax to grind on Bacon to air their views again and then dismissing them one by one for their lack of objectivity and personal animosity.

Ten years in the making this tremendous labour of love provides more than adequate scope for the interested reader with over one hundred pages just in annotated notes alone, rounded out with an extensive twenty-page bibliography. Mathews starts out with an epigram quoted from one of Bacon's chief antagonists, Edward Coke, "The slander of a dead man is a living fault." The humorous irony here is that the insensitive Coke was a menace to anyone living who stood in the way of his political aspirations and Francis Bacon experienced this first hand. Coke had orchestrated Bacon's downfall from the Chancellorship from behind the scenes and he also slandered Bacon with false bribery charges. After Bacon's death, many uninformed commentators on Bacon's life failed to see that he was actually an honest man who was unfairly framed by Coke's influence and so the charges stuck through succeeding generations. The above quote from Coke now serves sentence on all those misguided by Coke who refuse to recognize historical truth from fiction.

Much of the later widespread misrepresentation of Bacon as a dishonest, self-serving person originated in 1837 with Thomas Macauley's, "Essay on Bacon." In her book, Mathews points out that Macauley admitted to being motivated by his overzealous need to become famous at the expense of his subject. The book also goes into detail over the agonizing position that Bacon found himself in during the Essex insurrection period. Bacon was forced to prosecute his friend Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex or face charges himself. The Earl was the victim of his own hot temperament and also suffered from the shrewd traps hatched by Robert Cecil. Essex was eventually found guilty of treason, and was executed. Mathew illustrates how the unfortunate outcome of the trial for Bacon was being unfairly tagged with being opportunistic and disloyal to his friend by later day critics who were ignorant of the facts in the case while dismissing Bacon's own summary report of the trial. Supporters of Bacon who recognize that both he and Essex shared a common bloodline as children of Elizabeth I, will be disappointed that Mathews' book does not go in that direction. She overlooks such clues as the signature carved by Essex over the entrance to his cell at the Tower of London where he used the Welsh spelling Robart Tidir (Robert Tudor) as a message to posterity that he was Elizabeth's son. This bit of history can still be seen in the Beaumont section of the Tower in London and its implications are still deliberately kept secret by the Tower guards since it contradicts the " official" story of Elizabeth's reputation as the Virgin Queen.

However, this new book is truly a great contribution toward reestablishing Francis Bacon as both an honest man and an amazingly versatile genius whose prose and style influenced later poets such as Byron and Shelley and writers such as Coleridge and Emerson, in addition to making his mark on literary contemporaries like Ben Jonson. Mathews has also done her research on the Manes Verulamiani, the book of eulogies that was written and published by Bacon's own peers at the time of his death and contains pages of lavish praise which salute him as a highly-esteemed poet and dramatist. This often-overlooked book of eulogies is an important testimony to the fact that Bacon was a great poet and dramatist. It also acknowledges him as being associated with Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom who shakes her spear at ignorance. It is her nickname: "The Spearshaker" that is the origin for the word Shakespeare that currently adorns Francis Bacon's most famous literary achievement. Unfortunately, Mathews tiptoes over the Shakespeare Authorship question, perhaps because it is not part of the domain and purpose of her book. However, one cannot help but wonder what she secretly thinks on the matter of Authorship after having spent so many years closely examining Bacon's life.

Francis Stuart himself is a controversial enough character in my part of the world. In 25 words or less he's the 96-year-old holder of the suí of the Aosdána (kind of like a council of Irish writers and artists) and a man who allegedly worked as a writer and broadcaster for the Nazis during WWII until he got sense... For anyone who has ever pondered the effects of war on the ordinary citizens of Europe in the immediate aftermath of 1945 then this is the one for you. Vivid and graphic in its portrayal of a sort of love story amongst the suffering of the ordinary people in the bombed out streets with little or no money, food, clothes or comforts...

I had heard about Dorothy Dunnet a few years ago, but I was not able to find any of her books, even haunting used bookstores. When I saw that they had been re-released in paperback form I snapped up _The Game of Kings_. I have not been disappointed.

This is the story about one of the most complicated characters (Lymond) I've ever seen. Dunnett makes her readers hate, love, and respect him. I have been reading this book with a dictionary at my side, because the language is so rich and unusual. I plan to read the rest of the series, as soon as I can get them.

If you like long, fascinating reads, and if you are willing to work at your reading, and if intellectual challenges excite and delight you, then this book is your portal to literary ecstasy. It is everything historical fiction should be: it is fiction, which allows the author to create bigger than life characters (and Francis Crawford of Lymond certainly is that), it demands that the author place the story firmly into its historical context (which Dorothy Dunnett does better than just about anyone I have read), and it illuminates the history of the setting from the inside out. I personally am not terribly interested in 16th Century English-Scottish history, but I found Dunnett's characters irresistible. For those who want to understand the archaic allusions and obscure historical references, spend(from Amazon, of course) on Elspeth Morrison's book The Dorothy Dunnett Companion (ISBN 0375725873), a veritable encyclopedia of Dunnett's historical novels. Everything you need to know to understand the difficult passages and quotations is in Morrison's book, and it is all indexed in a way that provides easy reference. Reading The Game of Kings is not entertaining in the way that a television show or a romance or mystery novel is entertaining. You had better bring something of yourself to the reading of this book; if you do, you will be delighted.

This review relates to the entire Lymond series, which comprises 6 books and begins with this. This series is sheer literary entertainment of the highest order. The pace is fast and the plots are intelligent. The writing is flamboyant and witty. The reader is never condescended to or pandered to. Dorothy Dunnett will ruthlessly kill off lovable characters if her plot requires, which lends a particularly heart-stopping aspect to one's involvement in the plot. Amazingly, her novels are set in real history and populated by many real historical people. I am told by students of history of the period that her research is almost faultless. She brings history startlingly to life, partly by the use of modern prose, which unfortunately results in spoken words being less than authentic to the period, but I will put up with this for the immediacy and realism (to my modern ear) this brings. No one tells a cracking good story with intelligence and wit better than Dorothy Dunnett. Mercifully she does not try to moralise - this is pure entertainment with non-stop action.

An avid reader in my youth, at the start of my working life I found that I could not bear to read another word after a day poring over documents. It was only when I was introduced to Dorothy Dunnett that I went back to reading for pleasure. I was sucked into Lymond's intricate, exciting and realistic world of intrigue and adventure, to which I devoted every spare moment for a few weeks. When I was done I spent weeks after pondering the plot and thinking about the characters. Seldom have I been so overtaken by an imaginary world. I acquired a taste for historical fiction, and even plain history. And best of all, since then I have gone back to reading for pleasure.

Judging by the editorial the book gives a completely wrong picture judging actions from another time and place by modern rules.

Sir Francis Drake had very little in common with the pirate from the movies. He was more of talented gentleman of 16 century on dangerous, but profitable enterprize.

I do not remember Drake looting churches, but even if he did - one must not forget about him being protestant during major religious unrest in Europe. His attituide to his enemies was good and he wasn't bloodthirsty. His moral values were quite normal for his time. And his military prowess definitely was higher than normal.

His performance during engagement with Spanish Armada was good as well (worth to mention, that, unlike of admiral Hogwart - commander of the English fleet, Drake owned some ships of English fleet). The book "Defeat of Spanish Armada" by Garrett Mattingly gives very accurate account on that issue.

He never lost Queen's favor. He rather lost Queen's admiration, because results of his last expeditions were less spectacular, but he died vice-admiral commanding his fleet.

I have unplesant feeling that the book is just one of those "detroning" biographies, which use the standard approach "all great people are just good liars" and aimed to entertain readers with no background in the area. Pity, because writing biography of Drake give unique possibility to make reader understand 16 century through picture of this great military leader.

For afficionados of Drake, Elizabethan England, or nautical history, this is a first rate read! The scholarship is thorough and well documented without leaving the prose too dry. Author Kelsey exegetically strips the gloss which has been after-added to most accounts of Drake's life (my brother, who is a nautical archaeologist, found it professionally worthwhile). Unfortunately, Kelsey's apparent bias against Drake's commercial focus prevents a discussion of Drake's larger role as an economic multiplier in the Elizabethan fiscus. The cash brought in by Drake's expeditions and similar ilk were probably critical in enabling the crown to finance the struggle against the Spaniards. Still, all in all, highly recommended.

I love the story of Sir Francis Drake and his adventures in the Spanish Main and was eager at this chance at such a thourouh telling of his story.

While the book starts slowly with what seems to be an overly detailed account of Bacon's family and their activities, it is a clear headed and balanced account of a man who achieved fame across the centuries, as well as in his own time---but never great virtue, character or happiness in his own life. It is quite readable, and even engrossing in the second half. Scholars will appreciate the careful documentation and extensive reference to sources and supporting materials.

The book starts with a strange 'Introduction to Programming' chapter, which is for people who don't know what a variable is (good thing _that's_ in a language reference book!) Meanwhile, there is no 'Introduction to VBScript' chapter. I found it very difficult to find simple information on syntax and keywords (just try to find anything on function return types or declaring arrays...) The main Appendix, which contains lots of valuable information, is organized randomly by arcane subjects (and there's no listing of the subjects) so it's difficult to find anything. It also seems to be lifted out of a VB book and contains things that aren't even supported in VBScript.

The range of topics covered is useful if you're trying to decide whether VBScript is right for your project . But if you're just trying to write Active Server Pages, I recommend skipping this book and getting 'Beginning ASP' by Wrox -- it uses VBScript exclusively and has a better introduction to the syntax and usage of the language.

Subs,procedures, and functions all covered in the book in Chapter 3.

"A reader" doesn't read much! I think Wrox and 1000's of other people who buy may noticed if Subs and Functions missing!

One of best books I buy. But I would like Appendix A (BEST VBScript reference ever!) to be alphabetical - easier to look up, but I love book anyway. I recommend to everyone.

I have read VBScript Programmer's Reference. I would to congratulate the team who put this book together. Its so well written I was programming within the day. Not just a "Hello World" program but a program of substance that opened files, validated them, wrote events in the event log etc.
The book is easy to follow and the short introduction to programming most useful for non-programmers like me and my team.
Unfortunately, for me, the book will lead to more work for me and my team of technical mainframe support staff converting mainframe legacy JCL to VBScript. I will be ordering two more copies of the book for my team and I am sure that they will gain much from it.
Even after a few days, members of staff from programming teams keep borrowing the book I am now forced to lie about its location (under my desk).
If I had a criticism I would say that Cscript should be covered in a little more detail, but its only minor point and I found the information I was looking for on the Web.

I bought 3 books on VBScript, the others are not bad books but they are written with a rocket scientist in mind and assume that the reader is competent in programming and modern scripting techniques. Thankfully your book saved the day and I actually enjoyed reading it. I get the impression that the team that put it together also enjoyed that task, it seems to come across in the text anyways.

Its a great book.