I've ben GMing for something like fifteen years and this is the system I always return to. If I want to run someting of my own, this is the system I base it on.

Slim-line, fast, flexible, simple, expansive, effective. All words that describe Talsorian's game mechanics - it simply does not get any better.

As for the universe - this is a REAL world of darkness. No bright dawn, no happy ever after. Only your wits and tech, style and edge. No right or wrong, only power and death, a world of grey areas that seems only just around the corner.

If you are a gamer and you don't have this - get it now.

If you aren't a gamer but love the Dark Future setting, it's worth it.

Magnificent.

This is one of my all time favorites!! I got into the gaming craze at an early age and quickly tired of singing burds and happy elves. This game takes a long hard look at where were headed as a society and allows you the player to take part. It has one of the more versitile character creation systems and is not hard to follow the logical progression to modify equipment! Oh, and not to forget it supports two of my favorite philosophies: 1)Knowledge is power! 2)Attitude is everything! So don't lose any cool points chumbada, buy the book!

I was stationed in Vilseck Germany with the 2nd of the 63rd Armor when I friend told me about Cyber Punk. It was almost a year before we found someone with the books, and immediatly set up a game. It was a game that I have never forgoten. It sits in my mind like the begining of Secret of Mana, forever a defining factor in my oppinions.

This game does tend to drag with its role to hit/role to dodge rules, but it is more believable then any other game I have seen or played. The setting for Cyber Punk is OURT world, with OUR history. It is science fiction. We can look at our own lives, make few changes to the timeline, and see that it IS possible. In reality, these things would never happen, but in the game, it is easier for us to adapt to this new world because it is so close to our own. Realy, what has changed? The world has met a sort of anarchy, like in Mad Max. The government is now run by Corporations. Bionics are common enough that you see people with mettle limbs on a regular basis. This world is more real then any other I have seen, and this makes more believable. Since it is more believable it becomes easier to enter your charactor and enjoy the game.

If I had to rate all the games I have played, I would put this on tope, even with its long combat and ineffectiveness with machine guns.

As far as pain mgt books go, usually they are overally verbose and ridden with medical jargon that makes it difficult to understand the reason you are reading the book in the first place...why does this hurt and how can I make it stop hurting? Back Pain for Dummies was so practical and to the point that just reading it made my back pain lessen. I highly rec this book to anyone who experiences back pain, especially if they are fed up with the pain associated with some doctor try to over-explain something that could be done in 10 words or less. Back Pain for dummies definately implements the K.I.S.S. method for understanding back pain. Keep it simple and make the #@*! pain go away.

Having had back problems for almost 15 years, I have read just about every book available. Back Pain for Dummies is by far the best. It delivers very practical and easy-to-understand advice and practices that helped me more than a dozen chiropractors ever did. This book should be in the waiting room for every back specialist in the country. If I ever get to meet this Dr. Sinel, I'm going to give him the biggest bear hug ever (keeping my back straight, lifting with my legs...)

Sinel and Deardorff take a refreshingly humorous approach to dealing with one of the most pervasive medical problems in our country. This book is easy to read and provides a very comprehensive approach to dealing with back pain. I would consider it one of the best resources available in the field.

My 7 year old son and I just finished reading Olive, the Orphan Reindeer. What a delightful story. Each year we read The Night Before Christmas, The Christmas Carol, or Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer, it was nice to discover a new title to add to our holiday reading. The press release stated that this book was geared toward the age group 9-12. My 7 year old read this book with ease and understanding. I agree with Michael, this book is for anyone who believe in Christmas.

Good Job, Are there other books available by this author?

Michael has wrote a wonderful classic story for Kids from age 8 to 80! This Book gives you the Christmas spirit you need, to get through the holidays. Olive would make a great little gift for all your friends!

Michael Christie has written a wonderfully endearing story of a shy little reindeer named Olive. Olive is like many of us in that even though she is constantly doing her best, and getting better and stronger every day, inside she still feels like a nobody, and wonders if she would ever be chosen for such an important job as pulling Santa's sleigh. This is a very uplifting story about how Olive finally comes to discover her dreams at the North Pole. Even though this book is written on a 9-12 yr old reading level, the little ones simply love having it read to them over and over. My 2-year-old constantly wants someone to read it to her, and my 11-year-old is usually the one who does. It's the kind of book that MUST read EVERY night at bedtime for months(or so your child will tell you.) This is definitely a 5 star book...a new classic in our house! You won't be disappointed with this one.

First off, I'll just say that I think the wake has the finest art of all the SANDMAN collections, save for maybe Season of Mists.

The Wake is a story about death and endings and farewells, and it is an end to the series, but only in the sense of the Death tarot card: representing transformation, rebirth, the closing of a door and the opening of a window. As Dream told Orpheus: "You attend the funeral. You bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you go on with your life." That's what the characters are doing in this book. It also contains the story of another wanderer in the shifting zones, (a parallel to "Soft Places"), and the writing of Shakespeare's last play (a parallel to "Midsummer Night's Dream.") All told, The Wake is a graceful coda to the bittersweet symphony (so shoot me for the reference) that is SANDMAN.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

This was the only way to wrap up the Sandman series - a wake. Morpheus is dead, driven by a complex set of events ending with the Furies decending apon the Dreaming.

Characters from the series collect in the Dreaming to share memories of Morpheus. The first few books of this collection are exactly what the title implies - a wake. The stories of the Sandman collection receive their final detailing and a new Dream (yet, oddly the same Dream) assumes the throne.

The final two books are my favorites, though. Hob, Dream's human friend of the past few hundred years, tries to deal with the loss of his friend while attending a Renissance Fair with his girlfriend. Combined with the sorrow of the loss, Hob is also starting to feel his age and is wracked with guilt about his past. At the height of this, he gets drunk and has a conversation with Dream's older sister.

The last story stands on its own: a wise man's journey through a Shifting Zone, done in a style unique to the story.

This collection gives a sense of closure, and is probably the best installment since "Doll's House" or even "24 Hours". A must-own.

That quote comes from the end of an earlier Sandman book, but it applies to "The Wake" as well.

"The Sandman" has always been about change, about those who can and those who cannot. This, the last in the Sandman series, ties together the ending threads of the story, and in the process reaffirms how wonderful a writer Neil Gaiman is. Never the showman, his prose quietly and powerfully speaks for him and his characters.

The artwork is, as always, brilliant. Michael Zulli's work on the main "Wake" storyline is amazing, and Charles Vess outdoes himself again for the very last story, "The Tempest." But most remarkable in this writer's opinion is Jon Muth's work for "Exiles", a quietly powerful piece that manages to express best what "The Sandman" was about; his art is a perfect match for it.

There are precious few proper endings, and ones that bring a tear to your eye are even rarer. This is one of the few books that accomplishes both.

I watched Port Charles and fell in love, I read this book and was amazed. The openness, compassion, sorrow, power, and beauty of his words scar you. I'll never look at him the same again, but it's in a good way. As you watch him play Michael Morley, you realize the struggle he went through to be where he is today, as you watch him play Caleb Morley you realize the ultimate disappointment he must feel that he's made it for acting, not his real passion, writing.

Enjoy it while it lasts, this is a short but amazing book. I re-read every poem several times, and you'll find yourself doing the same, especially if you've ever seen him act!

I am a huge fan of Michael Eastons, have been for a few years. Reading this book, which Iwas lucky to get off eBay, I haveto say there is a great deal of pain in there, but some poems I laughed out loud at. I know thatI will be reading this book many more times--I liked it very much.

I have been the proud owner of this book since November of 2001.
My assessment of this book can actually equate with my
assessment of Mr. Easton's acting...both share that same
"balletic, graceful, poetic" quality. Mr. Easton's angst and
devastation at that period of his life is so heart-wrenching to
read about...but at the same time important for him to bring
these feelings to the forefront and express his deep "inner-
soul" through these writings. Mr. Easton's supreme intelligence
just shines through in both his writing and his acting. I am
truly honored and privileged to be able to view Mr. Easton on
an almost-daily basis on Port Charles...he brings immeasurable
joy to me and has actually been an inspiration to me and a
dear friend of mine to become expressive ourselves. His
passion for writing and his passion for acting shine through
in all of his endeavors...and I hope and pray we will be
having him for our viewing pleasure on Port Charles for a long
time to come. He and his acting partner, Ms. Kelly Monaco,
bring their characters to life like no other daytime couple
ever. In conclusion, I hope these demons he felt back then
are in the past and I wish him nothing but a peaceful and
happy life.

Having been a space program buff since my childhood, I've been drawn by books like Martin Caidin's Marooned, Stephen Baxter's Voyage, and even political writer Allen Drury's The Throne of Saturn (that one dates me, I realize). Red Moon caught my attention while I was browsing Amazon, and after only a few pages I was pleased to see I had spent my money very, very well.

Simply, this is an amazing book. Unlike a lot of books that try to achieve a cinematic effect by cutting quickly between scenes and situations, Michaels' book, with its full chapters and fully realized sequences paints clear heartfelt scenes more effectively than most of today's films. His characters of astronaut Janet Luckman, planetary geologist Milo Jefferson, and central character, Cosmonaut Grigor Belinsky are living and breathing people with needs and flaws and conflicts. People I thought about long after I had finished Red Moon.

The premise is that a lunar mission set during the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing discovers the Soviet craft Luna 15, launched days before Apollo 11 but landing at nearly the same time, was not an unmanned probe, but in fact a last-ditch attempt to land a man on the Moon before the Americans. As an adolescent in 1969, I followed the flight of Apollo 11 completely entranced, and the looming presence of Luna 15 was felt deeply by me. I had wondered about the intentions of the mysterious craft, and it is fascinating to me to see this captured the imagination of this writer as well.

This is a huge book, not only in size, but scope, and Michaels pulls it off admirably, even more so considering this is his first novel. He takes us along three parallel storylines, two set in 2019 -- one on a lunar landing mission marking the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing, the second in the upper echelons of NASA -- and one set in the Soviet Union of 1968-69. The first Macguffin of the story, finding rare Helium 3 on the Moon, is the same as Homer Hickam's disappointing Back to the Moon, but is handled far more dramatically, and is in turn upstaged by the quest for finding the answer to the mystery surrounding Luna 15 and Grigor Belinsky, her pilot. Michaels skillfully plays the three storylines off of each other, teasing and rewarding us, involving us deeply into these people's lives. There are moments of great passion and feeling in this story, so much so it brought me to tears no less than three times.

I genuinely wished the book had been longer, and if there is a sequel I'll be the first to snatch it up. Red Moon is simply a wonderful read. I recommend it highly.

RED MOON is an exceptional novel of speculative fiction. The author has done a tremendous job in intertwining three related plots to generate an oeuvre of hefty proportions and considerable creativity. And it is such a pleasure to read a book that is written for the reader, not in anticipation of a screenplay.

RED MOON not only uses the backdrop of the US-USSR space race as one point of departure, but also creates tension through the ongoing philosophical differences that remain between the two nations. The historical references to the program of the late 1960's are insightful, accurate and compelling. The plots are uncompromisingly driven by a "what-if?" factor that is added by speculations that the world was not aware of certain flights and missions by the Soviets. Revealing these cover-ups and conspiracies through the future lunar exploration timelines is a remarkably effective literary device, well handled by the author.

The characters of astronaut Janet Luckman, planetary geologist Milo Jefferson, and central character, Cosmonaut Grigor Belinsky are well drawn and believable. The future setting of lunar exploration in search of Helium-3 is portrayed admirably, and the historical elements incorporated are enlightening and without extraneous embellishment.

A gripping and passionate tale that is sure to please. Highly Recommended.

Red Moon is an exceptional thriller as well as a novel of speculative fiction. It is actually three interwoven and inter-related stories all tied to the US-Soviet Space Race. The insights into the history of what happened and why it happened back in the sixties would be worth the price of admission alone-- but Dave Michaels has gone far beyond that to craft a gripping, page-turning novel about a future moon expedition and how the discovery of water on the moon will affect life on earth. I am not a huge fan of science fiction novels that are "the black and white hat fighting for territory in the sky" type. I prefer novels of more characterological depth that leave me with something to think about and have a real emotional impact as well. Red Moon is a great novel because it accomplishes just that. There are characters we really care about from Belinsky the tragic Russian cosmonaut to Janet Luckman an American Astronaut stranded on the moon with someone who is trying to murder her (and she has no idea who on her team it could be). This is a book to warm the heart, fascinate the mind and feed the soul. I can hardly recommend it enough for a first novel.

The second of the gospels according to Porter and the more useful of the two. This book gives a framework for allocating costs and assets among business activities which can then be used to seek drivers for cost advantage or differentiation. The later chapters may at first blush seem repetitive, but they are useful elaborations on the the basic search criteria for finding and exploiting value.If one had read this in 1995, their stock portfolio would have many fewer worthless e-commerce shares...

Porter has highlighted many important considerations for those who are pursuing possible strategies to employ for their organisation. In order to pursue generic strategies like cost, differentiation & quick response (recent), you would have to gear your value chain towards these options. Porter has shown how this may be done in his book which is a great reference for strategic formulation. However, in order to have the optimum strategy(s) for an organisation, you would have to consider the human side. Porter's book tends to sway towards the organisational design dimension. I recommend Miller & Dess's Strategic Management (McGraw-Hill Series in Management) for a complete overview of strategic management. Also look out for Warren Bennis's Organizing Genius for an insight into great teams.

Mr. Porter's book did an excellent job in outlining all the key areas that matter in the real world. Mr. Porter takes you through the exercise of properly choosing strategies (price, differentiation, technology) while focusing on buyer values to create sustainable competitive advantages and barriers.

His outline of industry segmentation helps to keep readers focused on properly using capital to maximize earnings and competitive positions (a common mistake in the business world). I found the read most helpful in structuring a much more sound strategic plan for my own company. Thank you to Mr. Porter for providing such a wonderful strategic guide.

CEO Profit Line of America, Inc.

What an amazing book! Though I know that the depiction of a multiple personality in this novel is not actually the way such things work, it was easy enough to suspend disbelief, because of the completely captivating story and the concise prose style of the three people who write as Michael Slade. I found this thing in a used bookstore not too long after it came out (lucky me), and noticed a blurb on the back that said it had Cthulhu Mythos content. That was good enough for me to shell out the few shekels and bring the thing home, especially as there wasn't anything else very interesting on the shelves...and was I ever glad I did. Couldn't figure out til the very end which one of the personalities was actually responsible for the wanton destruction depicted in this book, though I had my suspicions. The suspense was unbearable for me, and I stayed up all night to read this thing in one sitting. While doing research for a book of my own, this book popped up and said "Read me". So I did, repeating the experience all over again. I hadn't exactly forgotten about Saxon, but time and the load of many other fine books had dulled the memory a bit. Not now. It will be quite a while before I forget, and btw, I read it while listening to the earlier work of Alice Cooper, who had a recommending blurb on the edition I have. Nice combo-I recommend it.

Slowly but surely Slade introduces us to the bits and pieces of his Special X squad. HEADHUNTER gave us Rovert DeClerq (not sure about the spelling), and GHOUL gives us Zinc Chandler. This guy is about as gutsy as 20 real-life detectives, and every bit as suave as James Bond. To paraphrase a review I read elsewhere, he more or less becoems catnip for women in this book. Here we encounter 3 killers...and you know what, it's been so long since I read this book that I honestly can't remember all 3...but I DO remember that Slade grips you by the throat once aghain and leads you leeringly through his mad house of horrors. AS in all his books, Slade's story depends on the rotation of several plotlines that skip back and forth between time, location, and characters. Slade is one of those authors who you either love or hate; his "numerous plotlines" trick either annoys or intices the reader, as well as his tendency to never pull a single punch when it comes to descrbing murder scenes (either during the act or the aftermath). But one thing is for sure: there is no inbetweens with Slade, and that is the sign of a damn good author.

It has been a long time since I read GHOUL... I have not forgotten any details! That would be impossible.

Michael Slade, actually three lawyers from Vancouver BC writing under this pen name, put together a wonder story. There's so much research and detail put into the story that it is hard not to believe very action. These men draw upon non fiction material from the real world; murder cases, doctor reports, physiology reports, and many others. Did I mention material from history too!

I would have loved high school if these authors were the teachers. I digress... back to this book. I read it in two days, the fastest I ever read any book and that record still stands today.

It's an edge of your seat, stay up all night, mentally psychotic, skin crawling, horrorific ride that ALL horror novels should be graded against.

Any one of his books are top notch but this will always be my most favourite.

The first of Michael Lesy's books, 'Wisconsin death trip' is as harrowing and breathtaking today as when it was first published, back in the early 1970s. Utilizing a veritable treasure-trove of miraculously preserved glass negative plates taken in rural Wisconsin during the period of the 1880s-early 20th Century, and combining them with newspaper clippings and other snippets of local news from the area and era, Lesy has pieced together an amazing (if bleak) view of life in that day and age. Times were hard, and the challenges faced were many and daunting -- anyone bemoaning the state of life in America today should read this book...anyone who wants a truer sense of American history should read this book. You will never forget it.

On a related note, readers might be interested to know that this book inspired Stewart O'Nan's great novel 'A prayer for the dying' (also available through amazon.com).

The author discovered a huge cache of old glass photographic plates belonging to the town's photographer and writer, who, along with his son, published a local Wisconsin paper. One is struck by how such a simple collection of photographs and articles, offered without editorial comment, can be so powerfully affecting. Perhaps it is the haunted, mad eyes of some of the subjects, or the babies in coffins, their images preserved for posterity, or the intermittent reports from the state mental hospital, or the subtle way in which some of the photographs have been altered to emphasize some quality of the image. There is something powerfully haunting about this book - all the moreso since one gets the impression that small-town America of this time must have lived the same way.

There is relatively little I can say about this book.

The book is essentially photographs and news clippings from a newspaper in Wisconsin from about 1890 to 1910. Interspersed are snippets from novels dealing with life during the period.

Turning the pages, reading the articles, and looking not at the pictures but into the eyes of the people in the photographs, one gets a sense not of some sterilized, backward glance at these people as some great societal force, not as a band of pioneers, but as very human people, who die in childbirth, die as children, die of diseases that sweep through whole towns and infect the entire state with fear, go insane, murder, and still maintain enough inner dignity to be able to look into the lens of a camera and mask most of their emotions long enough for the half-second exposure but not long enough to pierce the heart of people living a century later. It is pain. It is a death trip.

The book speaks for itself. Actually, it doesn't. The people in word and image speak for themselves.

Michael Moorcock is one of the most literate and witty fantasists of the twentieth century. His Elric Saga took the sword and sorcery epic far beyond standard tropes and created a literary tour de force.

The Dancers at the End of Time, which is a part of the Eternal Champions series, is full of the kind of wit and social satire that Oscar Wilde would have written.

Jherek Carnelian is one of the glittering, amoral denizens who inhabit the world At The End of Time. Magic and technology are inseparable, and life, such as it were, goes on like there's no tomorrow...which of course, there won't be. Jherek meets and falls madly in love with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a very prim and proper Victorian wife, who finds herself in his future. Thus ensues a comedy of manners, morals and philosophical leanings reminiscent of the social changes that rocked England in the late nineteenth-century.

Not to mention that I loved the Thomas Canty cover art. If anything, buy the book just for that alone!

For years I had put off reading Moorcock... I read plenty of other Science Fiction and Fantasy, from Neil Stephenson to Robert Jordan, but never got around to reading this giant of the genres. I'm glad I finally did.

"The Dancers At the End of Time" is quite possibly the wittiest and most amusing time travel scenario I have ever encountered. Moorcock wrote this exciting little trilogy (originally published as several smaller hardcover volumes) with a wit rarely encountered in the often overly-serious sci-fa genres. His satire drips with the delightful flavor of the turn of the century fin-de-siecle, delightful parodies of H.G. Wells, and a delicate, romantic heart that matches the author's humor. I laughed at Jerekh's bumbling attempts at romance. I cried at the almost tragic occurences near the end of the novel, and I cheered at the resolution. Having just finished reading Mary Doria Russell's depressing "The Sparrow" (although also an excellent book), I needed something a bit more uplifting. This did the trick.

If you're looking for a good intelligent satire, you can do no wrong by taking a look at this classic Moorcock masterpiece.

Most people don't know Moorcock invented the Multiverse. That is he invented the concept (along with the idea of black holes and a fair bit of Chaos Theory) around 1960 in the otherwise unremarkable The Sundered Worlds (The Blood Red Game). In fact Moorcock has contributed so many fundamental ideas to the fantasy and graphic novel genres, as well as to the general literary world and the scientific world that it's a wonder he isn't claiming copyright fees off half the stuff that's out there. This was probably the first fully-fledged space-time opera comedy and it's easy to see why Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett admired it so much. Some of these ideas even turned up in Douglas Adams's Doctor Who stories (check them out!). It has been Moorcock's lot to be a seminal force in our modern culture and to have other people get the credit! I doubt if this bothers him much since he is so inventive he probably doesn't have time to brood on it, but I have been reading him for a long time now and it really is astonishing how many ideas he's had which are now in common use and part of the language. This is one of his most joyous series, celebrating the styles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and as well as being outstanding science fiction (about the nature of time and identity) it is a loving homage to the fin-de-siecle.
Gosh, Moorcock, I wish I'd said that. You will, Adams. You will. Unreservedly recommended.