This book is no. 23 in the prestigious annual publications of the Colorado Railroad Museum. It details the arrival of the AT&SF Railroad in Colorado with the major portion of the book being dedicated to the history of the Raton Pass section of the line. It is heavily illustrated with excellent black and white photography, including a section on the steam engines that worked the area. Photography is almost exclusively of the steam era. No history of the Santa Fe and specifically Raton Pass is complete without this volume. Hardback, 296 pages.

I was EXTREMELY pleased with this book. The Christmas message that it portrays is one of Christ, not commercialism. The TRUE meaning of Christmas -- remembering Jesus Christ and celebrating His birth -- is the main focus of this book. The illustrations are very fun and child friendly. My three daughters have enjoyed this book time and time again since we received it, as well have my wife and I. Santa teaches, using the commonly known and recognized symbols of the Christmas season, about Jesus and His Atonement and reminds us of the true reason for Christmas. My children now cannot think of Santa without thinking about the Savior and His sacrifice for us. This is a MUST HAVE book for every Christian home. It is destined to become a classic. I would recommend this book to anyone, with or without children, without reservation. Finally, Santa is not the focus of Christmas!

This book had all five of my sons (ages 1 to 14) and my husband and I laughing as we read it outloud. The message is so good...that there are great rewards to doing the right thing! The characters learn about listening to their consciences and that it's never too late to do what is right. A classic!

At present on Amazon.com, there are 3 different
editions of the SATYRICON offered. They are all
excellent...I own all 3. And if permitted, I plan
to review each of the three individually. This
edition is hard to find, because of its title.
Amazon has indexed it by its title -- SATYRICA -
and thus, it does not come up on searches for
"Petronius" or "Satyricon." Which is unfortunate,
because it is probably the best of the 3 editions,
with all of its extras.
There have been many writers who have been influenced
by having read Petronius and the SATYRICON (or SATYRICA).
Some of these writers have even gone so far as to offer
their opinions about Petronius or about the SATYRICON
itself. One of the excellent features of this edition
of the SATYRICON (published by Univ. of California Press),
translated and with an "Introduction" by R. Bracht Branham
and Daniel Kinney, is the fact that in the back of the
book they include a section titled "Petronius and his
Critics." In this section, they give provocative quotes
by authors starting with John of Salisbury (12th century)
and extending up through T.S. Eliot in 1932. What they
may not have known is that Herman Melville also has
a short piece about Petronius in his novel REDBURN,
Chap. 56, in which the narrator of the novel talks about
the hands of his friend Harry Bolton and says: "It was
not as the sturdy farmer's hand of a Cincinnatus, who
followed the plough and guided the state, but it was
the perfumed hand of Petronius Arbiter, that elegant
young buck of a Roman, who once cut great Seneca dead
in the forum."
The SATYRICA (or SATYRICON) contains materials which
might be considered salacious. So that warning should be
noted. Defenders of Petronius and the SATYRICON are wont
to point out that he does not seem to be presenting the
material as if he is trying to appeal to the prurient
interests of his readers, but that he is rather simply
saying "that's the kind of world that's out there, folks."
Some critics have said that Petronius is really being
an ironic satirist and is rubbing Rome's nose in its own
decadence and saying, "Look what you 'noble Romans' have
become." I would like to think that this last is the
case. He is no prude...no Puritan...but an intelligent,
elegant, ironic, poetic satirist of Rome's lifestyles
of the "wannabe" wealthy and powerful. He holds up a
wonderful satirical mirror for them to see themselves --
as only a sharp, clever, intelligent artist might
paint their portraits.
But the best "review" of Petronius among the critics
at the back of this book is that by the author J. K.
Huysmans in his work AGAINST NATURE (1884). I would
like to quote part of it as the conclusion of this
review:
"Petronius was a shrewd observer, a delicate analyst,
a marvellous painter; dispassionately, with an entire
lack of prejudice or animosity, he described the everyday
life of Rome, recording the manners and morals of his
time in the lively little chapters of the SATYRICON. Noting
what he saw as he saw it, he set forth the day-to-day
existence of the common people, with all its minor events,
its bestial incidents, its obscene antics.
* * * All this is told with extraordinary vigour and
precise colouring, in a style that makes free of every
dialect, that borrows expressions from all the languages
imported into Rome, that extends the frontiers and breaks
the fetters of the so-called Golden Age, that makes every
man talk in his own idiom .... There are lightning sketches
of all these people, sprawled round a table, exchanging the
vapid pleasantries of drunken revellers, trotting out
mawkish maxims and stupid saws, their heads turned towards
Trimalchio, who sits picking his teeth, offers the company
chamber pots, discourses on the state of his bowels,
f**ts to prove his point, and begs his guests to make
themselves at home." [asterisk "censoring" is mine]
(pp. 176-177)
Amazing insight, excellent writing, excellent book --
I will heartily recommend these qualities in this version
of the SATYRICON, and you will have to decide
for yourself whether you wish to peruse Huysmans,
or not.

"What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility" (Tolstoy). Those of us who venture into matrimony later in life bring with us a particularly rich store of potential incompatibility. If nothing else, we've simply had more time to get stuck in our ways and habits of thinking. This book is a helpful series of reflections, from a married couple who's been there, on some of the unique challenges of blending two lives later in the game. The authors give us lots of practical and insightful advice, but the real value of the book is the intimate glimpses we're offered from the everyday lives of approximately 70 survey respondents: couples just like us, learning new routines for handling money, schedules, living spaces, multiple careers, blended families... A thoughtful wedding gift for the older couple who probably already has two of everything.

My mother also suffered a high level spinal cord injury and reading this book helped me understand what to expect and helped me with her decision to terminate her own life support.

This critical study of Samuel Beckett's prose aptly relies on post-structural thought to investigate a highly challenging text. Without simplifying or mystifying the difficulty of Beckett's prose, this book is written with much intelligence, elegance and rigor. Commendable.

This book on cache coherence and shared memory multi-processor systems should be on every OS developer's desk; in fact, it should be well worn and marked up with lots of highlighting, underlining, and phrases of "Oh so THAT's how it works!" written in the margins.

The authors do a wonderful job describing the principles of cache coherence and the difference between message passing (or distributed) systems and shared memory systems. The rest of the book, of course, is spent on the latter, and the authors delve into such topics as: memory latency (and how to reduce/hide latency), NUMA and COMA architectures (and different interconnect networks), memory prefetch, memory bandwidth, various cache consistency models, and a lot of examples of various applications and the cache invalidation patterns those applications exhibit. And that's all just in the first 3 chapters of the book!

The book describes the architectures of several of the scalable shared memory systems that existed in the mid-90's, and then it goes on to describe a system called DASH that was implemented by the authors and folks at Stanford. At first I thought I was going to be put off by the focus on DASH, but it actually had the opposite effect. The chapters on DASH did a great job of going through all the details and clearly showing me how all this works "in practice."

I'm a software guy, and this book was recommended to me by a hardware guy, and I think it's a must for anyone doing software development for large complex multi-processor systems.

The writing is very clear and straight-forward, though it's not something I can read while the television is on (in other words, I've got to concentrate while reading this book).

Not only would this book be useful as a college CS Architecture textbook, but it's proving to be highly useful in the workplace!

Prof. Hirsch and Prof. Weinberger are the admirable international figures in psychiatric research. As the editors, they conjoined the most famous contributors of every subtitle in schizophrenia research. Reading it in 1999, some of the contents seemed a little out of date. However, to consolidate current findings and concepts on schizophrenia, it is not only a textbook but also a historical masterpiece. Next edition of such an encyclopedia on schizophrenia may not be composed until next decade.

Altick's The Scholar Adventurers is a book full of adventure and detective work. When I first read it in the early 80's (the first edition), not only could I not put it down, but I immediately bought two more copies as gifts. Very soon thereafter, the book went out of print. Today I thought of The Scholar Adventurers again as I wondered if I could part with my copy: a scholar friend recently fell off his roof, breaking multiple bones. His hospitalization means a meager Christmas for his family, so I've been deciding what books I could pass along to make the holiday brighter. I decided I could not give up this book, however, even under these circumstances, unless I had some assured way of replacing my copy. Happily I do. So, after you've finished calling me selfish, check the book out for yourself. It's a great read.