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Book reviews for "Taradash,_Daniel" sorted by average review score:

Lefty Frizzell: The Honky-Tonk Life of Country Music's Greatest Singer
Published in Hardcover by Little Brown & Company (September, 1995)
Author: Daniel Cooper
Amazon base price: $22.95
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Average review score:

Not what I expected
I am a Lefty fan; however, this book bored me to death. It was very slow-moving and not well-written, in terms of being interesting. Unimportant things were dwelt-on. I knew most of what was in this book before I even started reading it.

Story of a great singer who lacked good managers
I didn't know much about Lefty (other than his music) until I read this book. What a sad waste of a wonderful talent. The book certainly shows the importance of management and public relations for an entertainer. This is a good biography. What I thought it lacked was mention of Lefty's siblings. That made for an incomplete family picture.

"Lefty Taught Us All How To Sing"
Cooper presents the life of Lefty with little untold. Lefty was all too human and, one suspects, more a victim of his life and times than an instigator. His music was his creation and his escape. No other country singer influenced following generations as did Lefty. Alabama said it best in one single line of a song, "...and Lefty taught us all how to sing." Owning his Bear Family boxed set covers his music (and the only boxed set a country fan really needs), and Cooper's book gets you behind the music. Too many present-day artists have copied Lefty to a tee and fail to acknowledge Lefty as they should. Where is Randy Travis' tribute CD to Lefty? Today's country music is but a footnote to Lefty's career. Cooper tells it well.


Library: The Drama Within
Published in Hardcover by University of New Mexico Press (August, 1996)
Authors: Diane Asseo Griliches and Daniel J. Boorstin
Amazon base price: $24.50
List price: $35.00 (that's 30% off!)
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Average review score:

engaging, but too narrow focus
This book is engaging, but the reader should be aware that the focus is limited (mostly NY, MA, Jerusalem). Where is the fabulous library of Coimbra? or the hidden charmers of Leiden? or even LA? Too much time is spent on showing a child's wide-eyed wonder at encountering books. That is a noble undertaking, but not the one implied by the cover of this book. Ironically, this book titled, 'Library' will wind up at mine as a donation.

Must see to appreciate!
The actual photos in this book were recently on display in the Newport Beach Central Library. Accompanying the photos are wonderful quotes, all relative to reading, books, education, and libraries. When the display moved on, we were delighted to find the book and consider it a real treasure. It reminds residents how fortunate they are to have libraries in their communities, and inspires one to visit libraries featured in the book. A great book for children and adults alike.

Wow!
Librarian is not the sexiest job in the world. The ridiculously low pay is more than made up for by a total lack of respect from the rest of the world. Every time I begin to hate my job, I glance through this book and the feeling goes away.

If you're interested in what goes on in libraries around the world, then this is highly recommended. If you're a librarian, this book is mandatory.


Long Live the 2 of Spades
Published in Paperback by Green Bean Press (01 September, 1999)
Author: Daniel Crocker
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Overblown pseudo-intellectual rantings in the guise of art
Crocker attempts to let his imagination carry him through his writing and scarifice (or just outright overlook) the blood, sweat, and time a learned, mature writer needs in learning the trade of poetry. His influences are more than apparent in that his work is merely veiled copies of his idols: Berryman, Bukowski. (There is an ode to Ginsberg in the collection.) One feels as if he is channelling Kerouac and getting a busy signal. There are many great works and thousands of bad ones, unfortunately this work happens fall into the latter category.

The 2 Of Spades Is Dead! Long Live The 2 Of Spades
As a long-time fan of Dan Crocker, and a former editor of his work it was with much anticipation that I read his latest collection. Those familiar with Crocker's "telling like it is" approach ala PEOPLE EVERYDAY and OTHER POEMS will find nothing lacking in this volume which would detract from the brutal self honest assesment of a man coming to terms with himself, his art, and his world. This is not poetry for the timid or weak. These 63 pages have blood spurting; guts groaning; eternal question marks hanging like pieces of his own flesh from the meat-locker walls which are the gallery of modern poetic reality. Each word comes from a man who has lived each word. This alone is worth the price of admission. The third in the 2 OF SPADES trilogy, LONG LIVE THE 2 OF SPADES is a fitting capstone. I will miss reading of his further adventures, but I know the author will provide for our appetite with future poetic fare stewed up raw and delivered fresh. Just don't ask him to "do the dishes." Shine on Daniel, shine On.

Dan Crocker is one of our best.
This is one beautiful production. The appearance only compliments Crocker's brash, brave, and resounding poetic voice. The third and final part of Crocker's 2 of Spades trilogy takes a journey through the life of one of the small press' most accomplished young poets. Crocker has a unique ability to tap into the mechanisms of the everday person and make them shine on the page. "Father", a longer piece drawing parallels between the poet and his father, stands out as one of the many profound pieces in this collection. Dan Crocker is one of our best.


Northwest Better Bed & Breakfast-Inns Guide
Published in Spiral-bound by Chief Mountain Publishing (25 January, 2000)
Author: Daniel Goldstrom
Amazon base price: $12.95
Average review score:

Northwest Better Bed & Breakfast-Inns Guide
There may be more than 2500 listed. The best directory for B&Bs in British Columbia & Washington state we have seen so far. The challenge we found, so few listings have e-mail addresses

A Great Guide to over 2500 B&Bs and Inns in the Northwest
The Guide is user friendly, with the basic information one needs in planning your travels from Washington state to the Yukon Territory. Details of Border Crossing Informaation with telephone numbers of most departments is most informative.

GREAT B&B GUIDE
Very effective and conveniently sized booket. Fits perfectly in your glove box. User friendly and easy to read. Good selection for any area.


Redheads
Published in Hardcover by Edition Stemmle (April, 1900)
Authors: Uwe Ditz, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Uwe Dietz
Amazon base price: $39.95
Average review score:

What about Joel Meyerowitz?
Let's be honest. Photographer Joel Meyerowitz has a book with the same name and subject. And even the format of the photos are the same (large format). But his book was edited before this. So, what does Uwe Ditz book have for you to say "never before..."????

The Perfect Red
I received this book as a birthday gift from an ardent admirer (OK, my friend Jim!) and we had a marvelous time moving from page to page and reading the sassy quotes of the beautiful men, women, and children.

The book now lives in my front room and has displaced all other photo journals by its very presence.

I concur with the woman who said, "I no longer worry about getting the perfect tan, I just glory in the perfect white"!

If you love or are a lover of redheads, this book will bless your home or office.

From one "Carrot Top" to Another
If you are one, this book is for you. If you are not one, (a redhead, of course), then you will see some beautiful photographs of various people, young to middle aged, women and males, short and long hair, but all of the hair is RED. Short first-person accounts by Barry Egan, Irmela Hannover, and the photographer, Uwe Ditz, are the only text in the book. But, to one who has lived through the experience of being a redhead by birth and genetics,this book is a gift; a rare confirmation that your experiences were real, predictable, and not uncommon. Three short prose essays expose the prejudices, superstitions, fears and nonsense, that surround the person who has a head of red hair, the fairest of complexions, and to some degree, the dreaded freckles.

If you are a redhead,you must have this book. If you love a redhead, consider giving it as a gift. You will be affirming the experience of someone close to you, whether male or female, child or adult.


Slaves of Spiegel
Published in School & Library Binding by MacMillan Pub Co (May, 1982)
Author: Daniel Manus Pinkwater
Amazon base price: $7.95
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Average review score:

Mostly Harmless
I think my only real issue with the content of "Slaves of Spiegel" is that Pinkwater seems to be trying to be Douglass Adams, but doesn't quite make it.
The other thing that surprised me about the cassette was how lack-luster Pinkwater's performance is. Usually one would expect the author to do an exceptional job of reading, seeing as he knows what he was thinking when he wrote it and can imbue the characters with just the right inflections, emotions, and etc. But Pinkwater just doesn't pull it off. The book is read at high speed in a near monotone. He doesn't attempt to provide different voices, inflections, or rhythms for different characters, and he never leaves time for you to laugh at the sheerly ludicrous situations into which the characters are inserted. In other words, he's entirely lacking in comic timing.
Anyway, after hearing an absolutely hilarious performance (not reading) of "The Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death," I was dissapointed in "Slaves."

Blimpish space pirates & interstellar cooking competitions
Ever since my grade-school days, I've been a follower of Daniel Pinkwater's 'Magic Moscow' books. 'Slaves of Spiegel', the third and (so far) last book in the saga of Hoboken's most unusual fast-food joint, contains more than its fair share of that trademark droll weirdness and strange culinary combinations that I've come to expect from the 'Magic Moscow' series as well as most of Pinkwater's other books geared towards grade-school children and adults who enjoy a nice, whimsical light read. Fair warning, though: some may find the book's somewhat un-PC portrayal of fat people less than savory. Personally, I think it really adds some good fun to the story.

Before you decide to dive into this particular adventure, however, I recommend you bone up on some of the backstory behind this book first, including 'The Magic Moscow', 'Attila the Pun', and 'Fat men From Space'. Happy reading!

'Late

Great swirling onion rings!
Norman, Steve, and their Hoboken-based greasy spoon/health food wannabe restauraunt The Magic Moscow are kidnapped by fat men from space in polyester leisure suits and forced to participate in a Universal contest to determine the greatest junk food cook of all time. Aliens, savage ducks, white vinyl shoes, trash compactors filled with ice cream and bean sprouts, 200 tons of bright blue garlic, inept local authorities, and potato pancakes, what more of a recommendation do you need? Let's hear it for Pinkwater, weirdest of the weird!


SVG Unleashed
Published in Paperback by Sams (20 September, 2002)
Authors: Chris Lilley, Daniel J. Ayers, Randy George, Christian Wenz, Tobias Hauser, Kevin Lindsey, Niklas Gustavsson, and Andrew H. Watt
Amazon base price: $34.99
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Average review score:

Just Plain Worthless
First, a thought...Javascript and wireless web incompatibility. This book is full of it. Javascript was invented many years ago and is designed to run on the user's machine. This puts a load on the user's processor and for those with slower machines, the load is sometimes too much. Wireless phones don't support javascript and they most likely never will. SVG was created to be a high quality, small and highly compatible format for cell phones and other wireless devices. This book is full and I mean full of javascript to handle almost all of the web and appication solutions.

Now another thought....XML. A new technology which was designed to be portable, compatible and server side, which means no trouble with the user's computers. regardless of how intimidating XML might seem, it is the future and needs to be addressed. SVG was designed to be used with XML and XML was designed for both web and application development. The focus on PHP, Perl and other scripting languages was given too little focus. Old information and technology does not constitute a good resource. This book was a poor example of the true power of SVG and will lead many new developers into the pitfall of using javascript which is doomed for extinction.

Is it a tutorial, is it a reference? It's neither...
The authors seem to have had a problem in deciding what to write, a tutorial or a reference manual, and ended up writing something that's neither. I hesitated between a 2 or 3-star rating, and gave the authors the benefit of... Well, not the doubt.

The book consists of six parts: "SVG fundamentals", "Programming SVG Client-Side", "Producing SVG Server-side", "Case Studies", "Looking Ahead", and "Appendices". You will need to download most of the Appendices ("B: SVG Elements Reference", "C: SVG Attributes and Properties Reference" and "D: SVG Document Object Model (DOM)") as only appendix "A: Glossary" is actually included in the book.

Each of the chapters that discuss the actual language ends with a discussion of the part of the DOM that applies to what was discussed in each chapter. Unfortunately, this is too boring to read as tutorial, and at the same it is too unorganized to be used as a reference (the 'discussion' of the entire DOM spreads out over almost 20 chapters).

With respect to the tutorial part of each chapter: whenever I came across parts that were likely to trip my trigger, I was disappointed to read that all the really interesting details "are provided in the SVG 1.0 Recommendation." However, your mileage may vary.

My recommendation is to read some online tutorials (IBM DeveloperWorks and/or the one by David Duce and Ivan Herman) to get an idea of what SVG is all about. Then, if you are interested in doing some SVG 'programming', continue by downloading the aforementioned SVG 1.0 Recommendation and possibily even the SVG Unleashed Appendices. That should give you enough information to avoid the purchase of this book.

Equips the reader with the practical knowledge
Targeted to the experienced Web programmer, SVG Unleashed deftly equips the reader with the practical knowledge required in order to create and manipulate Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) programmatically, both on the client and the server side. Part I of SVG Unleashed provides a thorough reference of SVG syntax, elements, coordinate systems and animations, with coverage of the XML Document Object Model(DOM) and the SVG DOM application to each element or attribute. Part II of SVG Unleashed introduces client-side SVG programming with particular emphasis on the use of ECMAScript/JavaScript. In Part III of SVG Unleashed readers learn to use several server-side languages to create SVG documents. Part IV of SVG Unleashed demonstrates SVG programming through several case studies. User Level: Intermediate, 1152 pages


LiveMotion For Dummies
Published in Paperback by John Wiley & Sons (15 January, 2000)
Authors: K. Daniel Clark and Cathy Abes
Amazon base price: $19.99
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Average review score:

look elsewhere
I had the feeling that the authors use other programs and only leaned enough of LiveMotion to write the book. I wanted to learn how to create buttons that you click to go onto the next part of the FLASH presentation. They do not discuss this well and through a printers error or their own the descritions don't fit the illustrations for what was for me a critical part of the book. In the end I figured out the program by myself -- no thanks to the authors.

Awesome Beginner's Guide !!!
This is a great book to get started with LiveMotion. They use real-world examples, and put everything into clear language. There's none of the typical jargon to deal with, and everything is presented in the context of getting something accomplished. I wish they had more and better information on working with sound, otherwise they cover everything in the program. A great way to get started with this incredible animation program. There's no CD, which is why I took off one star, but the book easily makes up for it in it's easy step-by-step instructions.

Great book
This is a fantasic book like all the other ones from the dummies series, it has fantasic diagrams, HEAPS of infomation even though it doesnt have a CD its just as good without it.

The book teaches everything for an BEGIN to INTER level. Many tutorails and design info.

Buy this good! HIGHLY recomended.


River of Forgotten Days: A Journey Down the Mississippi in Search of LA Salle
Published in Hardcover by DIANE Publishing Co (March, 1998)
Author: Daniel Spurr
Amazon base price: $23.00
Average review score:

River of Forgettable Days
I want to be sympathetic to an established writer, so John Eastman's review from Jan, 99 sums it up for me in every detail. I ate up the History in his book, which was my reason for reading, but the kid stuff drove me crazy (I've got some of my own), and the writing, exclusive of the historical part, was bad. I think all poor Dan Spurr needed was a good honest editor.

An attempt to combine North American history with family fun
This book is as much, or more, of a parental odyssey than a historical one. What information Spurr presents on LaSalle and current thinking and research about this fascinating French explorer is solid and intriguing. Far less engaging, at least to this reader, is Spurr's own family story. Long, dreary episodes tell us considerably more than we want to know about father, mother, and children (his wife mercifully escapes our scrutiny); he even quotes at length some of the clever little bedtime stories he makes up for his son. While all of this wordage is significant to him, no doubt -- and even mildly interesting, perhaps, to other daddies and mommies -- it provides a less than enchanting gift to the general reader. The book belongs on the parents' shelf of "what I did with my kids last summer" rather than with serious historical travelogs. One comes away with the impression that the relatively minor focus on LaSalle emerged as an incidental by-product of a family jaunt. Also, Spurr is not an especially gifted writer, making some of his too-frequent, ruminative, pretentiously insightful passages less than crystalline at best, murky and obscure at worst. Unfortunately, his prose comes alive only when he's discussing his boat or his kids. We learn precious little about the mighty river itself, its dwellers and endless permutations. Spurr's bankside activities mostly revolve around acquiring fuel for his boat. Still, Spurr's book is worth reading for its useful gleanings about current discoveries relating to LaSalle -- one must just tread a lot of water in order to find the good stuff.

A River of Remembered Days
When I saw La Salle in the title, I was almost put off this book, but I am glad I took the time to look a bit further. Being a Mississippi River travelog buff, I hoped to find something of interst in this book and indeed I did. Skipping all the entries on La Salle and focusing only on Daniel Spurr's here and now story, I felt as if I were traveling along with him as "a fly on the wall" in the cramped quarters of Spurr's boat, Pearl. The author and his family seemed to be involved with the waters and the banks of this river as opposed to just skimming past to be getting somewhere. I empathized with the author over the myriad uncertainties, irritations and feelings of guilt that go hand-in-hand with parenting. I understood the deisre to introduce his young son to a world far removed from the two-dimensional-virtual-reality vortex Steve was fast becoming addicted to. Travel can be about getting away from or going toward, but I think this story was ultimately about going along WITH. And in this case, I think Mr. Spurr and his children were traveling in spirit with the son Peter, who died in a train accident. I felt a deep heartache coming through in Spurr's words, but also his hope of renewal and his sense of the circle of life. Pre-America barely exisits anymore within the 48 contiguous states, but along the banks of The Mississippi, this author came close to finding it, in spirit and in fact.

i


Relevance: Communication and Cognition
Published in Paperback by Blackwell Publishers (December, 1995)
Authors: Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson, and Daniel Sperber
Amazon base price: $33.95
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