Tales of the mile-deep blue sea, written for sheer adventure...about divers and sharks, shark-catching, game fishing for sharks, sharks that attack, shark behavior, shark lore...A fabulous haul of the best true and fictional stories about sharks and human encounters with sharks. Stories by Cousteau, Hemingway, Thor Heyerdahl, Peter Benchley, Peter Matthiesen, Arthur C. Clarke, Zane Grey & More.

The photographs in this book are gorgeous and the text is interesting, informative and inspiring. Rather than leaping right into a description of flowering plants, however, the author begins with a chapter on smell itself, discussing it's importance, the fragrances that were popular in the Victorian era and those that are sought after today. The plants themselves are divided by type: annuals (which, for some reason, is where he puts scented geraniums); perennials; roses; bulbs, corms and tubers; shrubs and vines; water gardens; night gardens; and scented houseplants. Each chapter describes a large variety of plants and explains where and how to grow them. Also included is a design map for planting a border of annuals; a brief section on the diseases and pests that attack roses; a short chapter on general garden maintenance; and a complete index (but no list of suppliers).

The author has an easy to read, rambling writing style. He tells stories, gives personal reflections, supplies quotes from litereature and horticultural writings, and clearly know his subject. If you are looking for a general book on fragrant gardens, then you'll probably like this one a great deal. But if you're looking for more of a guide to scented plants, which ones to grow where, in a concise format, then this isn't the book for you. The author does supply light/water/soil requirements and hardiness zones for the plants in the book, but it's included in the text, it isn't in an easy-to-find table which means that you have to read through the entire thing in order to find appropriate plants for your garden.

This book is so pretty and fun to read that it would make a nice present for someone who likes to read gardening literature but it really isn't for the person who, like myself, was looking for quick reference guide to the types of scented plants for zone 5 that grow in full sun and under dense trees.

The title is a bit pompous. The book looks like another regurgitation of already well written world-systems garbage. Surprisingly, though, Peter Taylor has come up with something more readable than Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century" and perhaps more theoretically sound. I am currently writing a Masters thesis in political geography, and I was pleasantly surprised when I read this book after a plethora of others by Taylor and Arrighi. Having read a good dozen books on hegemony, this is my favorite one yet. If it weren't for the outrageous price (get it from the library!), it might be the book that would convert other structuralists over to world-systems theory. If you are into geohistorical analysis or hegemonic discourse you must read this book. Kudos to Doctor Taylor! Job well done. (His book "Modernities" was excellent too!)

It is true that with each new version (as of this writing, they're now up to ICQ 2000b) ICQ adds more and more bells and whistles, and it gets a little more complicated, and overall I love the DUMMIES series, but the truth is, everything you need to know about ICQ can be found at their web site, or perhaps your ICQ buddy can walk you through it. On the other hand, at times the web site seems more difficult to navigate than the program (its great... but BIG) Still, I couldn't totally put this book down... you can't read ICQ on the toilet or curl up in the bed with it,or read "ICQ" during your lunch break or on the bus to work or school, so maybe that would warrent the purchase of a book about it. I guess it would make a nice gift to for a new ICQ buddy, however, if you think you need a book to learn how to use ICQ, you're getting it for the wrong reason - - and also, by the time it arives in a few days, ICQ will probably have added 30,000 more features.

I love the Dummies books. However, I did not enjoy the ICQ service. The chats I tried were dull, weird, or both. I finally decided there was no intelligent life on the ICQ world and beamed the application into the recycle bin.

i will to know asvantage of icq

Don't get me wrong here, I'm one of the biggest Capstick fans there is but what I've seen from him is this: He either writes a nail biting account of personal or researched adventures or he rambles on about some boring life chronology spiced up by only a few tidbits of adventure or peril. Thats the way parts of Silent Places is and thats how this book is. If you are a fan of John Taylor or are interested in getting a history lesson of the everyday life of someone like him, then you'll probably enjoy this book.

Me, I'm a fan of the man who writes about the true life (or not)near death experiences of Corbett, Patterson, and himself in exotic bush locations in a time long since forgotten.

I knew what I was getting into when I bought this book but, hey, it's a Capstick book and I have to read 'em all. It's not a terrible book but it's definitely not Long Grass or Dark Continent.

I have enjoyed Capstick other stories in the past, but this one bored me to tears. It is nought but a rehash of "Pondoro" with some extra information from casual acquaintances of the Irish writer/hunter. The fact that Taylor was a homosexual didn't deserve chapter after chapter since, despite Capstick's analysis, his more serious failings were a total disregard for the Law and an inability to hold on to his pennies. That brought about his downfall, not his preference for the same sex. John Taylor deserved a better epitaph than this book.

This is a very good review which is based upon many personal experiences with the subject. It is also honest and doesn't whitewash anything about the man. I found it riveting reading. I read it in only a couple of days.

Peter Taylor, whom William Du Bois, writing in the New York Times, proclaimed "a master of the short story form," was also a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist, a playwright, and sometimes poet who was numbered as one of the first generation of writers to make their living teaching writing.

Knowing what we know now, that Taylor would enter academia, it's interesting that upon his completion of studies at Kenyon College he wrote that he longed that "this limbo of a life could go on forever; I dread seeing the great real world again."

He would seldom have to for when he enrolled in Allen Tate's composition course at Southwestern College in Memphis he found instead entrée into an elite literary society when Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, soon invited Taylor to dinner and into their world.

Taylor would go on to Louisiana State University for graduate studies, and when a number of his short stories were published in the Southern Review, he gained recognition in literary circles. Deciding graduate courses weren't his forte, Taylor soon resolved to return to Memphis since he was "starving for the sweet taste of gossip, absurd argumentation, intimate Sunday-night suppers, carousing evenings...and an occasional whiff of the rare, rank odor of Memphis High Society."

Unfortunately, McAlexander isn't able to provide us with much detail about such carousing and the book ends up reading like a busy social calendar.

Unable to avoid the draft as a conscientious objector, Taylor found himself involved in the Second World War much to his own chagrin, but it was in the army that he was given his first teaching position when he was assigned to teach American literature at an army school. After the war he took a job teaching at Woman's College (later the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and soon thereafter Harcourt, Brace published Taylor's first collection of short stories, A Long Fourth and Other Stories.

At one point, Taylor confided to friend Tom White, "I now have 'tenure' in the teaching profession and can be fired only for a 'treasonable act' or for 'gross immorality.' What an awful situation for a man of my temperament to be in at [thirty-one]! The impulse to throw it all overboard grows stronger everyday."

He would avoid this impulse throughout his life. Perennially restless, he would change publishers, homes and colleges the way most of us change our shirts, eventually teaching at Indiana University, the University of Chicago, Kenyon College, Ohio State University, and Harvard, among others. His stories often first appeared in Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Harper's Bazaar and the New Yorker, while collections were published by a series of book publishers.

Notorious for missing deadlines (for classes and other teaching duties as well as writing assignments), Taylor - like most writers - was disheartened by critical reviews (As John Osborne once said, "Asking a writer what he thinks about negative reviews is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs!") and ashamed of some of his own works. After the opening of one of his plays, Tennessee Day, in Nashville, he confided to a fellow Memphian, "Finally I was so embarrassed that I just sneaked away into the night."

Despite his early apprehension about the teaching profession, Taylor would come to love the social opportunities it afforded him, while he exerted a profound influence on his students. Reflecting on his studies at Harvard under Taylor, James Thackara says, "Within the first few minutes of my first conference, the roles of professor and student were dropped. He must have known that I was a homicidal writer, that for me being a writer was a matter of life and death"; and commenting on Taylor's reading of Chekhov's "Gusev," Lawrence Reynolds conveys, "His voice created the story for me in a way my own reading had never done, he made it real, he made it matter."

Taylor was the consummate friend within his vast social circles (populated by Tate, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarell, and others), which would prove to be his greatest distraction from writing as he and his wife (poet Eleanor Ross Taylor) became legendary for the parties they gave.

In the real world, Taylor noticed the little things: a painting of a beautiful woman in a coffee shop, the waiter talking to himself, an anonymous man who's just realized the main seam in his coat has come undone. But other than a brief description from Brian Griffin (a former student who served for awhile as Taylor's typist), we gain little insight into how Taylor wrote, other than his determination to do so in the face of numerous rejections from the New Yorker and other publishers. Observing Taylor scribbling with a pencil in a notebook on a sofa, Griffin described Taylor's writing as "the unintelligible scrawl of a desperate man."

Eleanor was a devoted wife, offering her unfailing support - while the lives of those around them were in disarray, often marred by suicide - even though she and Peter were vastly different people; he an extrovert (described as ebullient), she an introvert and somewhat of a recluse (described as reticent). She described differences best herself in a poem entitled "Kitchen Fable" which appeared in the New Yorker, which ends with, "He dulled; he was a dull knife/ while she was, after all, a fork."

Late in life, Taylor was diagnosed with diabetes and suffered a series of debilitating strokes. He died in 1994 at the age of 77.

Of Taylor's novel, In the Tennessee Country, Alicia Metcalf Miller wrote in the Cleveland Plains Dealer, "under an extravagantly bland exterior, it seethes with anger, failure, and pain."

There are hints that her words would also seem apt in describing Taylor's life, but here we see little more than the "bland exterior."

Former Taylor students might enjoy this reverent biography.

See Robb Forman Dew, "Now Known as Peter Taylor," in The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, September 30, 2001, p. 10, and
Jonathan Yardley, "Peter Taylor," in The Washington Post Book World, Sunday September 30, 2001, p. 2.

A professor of English at UGA, Mr. McAlexander personally knew Mr. Taylor and edited "Conversations with" the writer and "Critical Essays on" his works before being given access to the papers in his widow's--poet Eleanor Ross Taylor's--possession. In the present volume, befitting his subject, the biographer gracefully weaves the history of 20th century American letters through the life and works of perhaps its most admired short story writer.

Caveat emptor: nothing later than 1922 in this collection - i.e. nothing from 'The Hollow Men', 'Ash-Wednesday', 'Ariel' poems, the Four Quartets, etc. etc. A seriously deficient selection.

Excellent selection of poetry and poetry-related essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. NOTE: previous reviewer seems to have confused Coleridge with Eliot. Coleridge DID NOT WRITE The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, or Ash Wednesday -- THAT is why those are not in this book. He DIED in 1834!!

First and foremost, the introduction was very sad but made me keep reading. Although my sympathies lie more in the nationalist camp, through reading this book I was able to comprehend why the loyalists have done things like the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in '74. Taylor does a wonderful job of showing that in a conflict such as that in Northern Ireland, no one is innocent, and people feel forced to do things that they would never do under normal circumstances. I would have liked to have seen more about the loyalist splinter groups, as well as the UDA's connection to Combat 18, which is a British neo-Nazi group, but those are tiny little nit-picky details in a much wider conflict. Like his book on the IRA, Taylor has done massive amounts of research and interviews with this book. I feel sorry for the people who have died in this conflict in the past 33 years, and Taylor has shown me why I feel that way.

This is actually a very good book it shows the plight of both Nationalists and Unionists in Northern Ireland, but more importantly it shows how the Loyalist paramilitaries(the UDA and UVF) although not nearly as powerfull or as well trained as the Republican IRA and INLA, have never the less been able to kill over 900 hundred Catholic civilians. The book does a good job making a distinction between members of the UDA and UVF like Gusty Spence, who did not want to hurt Catholic civilians, and depraved killers like Johnny Adair and Billy Wright, who only killed innocent unarmed men and women. The one thing the book shows exceptionally well is how the UDA and UVF were Ultimately no match for the seasoned IRA(although they try to stoke thier inflated ego's by saying they were winning against the IRA when everyone agrees they were actually losing).

This book is blunt, painfully so in that it is chilling to hear people speak so openly about the atrocities they carried out in N. Ireland during the troubles. What other reviewers have failed to mention in their pro-nationalist writings, is the underlying feeling of alienation that the Loyalist people of Ulster are enduring. On one hand, republicans are relentless in their campaign of bombing and shooting, and on the other, the British Government, giving concession after concession to Sinn Fein/IRA. Add to that the Shankill bombing, Enniskillen, Warrenpoint etc, and one can understand the pent up hatred in the protestant population, manifesting into terrorism for some. This book tries to explain the rationale in the thinking of the people responsible for Loyalist violence, without condemning or condoning it. His insights in to how the escalation of the war by the new blood in the UDA and UVF ultimately brought about peace are controversial but probably right. Unionists are the majority and the IRA should accept that so that others don't have to pick up the gun to defend their way of life. A good read, it takes its place amongst the numerous books written on republican terrorism.

We recently traveled through Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia and found this guidebook practically useless and certainly frustrating--definitely not worth its weight. We have used other LPs in the past and found them to be at least adequate but this one doesn't even rate that well. It lacked many important details--such as the time/distances between many points, availability of various transportation options and routes, decent maps--the list goes on and on. Even though prices change often and currencies fluctuate, even a vague idea of prices (is it $10 or $100??) would have been quite useful to help us plan better. Although we ran into many people all 'armed' with the LP, they all had the same complaints.

This book is an adequate guide but it needs improvement in several areas. I used this book during Janurary and February of 2000 when I traveled through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. Last year I used the Lonley Planet-India and found it was much better than Southeast Asia. Here are the weaknesses. 1. The numbers of the locations on the maps should be used in the text describing the location. This would grealy improve you ability to plan your day or route. 2. Maps should be improved. I would be willing to spend a few dollars more for better maps. 3. Hotel, restaurant, etc. names are not printed in bold type. This makes it more difficult to use. 4. It would be very helpful to grade the sites with a priority to reduce the time one spends reading fine print and get on with seeing the country. When I return to this part of the world next winter I will try to find additional books to correct these weaknesses.

I travelled through Thailand, Philippines and Hong Kong using this book. I initially bought this book with weight in mind. I did not want to carry three more LPs along with the other country books (LP Taiwan, Japan). Although much of the information needed to survive was written in the book, it certainly did lack the detailed maps and background information needed to have a care-free journey. SOmetime it certainly was a struggle , especially in Thailand. The Thailand Section prices were extremely outdated. Even in the height on the "asian economic flu", I had to triple the prices listed. The Hong Kong section was adequate, but HK is an efficient and easily travelled city. Of the three, I found the Philippine section the best, but some of the hotel quality ratings are out dated. Please do not stay at the Hotel Mercedes in Cebu!

All of the Taylor books seem to be written for non-western gardens. I have 4 of their books and yet whenever I want to look up a plant I've seen in a nursery I rarely find it in these books. This is not the book you want if you are hoping for a good resource for roses. This is a guide book, when you want to look up a rose you saw at a nursery to find out a little more about it. The book divides the roses by class so if you are like most people and looking to buy a hybrid tea this book has fewer than 100. There are thousands and thousands of roses on the market, the odds that you will find it in this book is nil unless you are looking for Peace or the most common. This is a small book, you could spend your money better elsewhere. I recommend Botanica's Encyclopedia of Roses.

This book is full of photos but it is also full of inaccurate information. Listing the rose "Roger Lambelin" as a disease resistant variety is a prime example. World famous rose authority Peter Beales says of Roger Lambelin in Classic Roses, "A strange rose, whose addiction to mildew and other diseases renders it no more than a novelty." Other hybrid teas known to often have problems are also listed as disease resistant. I guess Taylor's idea of disease resistant applies only if you spray your roses weekly with fungicide. The sad thing about this misinformation is that this book is probably targeted at people new to roses. That being said, I would say the photos in this book are consistently well done. But for more accurate & detailed information, even better photos, and more roses, buy Peter Beales Classic Roses instead.

The Taylor's Guide to Roses is, like its companion volumes, handy to have around as a supplement to other books on roses. In itself it is neither complete nor entirely reliable; however, its many attractive photos are useful, especially for people who are not familiar with the various classifications of roses. I particularly appreciate that it gives equal space to old roses, shrub roses, and species, as the round of hybrid teas grows tiresome to the eye and these plants deserve far more garden space than they receive.

Overall, best used as a visual aid for form--color, as in any book, is subject to the vagaries of nature and photography.