I can hardly think of a book that has been more disappointing than this one. Expecting to read a scholarly analysis of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I read instead a nit-picking critique of words used in the explorers' journals. One chapter entitled "Hunting" barely recognized that these men had to shoot animals to live in its fevered attack on the fact that the explorers and their men actually shot animals. The reek of political correctness overwhelms this book. Certainly Lewis and Clark were human and not saints as they traversed the continent, but the conclusion one would draw from Slaughter's book is that Lewis and Clark (and Columbus and James Cook along the way) never did anything right. A sadly deficient work.

"Exploring Lewis and Clark" makes some interesting points about Lewis & Clark, somewhat in the spirit of being the devil's advocate.

Slaughter is clearly trying to draw a contrast between the worshipful view of L&C popularized by Stephen Ambrose and Ken Burns and what Slaughter views as the reality. Slaughter notes, for instance, that L&C hunted excessively, repeatedly stole from Indians, and generally exaggerated their historical importance. Slaughter also has a very interesting discussion of the life of Sacajawea and the possibility she lived longer than is conventionally acknowledged.

All this said, this is very much a niche product. One has to know a great deal about the L&C journey prior to reading this book. I would also suggest that it's a relatively thin book. I think Slaughter's interesting points probably could have been presented in 30 or 40 pages, but he has puffed it up to somewhat get to a book length.

Exploring Lewis and Clark constitues Corps of Discovery #202. First complete course#101 by reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose or the Lewis and Clark Journals and then you are ready to delve into the incisive and provocative critique of the Corps of Discovery by this author. As a Native American and the author of Yazoo Mingo - The Journeys of Moncacht-Apé Across North America 1687-1700, I appreciated slaughter's informative and thoughtful chapter on Porvio, also known as Sacagawea. The(rest of the) story regarding York was also of great interest.

Whether or not you agree with all of the author's conclusions this book will increase your knowledge and understanding of the Courageous Captains and their Corps of Discovery.

This is an unfortunate example of the sort of thing which academics produce and then force undergraduates to wade through. The author has found all the similar passages in Aquinas' many works and has collected them together in snippets varying from a paragraph to two to three pages in length. This results in great repetition, and the beauty of the sweeping logical development which is presumably present in the original, is lost.

A word of warning to anyone who would approach Aquinas: read your Aristotle first.

This book suffered from three weaknesses, the first of which may be idiosyncratic. 1. A "reader," I presumed, would be an introduction to Acquinas, one I could read without attending a class. Not so. This book assumed a lot of familiarity with Acquinas's terminology and intellectual heritage. 2. The book is organized by topics, with brief excerpts from Thomas's works yanked out of context to fit the editor's topic selection. A sequential selection from Thomas's principal writings would have better preserved the integrity of the works and allowed the reader better to follow Thomas's reasoning. 3. Finally, the editor needed an editor. Her writing is cumbersome. She seems to have forgotten how to write a simple declarative sentence.

I find Moses Maimonides no more approachable than Thomas Acquinas, but Isadore Twersky's "A Maimonides Reader" is far more approachable than Mary Clark's Acquinas reader.

I have just finished this book. I just took five minutes to tell the customers of Amazon that it is very interesting. It is well presented by Mary Clark with very interesting introductions to the five chapters. This presentation really makes St Thomas Aquinas very readable today. What the Saint focuses on is so important and so relevant to our understanding of our modern world and yet he wrote in the 13th century. When I read the book I tried to always think about how it applies to my life today. Don't be put off by reviews that sound a little bit over the top and too harsh.

This book is a good source of history about the Kentucky River but is very difficult to read. The writing is awful, as Mr Ellis often changes topics in the middle of a paragraph and punctuates erratically. This book is heavy on recollections of old-timers on the river, but light on photos, maps, and illustrations that would help to make the book a lot clearer.

Only buy this book if you have a deep interest in the history of Kentucky or America's rivers. If you don't have a driving interest in one of those subjects this book will put you to sleep.

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.