I am a great admierer of the french symbolists, but not when translated by Mr. Crosby. According to the biographical information in the back of the book, Mr. Crosby is qualified to translate the works of Baudelaire because as a medical doctor, his area of experise is the spleen. His experiecne with french, he claimed, came mostly from 2 years of High School study. Theoreticaly this makes me more qualified than he is to translate the works of Baudelaire.

All this you can see in the great liberties he takes with the text, and the innacurate representations he puts forth in many cases.

Aparently, this is all just a hobby for him.

At any rate, I would recomend finding a scholarly translation if you are interested in the real voice of Baudelaire.

I am writing a final paper on this book at the moment. Chestnutt is an important writer, but not one of the best of the period. I don't think he ever got the chance to fully mature as a writer. This book leaves me with a lot of what-ifs and whys. For example, he introduces a nephew to the heroine who appears as though he will be important, but simply drops out of the picture. The book leaves me wondering what he meant to do, and didn't have time for. It is a good read, but rather frustrating.

If you only have time to read one African American classic, I would turn you instead to Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Are Watching God" which is truly amazing!

This life of General Albert Sidney Johnston was written by his son about twenty years after the War Between The States. It covers his entire career, while concentrating upon the events surrounding the fall of Fort Donelson and the battle of Shiloh. It is obviously designed to prove that Gen. Johnston was not to blame for the fall of Fort Donelson, and that he deserves credit for a great strategic success at Shiloh, which was spoiled by his untimely death. Despite the propaganda, I quite enjoyed the book. Gen. Johnston was highly regarded by President Davis. Many thought him to be the equal (or superior) to Lee and that his death was a great tragedy to the Confederacy. The book is somewhat dense reading, containing numerous letters to support the author's case. Many were solicited from the surviving participants after the war.

Charles Williams was a member of a group of writers called The Inklings. (There is an excellent record of this group called 'The Inklings' by Humphrey Carpenter.) Another member of the group was JRR Tolkein. It's a while since I have read 'Lord of the Rings' (and I haven't seen the movie) but I did recently reread 'The Hobbit' and Tolkein is an engaging writer but does show a tendency to British parochialism. Another member of the group was CS Lewis and for me he is by far the superior writer - for SF fans see 'Out of the Silent Planet' and 'Voyage to Venus' (aka 'Perelandra'), for fans of children's literature see the Narnia legends, and then there is all the Christian writings, such as the Screwtape books.

Charles Williams in his novels (such as 'Place of the Lion' and the one I am reviewing here) explored less of fantasy (Tolkein) or speculative/philosophical writing (Lewis) but concentrated on the occult/spiritual world. In this novel there is a character who has 'conquered' death by power of the mind and self discipline. There is also a strangely unspecified threat/invasion from Africa (in some ways this perhaps foretells the waves of illegal immigrants) but it is a curiously dissipated threat. The greatest weakness in the book for me are the archetypal characters that are all overwhelmingly British - even the African 'king'. Not only that, but they are archetypal of the thirties when the book was written - hardly to be identified with now.

It is an interesting novel, if a bit slow, but I suspect most of today's readers will find it badly dated in a way that you wouldn't see with Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf or Anna Kavan.

I used this book for a college freshman composition course I teach. I liked it and found the essays useful. The students didn't respond quite so well, but then again, they don't like most anything that requires thought....

This little novel really is quite good entertainment. Most of the book is just dialogue, reading much like a screenplay, so it is hardly going to rank up there as an all-time great novel. The conversations between Ben and his parents, Ben and Mrs Robinson etc. are tremendously witty, and I found myself laughing out loud on a number of occasions. Ben is a considerably darker character than he appears in the (perhaps superior) film version, being a cynical and disillusioned graduate going through a depression during which he loses interest in just about everything and resigns himself to a life of 'bumming around'. I think I would agree with Douglas Brode, the film critic who wrote of the movie that it was not a story about the generation gap, but rather about a young man who feels as alienated from his own peers as from his parents' generation. This comes across much more strongly in the book, and we also get a very strong sense of WHY he feels so distanced from the rest of his culture - the superficiality and hypocrisy of middle-class America (this is very much a book of its time) is evident, and the reader finds himself disgusted with the shallow attitudes of the milieu in which Benjamin finds himself.

I found this book to be loaded with unspoken richness and multi-dimensional characters, especially Mrs. Robinson. Charles Webb has created a very complex woman trapped in a situation that she regrets but can only try to hold on to because it is all she has. At the same time he has the main character, Ben Braddock, trying to find puropse in his life after he has already accomplished everything everyone else wanted him to. At 20 he finds himself out of college with neumerous prospects for graduate school but feeling lost and empty inside becasue he has never stopped to understand who he is and what he wants out of life. In this state of internal turmoil and kindred spirit, Mrs. Robinson, finds him and makes him an offer he tries to refuse but eventually cannot. In the end this offer causes everyones lives to be turned inside out. I reccomend this book to everyone.

As for all those extremely negative Swiss reviews, I guess this book and the white suburban upper middle class American sub-culture it so accurately portrays do not come across as funny and as true to people from other cultures. That's understandable; I may not be able to fully relate to an accurate tale of European life. This apparent lack of universality is a valid complaint. But the book sure rings true to me. Benjamin's frustration and rebellion are all part of the normal search for meaning and self-fulfillment that many people go through. It's a classic American coming-of-age story complete with a profound identity crisis. And the discussion between Ben and his father about fighting fires and sleeping with prostitutes in frozen fields -- well, it wasn't in the movie and it makes me laugh out loud each time I read it. That part alone makes the book worthwhile.

Its a very good book but I don't think it targets beginners as much as it claims to. There is a tutorial that runs through the book but it doesn't give concise instructions of the steps one should follow. If these were clearly indicated I would give the book 5/5. I feel that one should know a little about Powerbuilder before attempting to approach this book. However it is so detailed that it takes a while to complete, this can be percieved as a good or a bad thing.

For someone who just wants to learn the PowerBuilder painters, the other books are fine. The strength of this book is that it teaches you to build in PowerBuilder the RIGHT way...by building in an object-oriented way. Most new PowerBuilder developers know just enough to shoot themselves in the foot. This book takes more effort, but its examples are much closer to real development than the other intro books I have reviewed.

This is the first powerbuilder book, I read that seems to be not only a compendium but delivers as well many pratical nice choosen examples. On the first look, you got the impression that this is only an adapted book to the next version, but if you really take a look you will remark many details which are carefully done. I recommend that book to all newcomers to powerbuilder as well as a to experienced developers. The index is very well done.

Calvin bases his ideas on this 'observation' in chapter 7:

"The axon acts like an express train, skipping many intermediate stops, giving off synapses only when about 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 mm away from the tall dendrite (and sometimes continuing for a few millimeters farther, maintaining the integer multiples of the basic metric, 0.5 mm). "

This is a plain lie.

The so-called "reconcilation" promised by the title is not entirely delivered. Both Calvin and Bickerton seem too taken with their respective ideas. It is an interesting discussion nonetheless, and good points are made by both writers.

This book is not a very in-depth book on the principles of california real estate. It covered topics only very breifly, and really sped through them with not a whole lot of explanation. I would highly advise buying a different book if you intend to pass the CA Real Estate Licensing Exam.

This has some good discussion of general pneumatic principles, but it is focused on how pneumatics were used in 1919. It does not appear to have been updated to reflect current uses of pneumatics, or the current implementation practices. If you are looking for a book with current applications, I would look elsewhere.