This book discusses, in a general way, Communism and its place in the 20th century. As such, it does a very good job, giving the reader an idea of who was who, the relevence of certain ideas, historical context, etc.
There were only two things that I felt took away from this book. One, the addition of a beginning chapter on pre-Revolutionary communes, mostly those of the United States. With the exception of the Paris Commune, these have no place in the rather narrow intellectual universe that marxists inhabit. The second thing that I felt kept this from being a truly great book (given its scope) was the fact that, unlike other "Idiot" books, this one did not have caricatures for the asides. I thought Marx, Lenin, and Stalin would have been great as cartoons explaining different aspects of communism.

I gave this book 5 stars because I knew very little about communism. This book helped to answer alotta questions. Was not the most detailed book on the subject matter but kept in line with good Idiots series books. If you want to get a better Idea of communism the author lists books in the index for further reading. I would recommend this book to anyone who wanted to learn more about communism and the cold war period of 1946-1989.

Working as a cost/commercial manager, project manager and contract administrator in the construction industry, this book has always been a reference source. It covers a wide range of relevant topics without going to deep

This was the assigned text for my sophomore social science seminar and I really enjoyed the book (as well as the class!) The author expresses himself extremely well and I hope more people are reading this book than just those in my SOC class.

this book helped me to understand the basic concepts of ms access. it was easy to understand and to the point.

(This was originally a note to some Paradox users who at first found Access to be a little user-unfriendly.)

This Dummies tutorial is a little old (you have to confirm converting the sample databases to Access for Office 97), but the tutorial is perfectly serviceable, with all the features of the current release (this written 12/98).

About Access's user unfriendliness, to some extent it's a matter of perspective and to some a matter of exposure: After I installed the tutorial's sample database, I opened one of the files ("Camelot Directory 4") and was surprised to find a very user-friendly interface - one that the user creates.

Looking at the current market in these database products (in the broader history of the development of the PC), it seems like it's a matter of a computer equivalent of "For 3 you get egg-rolls and Visual Basic." That is to say, Access is a "bigger" or "wider" product, and it's harder to see the whole thing at once. Even the "Northwind" sample-database that comes with Access doesn't show off it's user-interface development capabilities as much as it gets right into the heart of the mechanical intricacies of Access' "engine room," as it were.

I don't know Paradox that well, but if I were to say that

· a large mainframe database like Oracle is an ocean liner,

· Access (which "real" database programmers complain has substantial limitations) is like a motor-yacht

· Excel is like a smuggler's speedboat

Then, though I am without any real acquaintance with Paradox, I would have to guess that, in terms of size (which they could have made bigger if that had been the market they were targeting)

· Paradox might be like a cabin-cruiser.

I would get the feeling that in a cabin-cruiser, you are used to having polished walnut handles on the throttle even as your galley is just a hop away and you always hear the motor - that is, you have a certain level of convenience (user-friendliness) but are still in intimate contact with how the thing runs. (Out in my fast little Excel, I enjoy being able to scoop things right out of the water - in my class, Sr Data Entry Tech, I have been known to open an uncooperative data file in Notepad and manually replace wrong formatting with commas and quotation marks to get a database to open my files.) In a motor-yacht like Access, the Millionaire is in the silver-&-chandeliers dining room being served his crepes & champagne, but after breakfast he goes onto the bridge and expects that the Captain, at least, will see clean, shiny chrome valve covers when he goes down into the engine room - that is, the Captain is in a sense the real consumer of the data, and the Millionaire delegates him to be his proxy, to do his thinking for him as it were.

The problem with getting into a program of a certain level of complexity, is that we are in the midst of role changes, disruptions that PC development only accelerates. In the old, strictly mainframe days, you had the distinct roles of

· a database programmer,

· a data entry person, and

· report consumers.

These were discrete roles that had little-to-no overlap. Spreadsheets came from a very different orientation - VisiCalc was with original PC "killer app" that had no mainframe precedent, so when a professor at Harvard Business School wanted to "run the numbers," he was liable to be consumer, programmer and even "data entry" person.

When you open the box on Access, you just want to jump right into productivity - yet as a database with mainframe ancestors but that "grew up" in a spreadsheet environment, you are going to be faced with what I call (sorry to switch metaphors) "driving a race while your mechanic is on the running board adjusting the engine with a wrench." (Unfortunately, most of the time, you are both driver & mechanic.) That is, you have to optimize the performance of something that is unfamiliar to you, and the expectation is that you'd better be damn quick at it.

This does not lend itself to a natural feeling of affection for a program with wider capabilities, but eventually, it can lead to a feeling of respect. It's just a matter of how much complexity you need to get into - you get used to adjusting the valves on your engine, learn to do it without getting yourself all greasy, and you are able to tell your colleagues with pride that you do your own engine work. The engine can still be shiny and able to be shown off to company without their ever getting dirty.

Once you see that Access can be user friendly (it's just complicated enough that some of the time, you need your mechanic's coveralls), it's just a menu thing - "With 5, you get Intelligent Clients."

This book gives the reading a kind of "before they were stars" approach. It provides a good spring board to seeing how Marx metamorphasized from Das Capitol into the Communist Manifesto. I recommend this book for anyone who is looking to get to the base of and learn more about this influential write and philosopher.

This is a great autobiography about Rod Laver, the only man to win the Grand Slam twice. Laver mixes autobiography with some "how to" tips at the end of each chapter. This is an interesting read, both from a historical perspective of the game, and the changes it goes through from the amature to the open era, and also just traveling with Rod through his landmark athletic feat. Rod tells his story in a with complete depreciating modisty that makes you respect the man even more.

Bronx-born Stanley Kubrick spent much of his professional life in England where he made some of the most controversial and original films ever to grace the silver screen. This uneven but fascinating book is in a sense a tribute to the man and his work. This is not the first encyclopedic treatment of a top movie director published by Facts on File--they have also done Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Perhaps this format--an "encyclopedia"--will catch on. At any rate, it is fun to leaf through randomly or perhaps one could actually proceed alphabetically.

The entries of course all have some connection with Kubrick. Included are actors who played in his movies, and people related to him and his friends and other people he worked with. There are also entries on movie business phenomena like "antiwar themes" and "censorship." There is an interesting entry on Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence (2001) in which I learned that the original conception came from Kubrick. There are a number of black and white photos spread throughout the text and some line drawings, mostly of Kubrick and the actors who played in his films. Often the photos are stills from the movies. It is interesting to see Kubrick at various stages of his career and how time changed his appearance. My favorite photo is of George C. Scott and Stanley Kubrick playing chess on the set of Dr. Strangelove underneath the "War Room" mock up. By the way, Scott is reported to have gained respect for the younger Kubrick when Kubrick beat him at chess.

There is rather a lot of repetition in the entries, some of it unavoidable of course because entries overlap in content. However the entry for Sue Lyon, for example, who was Kubrick's Lolita, contains a summary of the plot of Lolita to the exclusion of the rather sparse information about Lyon. Also the editing and proofreading of the entries is not first rate. The text was begun by Rodney Hill and then taken up by Gene D. Phillips, which may account for some of the avoidable repetition. Some of the entries were written by John C. Tibbetts and others tagged with initials and identified as "Contributors" near the back of the book.

Clearly the strength of the book is in the light it sheds on Stanley Kubrick and his life in film. The detail is fascinating and the writing, in spite of the repetitions, is engaging. There are nice pieces on George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, Malcolm McDowell, Nicole Kidman, Shelley Winters, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. as well as essays on all of Kubrick movies. Included are behind the scenes information about what went on during the shooting of the films, how the films were conceived and how they progressed. I was intrigued to learn that Kubrick was able to get a fine performance from the otherwise undistinguished Sue Lyon partly because he sometimes allowed her to use her own vernacular instead of words from the script. Also interesting was the difficulties that Shelley Winters experienced (from her viewpoint!) in working with James Mason and Peter Sellers in Lolita (1962). The relationship between Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and worked with Kubrick on the screenplay for the film, is interesting to follow. One realizes again that at the base of Kubrick's film creations is an abiding interest in science and human psychology.

Bottom line: an irresistible companion to the films of Stanley Kubrick, one of cinema's greatest directors and one of my personal favorites.

Great. It dispels the myth that "Moonies are mindless automatons" because there is more disagreement and varied interpretations among the Unificationists than among the Evangelicals!

This book is for anyone who is deeply interested in the similarities and differences between Evangelical Christianity and Unificationism.

Erich Kastner, a writer in the German Enlightenment tradition perhaps best known as a German poet and author of children's books, wrote a scathing satirical novel about decadence during the Wiemar Republic. Kastner's target is the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual climate of the years preceeding the rise of the Third Reich. He caricatured the times in an effort to awaken his contemporaries to the elements that contributed to the gathering storm. Jacob Fabian, after whom the book is named, is portrayed as a either a passive figure who waits for a return of decency or one for whom there was no place in such a deteriorating society. His life adventures served as Kastner's diagnosis of the diseased soul of Berlin. Fabian's escapades mirrored the interior world of a city seemingly oblivious to what it was doing to itself. He lost his job, sweetheart, and best friend in a series of events which eerily highlights what was truly at stake in such a culture. The suicide of Fabian's friend as a hapless reaction to what was later discovered to be a cruel joke is a metaphor for the heartlessness of the era. I was struck by the books apparant parallels to our own time and found the author's message to be nearly prescient. In his preface to the 1950 German edition he wrote of the moralist's task to defend "lost causes" and to "fight on notwithstanding." Kastner's quixotic writing deserves a fresh reading by Americans given our diseased culture at the end of the twentieth century. While his mood and some of his caricatures will raise the ire of some, the overall impact of the book is ample reward for the tolerant reader.