All in all a pretty good fantasy novel to read. For everyone who is new to the Realms I would rather have you stumble across a book of the Pool trilogy than any wild faerun pantheon novel, which would phreak anyone out who is not informed about the deities of FR and their history. I do find the characters a trifle superficial though and sometimes it seems more like three kids are on a field trip rather than a real quest. The story is simple to read and some readers may find their intelligence insulted. If you want to read more sophisitcated books I'd suggest starting out with a harper book like Elaine Cunnigham's "Elfshadow".

Well, first of all I am neither a child, nor do I consider myself uneducated so all those comments about the former are uncalled for. I read this book when it first came out without ever seeing the computer game and loved it. Yes, I do agree that it is a 'light' read but that is what makes it so enjoyable. I have just finished it for the third time and enjoyed it more now than the first time! I found and read through the entire series and found myself wanting more! Unfortunatley there are no more novels in this series (get the hint Mr. Ward?). I would recommend this to old and new readers of fantasy, especially those familiar with AD&D and the Forgotten Realms setting. I must say that this and the two other books in the Pools series will remain on my bookshelves until I read them again... and again...and again.

This truly was one of the greats. Being a hard core D&D fan, I've read a lot of Forgotten Realms books, but this one really stands out in my mind. The setting was great, and the characters were wonderful. Ren O' the Blade was a very intresting character, a man of great heroism and strong passions. I liked his episode with his thoughts of Tempest. Shal was great. I liked how she wasn't portrayed as the common image for female mages. Tarl was cool. He was a true champion of his church. I mean, so much crap happened to him early on, but he stayed strong. The villan aspect of the book was wonderful, having one villan clearly defined, and one sliding around in the shadows, manipulating others to meet his own ends. The book had a great balance of action, drama, and character development. All and all, it's a must-read for and D&D fan.

I found Dr. Brown, in conjunction with Dr. Churchill, to have written a very dry and non-useful text. It fails to provide the undergraduate student with the resources and background information that more highly touted books offer. There are a few examples that are somewhat helpful, but overall I found myself having to use reference texts to supplement this one. I am not a math major, but am continually searching for good math texts to help me grasp the fundamentals of more difficult topics. I did not find that help here. Too much 'math prose' and not enough to-the-point definitions and examples, which is the cry of every non-math major. Their treatment of the Laplacian is not even worth the bother of placing it in the book. The physical size of the book is small, (9 1/2 by 6") with 335 pages. Not nearly enough for the treatment of its titled subject.

That is, you can't find a better book on the subject at the undergraduate level!

This is a great book that gives precise examples which are easy to comprehend. Dr. Brown proves to be an excellent author once again.

The fourth edition of the Gamma World game brings it back to the standardized TSR / AD&D style system. Although the rules include enough material to play a game or set up a campaign, significant work is required to build a fluid gaming environment from the materials provided.

This book contains the rules for the Gamma World role-playing game (as you probably know, if you're looking for it). The game is really cool and very original and interesting. The only problem with it is that some of the rules set-ups are bizarre and/or senseless. If you're going to GM it, I suggest you use some creativity in adjusting them a little. It shouldn't be difficult, and it makes the game run much better. Overall, with a little work it was one of the better systems I've played under

4th Edition was the best for Gamma World.
This Edition contains ruleset for playing animals, plants, mutatants and purestrain humans. Has cryptic alliances and chacter classes (esper,scout,fighter,tinkerer). All the hightech weapons and devices are collected together in one book( rather than a stack of modules and 1-3rd ed. rulebooks) Loot tables, radiation effects, and monsters. Kindalike a players' guide and GM guide in one. ... The Alternity ruleset is/was completely different. 7514 is classic Gamma World, if you're intersted in GW you better pick on of these up.

This was a very informative book written with a great deal of police insight. I liked the fact that it is new enough to have very recent events in it. Great examples. Only downfall I found was that there was a bit of repeating and jumping around from time to time, but not difficult to follow.

The text is divided into four sections with thirty chapters. New in this edition is a chapter on automobile theft. Earlier editions of the book were required reading for the International Association for Identification's crime scene certification course and I expect that will continue to be true with this edition.

The third edition continues to be bound in paperback which was one my main complaints from the second edition. The dimensions of the book of the been changed resulting in a rather more solid feel to this edition. I'd still prefer to see it in hard cover, however, I understand some of the cost factors involved, which lead to the use of a paper cover.

The third edition also includes a 228 page study guide. The instructors edition includes both an instructors guide, and a set of PowerPoint slides, although I didn't receive the slides with my review copy. Given the popularity of PowerPoint presentations I have to believe this is a valuable addition for those that are using the text in a college course.

Overall the book continues to be well written and illustrated with appropriate photographs or illustrations.

Section one is the Foundation and Principles of Criminal Investigation. Part A is the Sources and Uses of Information, which includes the History of Criminal Investigation, Uses of Physical Evidence, Using People as a Source of Information, and investigations involving records and files.

Section one Part B Seeking and Obtaining Information from People and Records, includes detailed information on Interviews, using Records and Files and Informants. Part C follow-up measures includes chapters on Surveillance, Eyewitness Identification (which includes sketches, composites and line-ups) and two chapters on Interrogation.

Section two: Applying the Principles to Criminal Investigation, includes a chapter on Reconstructing the Past, and chapters on specific crimes including Homicide, Robbery, Rape, Burglary and Arson.

Section three is specialized investigations and includes Terrorism, Computers, White-collar Crime and Crimes Involving Vehicles.

Section four is specialized topics and includes chapters on What is Crime? Managing Criminal Investigations, Controlling Investigations through Constitutional Law, Evidence and Effective Testimony. Chapters which review the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the Lindbergh kidnapping, a chapter on Satanism, Cults and Ritual Crime (which in my opinion is still a waste of paper) and a chapter on Raids.

The text also includes five appendices: FBI suggestions for Packaging Physical Evidence, Photographing a Crime Scene, the Vicap Crime Analysis Report, Missing Person Checklist and a Glossary.

Given the breadth of the material presented, the authors can't go into great detail about any particular subject, however, each of the chapters includes an extensive list of supplemental readings.

The third edition continues to be an excellent introductory text on criminal investigation and remains one of my top recommendations.

In this petite 85-paged beginner's guide to yoga, "Yoga for Bears" demonstrates 31 various yoga positions, each posture interpreted via two drawn bears. (The master is on the left; the beginner is on the right.) Although the bear drawings are cute and unique, I found some of the positions slightly more confusing and inaccurate by using the illustrations rather than human subjects. It was hard to tell what goes where (especially on the Triangle and Sitting Twist exercises), but at least there's a descriptive paragraph on every other page that tries to clarify the yoga position.

There's also additional information in this tiny book (which, by the way, is easy to take with you almost anywhere), such as a recommended reading list, a brief intro to yoga (including the Sanskrit names of each exercise), hints and advice, and some useful addresses and telephone numbers for finding a yoga class (though they may be out of date by now).

"Yoga for Bears" was given to me by my sister a couple years ago when she had gotten over her yoga craze. Although I've only used it once or twice (I'm not really into yoga), I'd still recommend this book to beginners, particularly ones who love bears; after all, these furry creatures detail the entire book. However, I'd still follow the bit of advice on page 14 if you're serious about approaching yoga properly: "find a good teacher and go to a regular class." You may run the risk of injuring yourself by practicing alone.

How sad it is that this little book has gone out of print! Yoga for Bears is a sweetly illustrated users' guide for yoga practioners. Cartoon bears, accompanied by brief explanations, demonstrate a variety of asanas.

The AD&D One on One books are a great way to do some quick adventuring or to intoduce a newbie (especially a teen or pre-teen) to the wonders of role playing games. The books work somewhat in the "choose your own adventure" genre, but incorporate dice roll determined random events, battles and interactions with NPCs (non player characters) into the readers decision making. The books are a bit complicated for those starting out, so I suggest either two advanced players adventure together, or one advanced player guide a newbie through the adventure. These books are out of print now, which is a shame, but if you are interested in taking an exciting but brief trip into the world of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (and you can get your hands on one or two of these books), you're in for a lot of fantasty fun!

The last (?) descendant of Dom Manuel confronts the past to discover reality. Cabell's "average" (i.e. classical) exercise in urban wit, devious language and human puzzlement. This is a doorway to the past and all the other books of the History.

This book is fascinating both from a D&D viewpoint and on its own. Unlike other monster collections, every demon and devil in this book is based on a creature of mythology. To quote from the preface: "Remember that for every demon or devil presented here, someone, somewhere once regarded them as absolutely real. They have been feared by living, breathing human beings. Some are probably still feared by someone, somewhere." Certainly they have been adapted, but the few I am familiar with appear to be true to the original material. Thus, many creatures that would probably never have been thought of by gamers (e.g. household demons) are here as well as demi-god level critters.

Now the downside. Many gamers aren't really interested in creatures that affect the day to day lives of the peasants. The material tends to be a little haphazard and not extremely well integrated - remember that it is coming from a whole lot of different cultures. Lastly, some Christians won't like adaptations of their pet demons.

The only other comment I would make is that I, personally, thought the art work was not especially good. While this doesn't matter very much to me others might be more critical.

Overall, this is a very good work and the base material is far more varied than any work of pure imagination I have currently seen out there for the D&D / D20 world.

I have owned several books of antique automobiles, including Packards. This book is about the company itself and what lead it to its precipitous decline after WWII.

It is very readable and informative. It is one thing to read tables of sales and changing positions in the marketplace among brands, which are available in automobile encyclopedias. This book, however, explains WHY things happened. For instance, I did not know that in 1953 Ford decided to be No.1 at any cost. Ford's deep pockets were used to buy market share. GM did the same. This created a serious problem for all the independent producers, none of which were as efficient as GM or Ford.

I liked the book a lot.

If you ever thought ALL "conspiracy theorists" were nutso (and most are), then you'd better read this book.

If you're naive enough to believe that the only governments who commit human rights atrocities against their people are in places like China or Burma or Turkey or Chile or Nigeria or Guatemala, then you'd better read this book.

While recent events have brought the FBI's abuses and corruption to public attention (e.g., former FBI lab sceintist Fred Whitehurst blowing the whistle on the FBI intentionally biasing lab test results and misrepresenting findings in court to convict defendents; the document-shredding coverup attempt by FBI officials in the Ruby Ridge incident; the scathing Bromwich Report from the Justice Department), none of these recent abuses compare to the Gestapo-like tactics employed against political activist groups in the 60's and 70's, as documented in this book.

Although I agree with the recommendation of the closely-related "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" by the first reviewer (because it is a much more entertaining read, stylistically), I think this book is more important, due to its fastidious documentation of facts beyond what Matthiessen included, and due to the breadth of "Agents" coverage, which includes other movements targeted besides AIM (though AIM is definitely the primary focus here). Granted, this author has been involved in a silly feud with important leaders in the American Indian Movement, and I agree the Bellcourts definitely merit his respect; nevertheless, I think it's silly to bring in that outside spat as an excuse to pan such a detailed, hard-hitting, well researched book.

If you enjoyed this book, you can find a great historical survey of political repression in America (with the FBI frequently showing up) in Bud & Ruth Schultz' "It Did Happen Here".

In the introduction, Churchill and Vander Wall trace the founding of the FBI in the mid-20's by J. Edgar Hoover, as he emerged from helping carry out the Justice department's anti-leftist terror campaigns during and in the years following World War One, to its official authorization by Franklin Roosevelt in the mid-30's as a full-fledged sophisticated political police with virtual impunity. They note that the FBI was grossly incompetent and unwilling at fighting serious criminals like the Mafia, prefering to go after the petty criminals of the Dillinger variety, car thieves, and so on to gain cheap publicity for the bureau and its director and that their chief function was and is to protect the economic and political status quo from threats by organized leftists and others. They note the immense propaganda machine constructed by the bureau to portray Hoover as a great crimefighting genius and hero, though he was nothing more than a crazed, reactionary and very cunning bureaucrat, and the effective techniques of making "friends of the bureau" in certain media outlets who would tell the public what the bureau wanted them to know and the techniques of intimidation against those media outlets or ex-bureau agents who wanted to come out with the truth about the FBI.

They move on to discuss Cointelpro, the greatly successful attempts at infiltration, disruption and weakening of dissident groups, extended from the usual Communist and Socialist party targets, to various leftist groups, people like Martin Luther King, but especially the Black Panther Party in the late 60's. Making massive use of declassified FBI documents and other sources, the authors note the FBI attempt to split the BPP, provoke violence between members or factions or with other militant black groups, to spread media disinformation about them and to drain their resources and mental stability by subjecting its leading members to repeated arrests on spurious charges. These objectives were accomplished by fabricating anonymous letters to particular prominent individuals within the party alleging that other party members or factions were plotting against or even planning to murder them, the use of infiltrators/provacateurs to further egg on the factional strife (e.g. the split between Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton) and encourage violence between members (e.g. the murder of Fred Bennet by member Jimmie Carr who suspected Bennett of being a police informant, after being led to this impression by police informant Thomas Mosher; Carr himself was later murdered by two Panther members who suspected him of being a government agent) or between the BPP and the Ron Karenga's organization(e.g. the murder of BPP leaders Alprentice Carter and Jon Huggins), the use of "bad-jacketing" through infiltrators to spread the false idea that certain members of the party were government agents (e.g. which resulted in the murders of Huggins, Carter and Carr and which led to Stokely Carmichael's expulsion from the party by Huey Newton), the spreading of media disinformation about alleged financial impropriety and other crimes among certain party members to encourage mistrust and suspiscion within the party, and so on. Two particular cases examined are the murder by the Chicago police of Chicago Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969, using a detailed floor plan of Hampton's appartment that had been provided by FBI infiltrator and Hampton's bodygaurd William O'neal (for which the survivors of the attack and families of the victim were awared 1.8 million dollars by an arbitrator in 1983). They move on to analyze the spurious (mostly through the use of FBI informer Julius Butler and the efforts of infiltrator Melvin Cotton Smith) robbery/murder conviction of Los Angelas leader Geronimo Pratt in 1971, who had been subjected to much harrassment and arrests on spurious charges by the LA police before the 1969 murder of Caroline Olsen, and according to police infiltrator Louis Tackwood (who helped the FBI murder George Jackson) and "Cotton" smith, had specifically been designated to be "neutralized" the LAPD.

The bulk of the book is centered on the particularly severe Cointelpro operations (using many of the same operations as against the BPP, using such infiltrators as Douglass Durham and even possibly being involved in murder, as in the case of Ana Marie Aquash) directed against the American Indian Movement (AIM), particularly at the hub of its activity, on Pine Ridge reservation, Sioux territory, South Dakota, the center of great natural resources eagerly eyed by corporations, throughout the 1970's and beyond. The AIM had risen as a particularly effective organization to fight government violations of Indian treaty and civil rights (what little of those remained). The AIM organized "the trail of Broken Treaties" in 1972, a caravan of veichles that led thousands of Indians to Washington D.C. to hold protests. The authors document a patern of government lies and duplicty with regard to accomodating the protestors and other promises which led to the provoking of the AIM (along with the Bureau of Indian Affairs head in solidarity which got him fired afterward) taking over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington. The government blithely broke promises of non-prosecution of the BIA building incident, after the building had been released. On Pine Ridge, the government had been pouring funds into Dick Wilson's machine, who won the 1972 tribal presidency with considerable fraud, and proceeded to set up with FBI and Bureau of Indian affairs funds a paramilitary organization with the appropriate acronym of GOONS, who used terror against the inhabitants of Pine Ridge where AIM had widespread support. The next incident was the infamous "Siege of Wounded Knee," March-May 1973, the site where the army had massacred hundreds of Indian women and children in 1890, and where AIM leaders had gone to stage a press conference, only to find the Wounded Knee territory surrounded by FBI and Bureau of Indian Police, which AIM decided not to countenance, and they held down fort within Wounded Knee, gaining widespread international support and aid, with the FBI escalating the situation with its advanced weapons and other illegal Pentagon aid, with Dick Wilson's GOONS setting up illegal roadblocks and engaging in great violence with FBI support (but opposed by the U.S. Marshalls in this instance). After Wounded Knee, Dick Wilson's terrorists escalated their campaign, including murder, against AIM, with AIM members and traditional Indians filing innumerable complaints with the Justice Department and the FBI, which pleaded "lack of manpower" to deal with the situation, though their numbers continued to increase on the Pine Ridge reservation (in support of the Dick Wilson and theGOONS). Next came the "Oglala incident" near Pine Ridge in June 1975, with highly provocative FBI activity near the "Jumping Bull" compound in Oglala near Pine Ridge to "serve" a federal warrant for two youths who allegedly had gotten into a simple fist fight with a White boy shortly before. This resulted in a several day firefight with the Indians (most of whom carried weapons because of the climate of terror in the area) inside the "Jumping Bull" compound which resulted in the deaths of two FBI agents. The FBI proceeded to launch a reign of terror against Pine Ridge after the incident, looking for the murderers of the two agents, conducting innumerable warantless searches, ransacking houses, beating and threatening people. The authors examine the spurious charges brought against such AIM leaders as Richard Marshall (for murder and eventually released), Dennis Banks and Russel Means(both of whom suffered innumerable charges, including those for the incident at Wounded Knee, which judge Fred Nichol dismissed in 1975 on the grounds of gross FBI misconduct and fabrication), Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, and especially Leonard Peltier, who was alleged to have conducted the "execution" of the two FBI agents at the Oglala firefight. Peltier has become one of the international symbols of the American injustice system, promting widespread calls for his release and retrial, including from the Canadien government which originally extradited him back to the United States. For instance, a three judge panel in 1985, took note of the "improper conduct" of "some FBI agents" in Peltier's case, but ended their investigation there by saying that "we are reluctant to impute further improprieties to them."

The closing chapters deal with the FBI's increased attention on Cointelpro activities in Puerto Rico in the 1980's, including murder and burglary and harrassment. They continue with an account of large-scale burglary and harrassment operations against groups oppossing U.S. support for the Death squad regimes in Central America in the 1980's, particularly against the Committee in Solidarity with the people of El Salvador (CISPES). The FBI could never find any evidence that CISPES or

In "Agents of Repression" authors Ward Churchill and James Vanderwall have demonstrated the true workings of American "democracy" in all its glory.

The "Agents of Repression" exposes how the FBI launched one of its major programs of repression (COINTELPRO) in order to disrupt lower-class solidarity by instigating violence in African-American ghettos, direct participation in the police assassination of a Black Panther organizer, burglaries and harassment of the Socialist Workers Party over many years, and other methods of defamation and disruption.

A tremendouly important book and essential reading for anyone living under the delusion that America stands for liberty, justice and fraternity.