For all you Wraith players and storytellers who don't have any spectres in the game-- You have NO IDEA what you are missing! And, if you do have spectres but not this sourcebook, you could be doing a LOT better!

"Dark Reflections: Spectres" is Black Dog's first Wraith book. It does a GREAT job describing the mentality and characteristics of Wraiths who have fallen into their shadow. Storytellers will see how to properly incorporate spectres into the game, and players will learn how to properly play them.

Get this discontinued tome while you still can!

I first became interested in this book several years ago when I read an excerpt of it in the UK magazine "The Face". I'd never listened to any EBTG, but was impressed with Watt's prose. Its clean and Watt has a rare talent for description. Even a sample doesn't capture it. Like, "My eyes feel dry and crispy. Dry autumn leaves. I screw them up, trying to get them to moisten. Dry crunched-up leaves. Broken veins and capillaries. Leaf veins. Like the back of a hand with a torch shone through it...My head is an empty box. My thoughts rattle around, dry crumbs in a kitchen drawer."

In a short book he covers not only his illness and experience in hospital, but also those aspects of his life which sustain him: the confused-but-determined support of his mother, the charming relationship with his hosptial-shy father (successful conversation topics include music, football and sensible footwear). There is also his relationship with his partner and bandmember - Tracey. Watt doesn't give her special treatment and doesn't presume to describe her experience. But his determinedly objective and unsentimental description of the events as they unfold gives you a very good idea of what she must be going through, and it makes for compelling reading.

I read the book in one sitting and stayed up till 4.30am on a work day to finish it, partly to find out what happened to ben, partly to get the next one of the many humourous event that occurred in the Intensive Care Unit, and partly to get another clue as to how Tracey was coping. I feel so throughly drawn into his life I want to know how he and his partner are going ten years after the events in the book.

The nearest book to this that I have read is Oliver Sack's "A Leg to Stand On". I can remember that book quite well, many years afterwards. I think this book is better, and I know I'll remember it for longer.

BTW, if you read the book and you like it, get the best of Everything But the Girl and listen to tracks 1, 2 and 7. They make a great postcript to the book.

i was turned onto EBTG by my English boyfriend(now husband) and fought it every bit of the way because of the connection to his ex-girlfriend, but soon learned the error of my ways. the music and the pure emotion of the sounds that these two people were lucky enough to experience and talented enough to create taught me the real sense of living out a feeling with another person. I had to go through a life changing operation and it is one thing to think that you are choosing something because that is how you think you feel,yet it is another thing to have illness and medicine make that decision for you. You feel the helplessness that Mr Watt felt and you know that you and the person who has chosen to feel them with you ,what they will live with afterward. It isn't even that you think about it every day,but when you see an ad on TV or read an article in a publication, that is when you feel it,when you are alone. This book made me feel that I was in his hospital room with him and I wanted to reach out to him so badly that I found myself crying while reading ,not for his anguish aandpain, but because I couldn't be there for him. You must listen to "AMPLIFIED HEART" after reading the book for the second time and you feel the pain and the strength of the two of them and you feel so good about the fact that life goes on, even after so much pain that has affected so many people connected. You can feel how his parents were just being parents and eventually friends even if it was strained. We saw them in concert at The Vic in Chicago about a year after his surgery and you can see them as if nothinghappened yet you know that he will always be that weight and it will be a struggle and you feel so lucky to have experienced this new sense of life. We have seen them 4 times in concert,but that is the most painfully touchingexperience, like reading this book and then really thinking about life and its fragility. It makes you really appreciate the little things inlife that we take for granted,like simply looking out the window to see a tree or the moonlight as it wakes you up in the middleof your first sleepy night, so much so that you don't mind. Every person who has ever had to try to fall asleep for more than 30 minutes in a hospital or who has had to hold someone's bruised and tube filled hand will truly appreciate this book and the belief in real emotions. An absolute easy, painful,fulfilling,real and truly beautiful essay on life and love.

I recently re-read "Patient" by Ben Watt, which I read five years ago when it came out. It is a truly amazing and rare book, a poetic and unsentimental look at life threatening illness. In 1992, Watt nearly died after a rare disease was discovered which required the removal of 3/4 of his lower intestine. At the time, Watt was well known in Britain as one half of Everything But the Girl, a jazzy acoustic band he created with longtime love Tracey Thorn. This was before their surprise # 1 smash "Missing" put them on the map in the US and before their successful transition to techno-club music, which continues to this day. (Watt is currently a DJ and club owner in London; EBTG's last album came out in 1999.)

The book is spare and uncomprimising in its look at sudden, life threatening illness. It details the two month hospital stay when Watt was reduced at times to skeletal remains and a hallucinatory state.I remember cringing my way through parts of it the first time I read it. On second review, I marvel at the lack of vanity of both Watt and Thorn as they dealt with the bodily breakdown caused by this illness. And we are talking serious bodily breakdown -- the Farrelly Brothers seem restrained by comparison!

Thorn comes across valiantly through the eyes of Watt, who seems smitten with her even after a then 10 year relationship. In spare and poetic vignettes, he flashes back on healthier times for them: meeting at Hull University in 1981, vacationing on Bird Island and in Scarborough, and a final, touching sketch of a trip to Cape Cod after Watt recovered from this episode. Their relationship is truly inspiring and life affirming, and will cause any fan to reconsider the lyrics of their subsequent love songs. (They are still together.)

Mainly though, the book unsparingly details the ravages of this disease, and the near miraculous recovery. I challenge anyone to read it and not be grateful for what they have. The fact that Watt does this without ever being sentimental or self-pitying is amazing. He seems like an amazing person. We would have lost a lot of great music if he had died in 1992, but more would have been lost if this book had never been written. It is a gift to those in recovery and grief.

While I've been very impressed with the clear writing and highly practical instruction in this book, I've noted dozens of syntax, grammatical, spelling, and factual errors, on the order of one every ten pages or so. And this is a very long book. Be prepared to spend a few hours wondering why certain queries just won't work, until your programming buddies tell you that parameter passing to a web page is always done with a "?" and not a "&" as the book occasionally--and erroneously--asserts. If you can make it through the minefields, you'll learn quite a bit about relational databases, Cold Fusion Studio, and data-driven web sites, but not without a few battle scars...

On the whole, the CFWDCK book is very informative, and does take you from start to finish in terms of the creation of a web database. This book has been invaluable to me as go through the process of migrating my flat website to one that is database-driven.

It does do a good job of giving a decent overview of things, and even ventures into SQL (which turns out to be very important in Cold Fusion). And, unlike a lot of books which include CDs, I can say that the software that came with it was worth it. This is especially true if you are the type who erases large zip files after you download and install software. If you are trying to use Cold Fusion with MS Front Page, you might find the two programs don't seem to like each other. Thus, it's good to have a fresh copy of CF available if you need it.

But, like many other "Thick Books", this one does suffer from a few problems:

POOR INDEXING
Most references to CF statements only refer to definitions or sections in the book devoted to them. Not to each different use. This means that, for example, if you want to know about using a CFIF statment within a CFCOLUMN statement, you really gotta hunt.

PARTIALLY SUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS
The back cover of the book talks about how we can make shopping carts, online catalogs, conferencing systems, etc. Where are the examples? Maybe they're there. I couldn't find them

UNCREATIVE EXAMPLES
In any instruction book, most of the examples are going to be centered around basic tasks. How to do a query to a database. How to make a form. Blah, blah, blah. It's all good. But this book seems to ignore a lot of the richness of CFML. Not much talk about graphics at all. One has to hunt for information about using CFML with URLs. It's mostly basic, fairly uncreative applications. For the most part, that's appropriate. But not at this level.

NOT ENOUGH INFO ON CFML ECCENTRICITIES
Some of the tags seem to not work very well with each other. Others require different formatting of URLS. Without this information easily accessible, there is some trial and error that one shouldn't have to go through.

Overall, an excellent book. And, if you are considering Cold Fusion for your website, it's probably the only game out there. Just remember that you will probably need a second book on Cold Fusion once another comes out

I bought this book for my dissertation. After I started to read this book, I fall in love with it. I always have problem reading books in English as my mother language is not English. But this book give me a very clear idea on how to integrate your web page with database. I just finished my dissertation yesterday. But Cold Fusion is still in my mind. You will love this book.

Lots of Thurston, Mike Watt & Lee Renaldo, some David Yow, only one entry from Courtney and none from Stephen Malkmus, so the title is a little misleading. If you're a Beck fan, you'll love his entries. They're the best of the bunch. He describes the world as he sees it in Beck-style free-form, without bashing his fellow performers. Thurston's entries are almost entirely in strangely self-righteous defense of Kathleen Hanna and an incident in which he was not even involved, which is a waste. The last I heard, Kathleen is more than capable of speaking for herself so his defense of her/bashing of Courtney is unnecessary. I expected and would have preferred more insight into the Lollapalooza performing experience.

Here is a low priced little book with lots of journal entries from Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, quite a few from Beck and a couple others (but the others don't contribute too much). It is a very interesting inside look at one of the most vividly remembered tours in independent rock history. A lineup featuring the likes of these many performers will probably never cross the U.S. again in my lifetime. The Kathleen Hanna incident doesn't actually dominate Thurston's entries, but takes up a large chunk of his journals. Beck's entries are great. David Yow doesn't say too much... One overriding theme is how big of a jerk Courtney Love really is. There are plenty of little interesting stories relayed along the way. Don't miss out you Sonic Youth and Beck fans! And for all those who still remember being at one of these shows, it might be interesting to hear what was going on behind the scenes.

In 1995, the Lollapalooza maelstron plundered thru the cities & towns of America, a [diamond] sea of noise & beats changing lives & generally having fun. That's what I'm lead to believe anyway. Thurston is more or less the star here as he was in 1991: the Year Punk Broke, & there's some other cool & crazy kids there too. He writes in his typically amusing & insightful style about the Mexican food, the backstage parking that's reserved strictly for Hole & how Kim has to pretend to be Courtney so SY's car can get in, & how Bek was outraged by this, the Kathleen vs Courtney thing, the crowds disappearing when SY are last on the bill, etc. Lee Ranaldo also writes from the sonic perspective, of course in his more contemplative style usually except when he gets pissed off he shows it. Well, to be honest, I've read these things as they were intended, as computer things so I didn't get everything, I'd very much like to hear what the great Beck had to say about it as well. Yeah the show goes on eevry year but that was the one that mattered. Very interesting reading that you can go back to many times for enlightenment/amusement.