In the American Grain is William Carlos Williams's outstanding and interesting perspecitive on the formation of American culture and ideals. Set as fictional and nonfictional stories of historical figures and their place in creating what Williams' calls the American Idiom.

Williams provides the reader with some of the most interesting and provocative writting in the 20th century. He has supplied the piece with dramatic and extreme views on the state of American Art, Culture, and History like few before or since. An authoritative text for anyone seeking a realistic view of American Society.

Translated and edited by Lady Gregory, founder of the Abbey Theatre, this collection appears, as it claims, to be "complete". If you want a more or less exhaustive volume of Irish mythology, this book is a good choice. However, it reads like a translation: the style has traits of the original Gaelic which make it somewhat difficult to read. Even so, this style is in keeping with the subject and helps one get into an antiquated, Celtic frame of mind. It also includes pronunciation aids for the Gaelic and English translations for proper names (both very helpful), such as Slieve Mis = Co. Kerry, Teamhair = Tara, Co. Meath. The book itself is 550 pp. including notes with a lovely greenwood scene on cover and slipcover.

The book City Literacy's attempts to take a look at what happens when a child learns to read. The book also discusses different situations that a person learns to read in, whether it is formal or informal.
The main purpose of this book was to prove three myths wrong. The first myth is that being of a low economic level, does not mean low literacy levels. The second is that early reading success does not matter when it comes to your overall reading ability. The final myth is that parents do not have to speak English at home for their children to have a high literacy level. Through out this book the authors present a great deal of information. Most of the information is presented through interviews. The interviews consist of people that are reflecting on how they learned to read. Also, all of the people interviewed are from different parts of London. Through these interviews we are able to see the different types of learning styles, along with the different methods children learned to speak in different areas, and centuries. For example, some learned to read English through Jewish club, and through the library, while others learned through reading with their mother. We also learned reasons behind some of the students going to school to learn to read English. "Norma's mother sent her to elocution lessons so that she could erase any trace of Cockney accent from her speech" (p. 88). Through out this book we are able to see literacy through the individual's eyes, and not mere interpretations.
There is one main assumption that the authors rely on through out the book. This assumption is that he reader believes in the importance of being able to read, and teaching others to read. The authors also has the assumption that the reader knows how to read and has memories of learning to read. The purpose of this assumption is that the reader is able to relate to the different events that the people who were interviewed in the book speak about.
Overall, I would say that this book is a wonderful tool for looking at how people learn to read and what affects the way they learn to read.

This nonfiction book consists of information about literature and growing up poor in Britain.The authors' purposes for writing this book include: to show that just because some people are poor they can still learn to read, and some read well. Another purpose consists of getting people to think about the poor and to help them, including help them read and read better. This book is interesting because it talks about how people learn to read and how their vocabulary and reading skills progress. However, this book is slow reading. It doesn't use too many uncommonly-used words, but it takes time to absorb what the authors are saying. It is definitely a cultural learning book.

This book focuses on Spitalfields and The City in London of England. This is a very well written book and i am truely glad that I have it. The key concepts of this book are stated in the prologue (xvi,xvii) and explain how this book came to life. The key concepts of this book are the four myths about reading and literacy. The first myth deals with poverty and the effects poverty has on how to read. The second myth is focused around early reading and the proper type of parenting. The third myth is associated with the different types of languages and the learning styles used at home and those used at the schools. And the last myth is of Britain's way of teaching and if it is correct. These four myths are really important in the conclusions of this book. These myths are what make the book and Gregory and Williams prove them wrong.had the chance to read it. Gregory and Williams let the purpose of this book lie in the title of the book, City Literacies (Learning to read across generations and cultures). This book gives just one example of the many different places around the world that have/had migration and issues dealing with language and reading. This book focuses on Spitalfields and The City in London of England. Gregory and Williams are giving one example of language issues by writing about England; however, I think they want the readers to be aware that this is going on all over the world. The purpose of this book is to make the readers aware of the different languages and how literacy ties into language and the gradual changes over the generations.

Not so long ago, the thought of running a corporate PBX on a client/server network was unthinkable, almost ludicrous. Now many companies have a VoIP (Voice Over IP) PBX via their Cisco routers. Some organizations have separate VON (Voice Over Network) systems. While the benefits of convergence are many, their security implications are often ignored or, when they are considered, are addressed too far along into the development process.

That convergence is the focus of Voice and Data Security. About a third of the book addresses the fundamentals of voice and data security, covering topics such as cryptography, sniffing, and spoofing. The rest of the book deals with securing digital and voice assets.

As an example, PBX and mail fraud are huge problems facing corporate America. Yet while most companies are aware of the situation, many organizations don't do all they can to secure their voice systems. This book contains an excellent policy and audit checklist on how to set up a corporate PBX policy. Items such as protection management, standards and procedures, technical safeguards, and incident response are discussed in the checklist, which alone is worth the cost of the book.

A single unauthorized modem in a corporate network will undermine firewalls, cryptography, and all other protection mechanisms. Thus, the authors cover how war dialers and telephone line scanners can be used to ensure that the back doors that unauthorized corporate modems create are closed.

Voice and Data Security is valuable to those needing a good introduction to the core ideas and security repercussions involved with the convergence of voice and data systems. It speaks volumes.

I am a senior engineer for network security operations. I read "Voice and Data Security" (VaDS) to learn more about vulnerabilities in the voice world. A search for "voice security" here yields four results, of which VaDS is the only in-print title. Although I would have preferred VaDS to focus solely on voice security issues, I still recommend it as the only modern published reference for this critical topic.

When reading VaDS, it's important to remember that all of the authors have some sort of relationship with San Antonio-based voice security company SecureLogix. That's ok, as Foundstone is the powerhouse behind the successful "Hacking Exposed" book series. Some parts of the book read like commercials for SecureLogix products like TeleSweep and TeleWall, but the authors largely focus on non-proprietary solutions to voice security.

VaDS is strongest when it speaks solely to voice security issues, and, to a lesser degree, network infrastructure. I learned quite a bit about tapping phones (ch. 11), voice mail abuse (ch. 14), and voice-data convergence (ch. 5). Chapters on broadband infrastructure and exploitation were helpful. Even though the final chapter seemed out of place, its intriguing coverage of cyber law kept my attention.

Less helpful were the chapters covering general security issues, such as cryptography (ch. 18), malware (ch. 19), sniffing (ch. 20), scanning (ch. 21), passwords (ch. 22), firewalls (ch. 23), IDS (ch. 24), and denial of service (ch. 26). This material is so well-covered elsewhere that its appearance did little to help VaDS distinguish itself. Chapter 27 was an exception, with its succinct discussions of popular Microsoft IIS web server vulnerabilities.

Aside from including well-worn material, VaDS suffered slightly from a few technical mistakes. Explanations of buffer overflows in chapter 4 needlessly associated them with TCP-based sessions. UDP-based buffer overflows are exploited regularly. The author of this chapter also seems to believe that buffer overflows are a problem because they overwrite "user ID and privilege information" on the stack. That's rarely the case; subverting return pointers is the problem. Chapters 8 and 15, describing voice protocols like H.323, were difficult to understand, and ch. 18 (p. 283) makes an unsubstantiated claim that "a well-known Mid-East terrorist was discovered to be using steganography." Typos on pp. 155-156 appeared, and port 443 was replaced by 444 on p. 69.

Overall, VaDS marks a welcome contribution to the information security community. I plan to include it in my tier two security analyst reading list, with recommendations to concentrate on its voice-related content. Hopefully the second edition will strip out the unnecessary network security coverage found elsewhere, and include more excellent explanations of voice security issues.

(Disclaimer: I received a free review copy from the publisher.)

"the prophet who prophesies will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord ONLY IF HIS PREDICTION COMES TRUE."(Jer.28:9)

This is the inerrant litmus test of Bible prophecy: 100% Definitive Factuality in ADVANCE of freely chosen agent decisions, 0% error rate. Openism is DOA,AWOL,Mene-Mene-Tekel-Uparsin at this point! The handwriting is on the wall!

"Hear the Word of the Lord all you exiles in Babylon. This is what the Lord Almighty says about Ahab and Zedekiah who are prophesying lies to you in My Name. 'I will hand them over to King Neb. and he will put them to death before your very eyes. Because of them, all the exiles from Judah in Babylon will use this curse: The Lord treat you like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon burned in the fire.'"

An irrefutable case of EXHAUSTIVE DEFINITIVE DIVINE FOREKNOWN FACTUALITY about the future free decisions of Ahab; Zedekiah; King of Babylon specifically using fire for execution; and all exiles using the exact, precisely predicted curse based on the free decisions of Ahab, Zedekiah, King (all inextricably interlinked) in the OMNI-Mind of God, freely played out in time

Openism's 'extensive indefinite forecasting' cannot account for such prophecies. (Too many to list here - see separate reviews for 'Beyond the Bounds'; 'God Under Fire'; 'Bound Only Once'.)

Why must Gregory Boyd set up a hyper-Calvinist view as straw antagonist, then make his 'case' for why his Open Theory is the 'most Biblical' (compared to what??)? Ajarism (Free Futures are seen by God as through an ajar door darkly) can't help but seem more palatable by comparison with the ultra-Calvinist
'Closed door known but to God' or Liberal Process 'Wide-Open door unknown to God'.

The nebulous argument for 'Infinite Intelligence' to compensate for 'Non-infinite knowledge of free futures' (known as Divine Nescience,i.e Ignorance) is verbal legerdemain for denial of genuine, meaningful OMNI-science as the Bible teaches.

God is, according to Boydian theory, MULTI-scient or MAXIMI-scient (God knows a lot, more than anyone, the maximum logically knowable, but not quite EVERYTHING as the Bible says).

Instead, Gregory makes God out to be of such great intellect to work around His deemed lack of Infinite Foreknowledge of all future mortal free Shalls and Shall nots, Wills and Will nots. Boyd invents a new sub-Attribute to compensate for eviscerating another Attribute to allow God to come out O.K. in the end.

But it backfires. It only creates a deity in a limited human's intellectual image. In exchange for the Biblical Jesus of Infinite awareness, foresight, prescience and precise knowledge of all Space-Time events/decisions from Eternity Past to Eternity Future and all in between, we are left with a supreme weather forecaster or chess grandmaster. However as we all know, weathermen are often surprised, wrong, erroneous and mistaken. Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue have both lost against each other. Is this the sort of Jesus that Gregory Boyd sincerely believes in, trying to persuade others to accept,too?

'Infinite Intelligence' is woeful consolation for 'knowing' free agent futures as predominantly possibles, maybes, contingents, risky what-ifs, potentials, probables, likelihoods,
projections, indeterminates, variables, random chance, unpredictabilities, uncertainties that may after all not materialize to divine expectations/forecasts.

It is here that the equally nebulous Boydian concept of 'Theo-Repentism' must be triggered to explain how Jesus handles free futures that don't work out as anticipated. When confronted with new information, or in relating to free decision makers, the Eternal Lord Jesus then changes the divine mind, repents (of wrong-doing, wrong-guessing,wrong-imagining, wrong-thinking,wrong-prognosticating, wrong-speaking,wrong-predicting, wrong-prophesying, etc.) or regrets, rues prior decisions based on incomplete data, wishing they could be do-overs or in need of retraction or repair. Infinite Intelligence kicks in at this stage for 'divine damage control' to salvage a draw and prevent checkmate from all the free-ranging opponents who act/decide contrary to the limits of divine predictability in the chaotic chessgame/meteorology of life.

Sound puzzling? It is. Especially when you read the seminal book by Gregory Boyd that started it all: 'Trinity & Process' (see separate review), based on Hartshorne's 'Omnipotence & Other Theological Mistakes' (see review where you discover that Boyd's Omnipotence is no less limited than his Omniscience).

It seems OMNI (Latin for All) cannot mean OMNI anymore, at least for Open Theorists. What then becomes of OMNI-presence? Infiniteness? Eternality?
Transcendence? OMNI-sapience (ALL-Wise)? What happens to all the Historic-Evangelically understood Trinitarian Attributes? How are they Openistly redefined/updated for modern consumption? Only God knows (or, maybe He doesn't? Stay tuned!)

Most unfortunate that books like this which incorporate non-evangelical 'theology' alongside historic Christianity are distributed for uncritical consumption by a non-discerning readership. Seeking wider respectability, Openism/Ajar Theory merely shows with every published page how far Boyd-Pinnock-Sanders have headed AWAY from the Bible and TOWARD a vivid, free agent imagination a la borrowed elements of Hartshorne's Processistic, non-Scriptural philosophic fabrications.

The LORD said it best in Job 42:7 "I am angry with you..because you have not spoken of Me what is right."

This book rates 3 stars for including 3 Biblical/Evangelical views, but subtract stars for Gregory's use of contemporary philosophic presuppositions applied to selective misinterpreted Bible texts to provide a marginal audience the latest heterodox option to counter the straw antagonist of hyper-Calvinism.

Ultimately can't persuade in any cogent, balanced, unbiased way.

The OMNITrue One Who has Eternal Exhaustively Divine Definitive Foreknown Factuality of ALL Free Futures, Infinitely Uninformable ,Unrepentable,Inerrant, Incorrectible, Infallible, OMNI-Present (Ever-Present I AM in ALL point-moments of space-time: Length-Width-Height-Past-Present-Future), Eternal, Limitlessly Aware,OMNI-Relational,Interactive LORD Jesus said,

"Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?"

Just one Scripture from Jesus settles the Foreknowledge Issue once for all:

"I AM TELLING YOU NOW BEFORE IT HAPPENS SO THAT WHEN IT DOES HAPPEN YOU WILL BELIEVE THAT I AM HE." (John 13:19)
Not forecasting, possibilizing, but TELLING. Not if, but WHEN.
Not may,might,could,perhaps should, but DOES happen. 0% Uncertain. 100% definite. That's genuine Omniscience. Amen.

Interesting that this book would present as one of the "evangelical" options of what God knows and when He can know it:
the curious notion that God possesses EXTENSIVE INDEFINITE FORECASTING (a la weather prognosticator or chess grandmaster) subject to all the iffiness and unknowable randomness of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Chaos Theory working themselves out in a fallen world unbeknownst in advance to the Creator! Boyd's presupposition is THE FUTURE DOES NOT EXIST YET, EVEN FOR THE OMNISCIENT/ETERNAL CREATOR GOD, except as mere possibilities yet to be freely actualized.
Therefore He is the deity of what is humanly,logically possible.

Boyd's Neo-Processistic philosophical theorizing becomes more incoherent with each book. How can God know how He will definitely act in the future if He doesn't know how sinners and demons will definitely behave? If our decisions don't exist until we freely make them, how can God's decisions exist until He freely makes His in response to ours in response to others in response to the devil's in response to... ad infinitum?? If all God can know are ultimately possibles (not actuals, definites), then ALL He can know about future agency is INDEFINITE (MAYBE). Thus Boyd teaches EXTENSIVE INDEFINITE FORECASTING - which he calls Omniscience! Talk about verbal legerdemain! God can only know what is humanly,finitely knowable

A careful study of the Bible shows rather the truth that there is NO LIMIT to the extent (past,present,future) of God's knowledge. It is ETERNALLY EXHAUSTIVE DIVINE DEFINITIVE FOREKNOWN FACTUALITY OF ALL FREE FUTURES-OMNIPRESCIENCE
His understanding is INFINITE. That God definitely knows in advance precisely what sinners and demons WILL/WILL NOT do doesn't mean therefore that they are thus forced to, or thereby lose their agency/moral responsibility. Neither is God to blame for the foreknown exercise of their agency. He retains full final say, ultimate control and awareness as definite in advance of ALL they will choose to do. Because some mortal minds can't reconcile this profundity, Open Theory (Ajarism) is the misbegotten result. With all due respect to sincere but sincerely wrong Gregory Boyd, there is little about Neo-processism or EIF (EXTENSIVE INDEFINITE FORECASTING) that can be understood in any sense as Biblical or Orthodox Truth about God's Attributes such as OMNISCIENCE/OMNIPRESENCE. God is ever PRESENT at every point/moment of space/time, including ALL the FUTURE. The I AM is ALREADY THERE/THEN waiting for us just as He IS with us HERE/NOW.

Otherwise well-written. 1 star for attempting to resurrect the long-discredited 'Nescience' pseudo-theology of the late 19th Century (with some elements of 16th Cent. Socinianism) via a self-refuting misunderstanding of how God interacts with ALL FUTURE MORTAL AGENCY: Comprehensively, and for Open Theorists, Incomprehendible.

Most of the reviews on this page miss the boat entirely. Rather than actually reviewing or recommending DF the reviewers are merely venting their anger because their particular view is challenged.

Pay them no mind. DF is an excellent book. Buy it and read all the views with as much of an open humble mind as you can. It's better than the alternative spoon feeding that is rampant in many circles of Evangelicalism today.

The glossary is a great idea more publishers should follow.

Keep em coming Eddy, Beilby, Gannsle ....etc.

In case your one of the 96% who never really looks at the "size" of a book when you order it, make sure you do for this one. It's only a pocket version of Lady Gregory's book, and, although the website does not tell you so, this is an ABRIGDED version.

Just know what you're getting.

I have read this book and find that the first part is fairly accurate when I compare it with other translations of the stories about Finn and the Fianna. However, I read the notes section for the stories about Cuchulain and noticed that Lady Gregory states that she compiled these stories, while the book jacket states she translated them. Unfortunately she has used several different sources for one of my favorite tales (Deirdre and Naoise) and it makes me wonder how accurate her version of this tale is. She has some elements in the ending that I have found attributed to later versions of the tale (she uses the later version of Deirdre stabbing herself instead of her dashing her head on the rocks), but the fact that she admits in her notes to editing and compiling the tales as she sees fit makes me wonder what else she edited because she didn't like. Personally, I am searching for a translation that is more accurate when it comes to Irish tales, because I feel that the original meaning becomes muddled when tales are edited to match a person's taste.

Even though I've never read Irish Myths and Legends, I can assure you I would like it. I'm always interested in the mythology of my heratige. There might be some of My personal favorites; Cuchculain, Finn McCoul, and The Voyage of Bran. That's why I, Jacob Behnke, a ten year older from Hastings, Minnesota, highly recomend Irish Myths and Legends.

If you have not been near a Biology syllabus in a while, this is the book for you. The authors do not assume that you know everything. The chapters cover all the major topics (the only supplementation you may need is diagrams such as those of plants). I found that the practice tests could have been better structured because the Ecology tests are separated from the Molecular tests without the common core section that's used in the actual exam. All in all, a good book - using this book alone I earned a score of 660!

By Tom Bennett
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ralph Ellison wrote that Aesop and Uncle Remus teach us that comedy "is a disguised form of philosophical instruction."
Growing up in the hotbed of philosophy that was Wren's Nest, the west Atlanta home where his father Joel Chandler Harris spun the engaging "Uncle Remus" stories, Julian LaRose Harris had to have experienced a good deal more intellectual growth than the average boy in Atlanta in the 1870s.
He also had to have gained from the stories a roundabout introduction to philosophy, and each day had rub off on him the gentleness and altruism of his famous father.
This upbringing and his world travel formed a sophisticated Georgian, one who would prove be out of place in his home state.
Julian LaRose Harris and his brilliant wife Julia Collier Harris counted among their friends the newspaper titan H.L. Mencken and the sociologist Howard Odum. The Harrises' were on the world stage at a pivotal time, while Julian was general manager of James Gordon Bennett's Paris Herald during World War I.
Julian covered the 1896 Democratic national convention in Chicago at which William Jennings Bryan was nominated; the Versailles peace conference; and the Scopes monkey trial.
You cannot retain the narrow world view of a west Atlantan of the 1870s while you are hearing firsthand the oratory of a Bryan, or watching the streets of Paris fill up with the wounded from the Battle of Verdun.
Julian Larose Harris emerged from all this far too progressive to last for long as editor of a Georgia daily in the 1920s. He flamed out on the Columbus Enquirer-Sun after nine years, but not before it won the Pulitzer gold medal for public service for facing up to the Klan. (That "it" is correct, for the gold medal goes to the paper and not the person.)
"Someone had to be hated" is a book you can like a lot.
It answers questions that I've long had about this engaging pair who formed the second generation of a distinguished Georgia journalism family -- Julian and Julia.
What experiences shaped their progressive views, ruinous for their careers? What are the details of their perilous defiance of the Ku Klux Klan while putting out the Columbus Enquirer-Sun? What made Julia a notable figure in U.S. journalism in her own right?
All these answers are provided by authors Gregory C. Lisby and William F. Mugleston, and Georgians owe them a debt.
Julian LaRose Harris got a jump-start on The Atlanta Constitution as an 18-year-old reporter, but he soon would depart on his journalism odyssey taking him to Chicago to Europe to the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Columbus. He initially didn't want any help from The Constitution, his father's newspaper, for fear of charges of nepotism. If only second-generation journalists strictly applied that standard!
Harris' clear flaw as a progressive editor was that he wrote for Georgia journalists at least as much as for the readers of Columbus. No wonder they never subscribed as heavily to his Enquirer-Sun as they did the rival Ledger of the nondescript Page family.
A frequent target for what the authors call Harris' "broadsides" was The Atlanta Constitution. It doesn't come across well at all. He described it as the "Atlanta Morning Moddle-Coddle." It made no editorial comment after the Enquirer-Sun exposed how Gov. Clifford Walker told journalists he was headed to Philadelphia for a rest - A rest? In Philadelphia? -- but in fact he went to Kansas City to address the convention of the Ku Klux Klan.
Perhaps Harrises' most strident criticism for the three Atlanta papers -- Constitution, Journal and Georgian -- was that in that era they "were not representative of anything except the cheapest politics, and the most childish rivalry in obtaining or controlling cheap political jobs." Ralph McGill's emergence as a progressive about 1938 turned that around.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has cautioned that we must give the Arab world time to democratize. In our own experience, he points out, we gradually enfranchised our citizens over a 200-year period.
It's in that light that journalism history must view the 58 years from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board Education, from 1896 to 1954. That's a period squarely in the middle of which Julian LaRose Harris briefly flashed across the firmament as Georgia's liberal editor. Even so he never took an integrationist position. It put him at enough personal risk to advocate what them was progressivism of Georgia editorial pages. It was this: It's wrong to drag people from their beds and hang them from trees until they are dead.
This book reiterates how the immediate heirs of Joel Chandler Harris could have used marketing and business know-how. In the teens, they sold away Wren's Nest to a mismanaging committee of 100, for a pittance. In the twenties, Julian and Julia never figured out that their Enquirer-Sun bookkeeper, Francis Edward LaCoste, was stealing them blind.
Whether they intended to or not , the authors relieve the heartbreak of the Harrises' loss of control of the Enquirer-Sun by relating the story of the "cornpone-and-potlikker debate." What a welcome thing it is for the reader!
Gov. Huey P. Long of Louisiana bragged how he won over road contractors by serving them potlikker, with a platter of cornbread for dunking in it. Julian Harris, now news director of The Atlanta Constitution, led as the paper galvanized support across the South for the view that it was far better to crumble cornpone in your potlikker rather than dunk it.
Clark Howell Sr., The Constitution's partisan owner, had not fared very well in the authors' narrative until now. We see his witty side as he cables dryly from his Hawaii vacation getaway: "The boys at home have overlooked my instructions not to engage in any serious controversy during my absence."

I bought this book thinking it was a textbook for preparation for the ASCP molecular pathology certification exam. Instead, I find it is a print-out of power-point slides, without any accompanying text or commentary from the lectures they were used in! Many of the slides are diagrams and graphs which are worthless because of this lack of information. There are hardly any references, either....