I'm not so sure about the integrity of the publisher of a book that serves an aid to the wallet but an adversary to the eyes of one who is not so accustomed to reading such an esoteric font.

Blackstone was widely read in America for a century after it was published. Lawyers practicing in the West almost relied entirely on this and the Bible to defend or prosecute. This particular series of volumes is a reproduction of the original publication by Blackstone (which BTW had eight revisions while Blackstone was still alive). The print is large and dark (and very 18th century, i.e. ss is S (or f)), and makes for easy reading. The Editor's notes appear at the beginning of the book and are not intrusive of the volume itself. Overall a very nice reproduction and I found it a nice read.

George Rutler is one of the shining stars of the Catholic right. He's had his own show on Mother Angelica's network, his videos are for sale in conservative Catholic bookstores, and he's written a few books that are highly touted among conservative Catholics. I haven't read all of them, only his book on St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests. Frankly, I wasn't impressed with it. This book is a bad imitation of Chesterton, written exclusively for an audience of like minded persons as the author. His smug self-rightousness didn't leave me wanting to run out and buy his "complete works." You can almost hear him patting himself on the back after what he regards as a particularly clever statement. It's not a bad book if you agree with absolutely everything the author says. In fact, his world would be a pretty nice one to live in. The real world, however, the one most people live in from day to day, doesn't bear much of a resemblance to this guy's depiction of it.

It's an inspiring story, and Rutler writes a wonderful look at his life. It's a good read, but is very intellectual and philosophical - not your typical book about all the great God does thru the Saint but rather those great things in the context of life in St. John Vianney's time. Not for a lazy reader - it's too full of deep ideas.

The immediate sequel to Eclipse of the Kai, The Dark Door Opens builds onto the storyline of its predecessor. The writing cannot compare too well against the later books in the series, when John Grant has a firmer foothold with this line, but there are some memorable moments. The tension-charged confrontation between Vonotar the Traitor and the Guildmaster, the firestorm attack upon the city of Toran, and the flight to Holmgard are highlights of this book.

The Dark Door Opens take place immediately after the first Legends book, Eclipse of the Kai. It begins with the young hero, Silent Wolf, who has just changed his name to Lone Wolf, fleeing the desetruction of the Monastery where those of his order had trained for centuries. Lone Wolf is now the last of his order, the Kai, and must make his way to the capital of Sommerlund to warn the king that the Darklords have destroyed the Kai. And so, he makes a treacherous journey on foot and horse, through forest and stream, hills and ancient hallowed grounds before the spires of Holmgard are visible. But he is not alone, another young man, Banedon of the Magician's Guild at Toran has also learnt of the destruction of the Kai and becomea spiritual brother to Lone Wolf. Banedon must return to his guild and convince those present to take action. Meanwhile, the forces of darkness await the two would-be heroes around every corner, plotting their destruction and a fall of Sommerlund. Vonotar the Traitor's treachery and betrayal of his homeland has caused the downfall and almost complete extermination of the Kai, and only Lone Wolf has the abilities to stop him...before it is too late.

This book is a collection of eight essays. The first seven are each written on the subject of one of the "deadly" sins of sloth, anger, lust, gluttony, pride, avarice and envy. The eight is on despair. Each of the famous authors ruminates on the sin, looking at it from his or her unique perspective.

Overall I found the essays well written, and the book to be easy to read. This book makes for some lightweight reading, short and simple, but without much substance. Overall, I don't recommend it.

Eight essays on Sloth, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Pride, Avarice, Envy, and Despair (yes that's 8 sins). To be honest I bought it because of Pynchon, (whose essay -if you are even a slight fan- makes the buy worth it) but read on to the back cover. I quickly discovered that these authors compiled around the topic of sins is a great way to see inside these writers styles and appraoch to a similar idea. Some I'd read before, and others introduced themselves in this novel. All were unique and interesting in their own right, especially for someone -me- who isn't terribly interested in sins. Highly reccomended!

Despite the closely guarded nature of the MMPI's questions, they're all here--yes, all of them--in an appendix. What were they thinking? Anyway, this is the main reason to buy the book. Crazy, eh? The test is misused quite often anyway.

In a critical area of MMPI-2 interpretation which is often overlooked Butcher, Graham, Williams & Ben-Porath have covered a topical area which serves not only as an adjunct to traditional clinical interpretation, but offers the serious MMPI and MMPI-2 scholar the tools to demonstrate competency in clinical interpretation of the MMPI-2 Personality inventory.

Although I found philosophical challenges, (an astute attorney will point out the technical differences between a "test" and an "inventory" -- a "test" has right and wrong answers, an inventory does not), I found the work to be of a generally scholarly nature and a most welcome addition to my bookshelf. The authors did their research, but then what else would be expected from the primary author, Butcher, who has previously spent time in remote rural areas giving MMPI's to members of serpent-handling religious cults?

I was impressed with the thoroughness of the volume. Four stars in lieu of five, only because of some terms which were used are not consistent with appropriate terminology for traditional psychometrics, and an error found in a technical aspect of the work (information available on request.)

This volume should be required reading for psychologists who desire to demonstrate competence in use of the MMPI-2. However, the MMPI remains, in my opinion, the instrument of choice and one or more of the authors have certainly contributed to that assessment instument as well.

It should be pointed out that throughout the development/revision of the MMPI into the current MMPI-2 it was reported the changes were made, in part, because of antiquated wording. However, the authors reveal the MMPI-2 revision retained the original wording for item 369. Go figure. Worse yet, that item seems to also inappropriately substitute the word "feeling" for what is actually, fairly clearly, a "belief". The revision was developed by a team of psychologists, whom the authors could have pointed out should have "known better."

Overall however, an excellent reference for the competent psychological clinican. The quality and research behind this publication is apparant.

JD #30

This has a good explanation of regular expression search/replace and the Emacs regexp syntax. It also has a lot of little tidbits not in the O'Reilly book (which is still a better starting place). It's a bit older though (1992) and has chapters on Fortran and Pascal modes so a lot of trees are dying for nothing .

I bought this after reading all of the O'Reilly book and most of the O'Reilly "Writing GNU Emacs Extension" and have only gotten a few new things out of it, so it's good for completists like myself.

One of the neat things I learned were: when you C-x C-f to open a file, rather than backspacing to erase the path Emacs provided you can just type two slashes (//) and then the path to the file you want (of course C-a C-k would work too, but I want choice, damnit! :-)

The organization is also very different than the O'Reilly book; for example there is a whole chapter on "Administering Emacs" (how to find the parts of it on your system), a huge chapter that is nothing but a command reference (with keybindings), and "how to edit" happens in only three chapters, with the following chapters each devoted to specific things (except for the "Miscellaneous" chapter).

The print quality is not the best, if that matters to you, but it is a sizable book and a decent desktop reference.

I liked the depth of examples in this book. Where the O'Reilly book "Learning GNU Emacs" gave an excellent introduction and overview, this book gave more involved examples. For example in the regexp-search-replace, this book showed the use of \( and \) for grouping and \1 \2 \3 for where to place the each group in the replacement string. If your are new to Emacs, get the O'Reilly book; then get this book next.

The first volume in a series of group training development games. Although very basic in instruction and content, this book does provide a number of very good activities designed for team building and team learning experiences. If you are familiar with other works by J. William Pfeiffer, this book is a must for your training and development library.

Quality group exercises that apply to a variety of group sizes, needs and learning experiences. Exercises easily adaptable to various learning outcomes.

I came across this book last summer when I was in Stratford, Ontario, attending their annual Shakespeare festival. I had just seen Henry V so this title caught my eye. A glance through the table of contents made me think this book might be a real eye-opener. Unfortunately, I ended up being a bit disappointed.

Sutherland and Watts take turns addressing what they call different "puzzles" in various Shakespearean plays. The problem is, except for the rare exception, most of these questions can be answered in various ways depending on how the play is performed. For example, is Malvolio vengeful or reconciled at the end of Twelfth Night? Or, does Bottom actually sleep with Titania in Midsummer Nights Dream? In both cases the ultimate answer is, it depends on how you play it. There is no one answer fixed in the text.

Even questions that seem like they should have a specific answer like, who killed Woodstock in Richard II?, are given waffling answers. There's simply no way to know. Again, the ultimate answer will lie in how the play is performed. Different companies will lead their audience to different answers depending on what they decide to focus.

Ultimately, this book has value in the sense that it points out what some of the issues are with various plays. On the other hand, the writing here is not very dynamic. The authors rarely take a position and, when they do, they approach it so weakly that they do not inspire a response in the reader. Perhaps the authors felt that they didn't want to provoke any controversy with their readers but, if they had, it might have made for a more readable book.

Shakespeare wrote plays that were to be seen only as performances before live audiences, running around two and a half hours, on a rather small stage. And he probably wrote pretty fast. Are the numerous inconsistencies (or apparent inconsistencies) one finds in the plays genuine errors of oversight, deliberate toying with the audience, unavoidable given the physical limitations of actors and stage, or part of some grand artistic design? For any given play, the answer can be any or all of the above.

The authors discuss about 30 such "glitches," and seem to derive most of their fun from summarizing how various Shakespearian commentators (few distinguished for intellect) have dealt with the glitches over the past 350 years. Sometimes, the authors appear to me to be deliberately obtuse about an issue, perhaps because they had some trouble finding as many as 30 genuinely puzzling glitches to comment upon.

One comment I have about the whole matter, which the authors do not make: Shakespeare's intellectual and artistic depths seem virtually boundless, and every seeming inconsistency might well have a reason for being other than carelessness or a schedule that didn't allow complete revision. The authors are aware of this, even when they don't state it explicitly.

Among the questions discussed: Why does Shakespeare's Henry V during the battle of Agincourt twice order all French prisoners to be slaughtered in cold blood, yet have "full fifteen hundred" prisoners "of good sort" left after the battle, not to mention a like number of "common men"?

Why does Juliet say, "Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore (why) art thou Romeo," when the problem is that he is a Montague? Why do so many of the plays end with nothing resolved, everything hanging in suspension? [Notorious examples are Troilus and Cressida, and Love's Labour's Lost. The answer here is probably, oh say can you see, a sequel being demanded by audiences.] How is Desdemona able to deliver several lines of dialogue after being strangled or smothered by Othello? How can King Lear be more than 80 and Juliet only 13? And so on.

Some of the answers were fairly obvious to me, although apparently not so to the authors. Juliet falls in love with Romeo when they are both in disguise, and it is the revelation that he is who he is that is upsetting. He could be referred to as Romeo, Romeo Montague, or Montague, and the sense would be the same. The action of Richard II would cover 30 years or so in real time, yet the performers would have looked the same and worn the same costumes throughout the play, so Shakespeare has the characters proclaim themselves as "lusty, young" in the early scenes, and having "worn so many winters out" in the last scenes. Further tipoff to this necessary compression is that where ever the dialogue would naturally refer to "years," it instead refers to "minutes" and "hours." As the authors put it, Shakespeare has invented "Warp Time."

The book is a great pleasure to read, and will greatly deepen your knowledge of Shakespearean drama, and your viewing of any Shakespearean film. Highly recommended.

This book showed each side to any conspiracy that could have been involved in the Lincoln assassination. I became confused after reading a chapter and then all of that historian thinking was rejected by some other guy. If you are into that kinda thing, sure go ahead and read the book, but I just got confused. I can't determine what really happened and what was people's thoughts.

Since the day Lincoln was assassinated, many theories have emerged about who was the mastermind behind the plot. Among the accused have been members of the Confederate government, including Jefferson Davis, the Catholic Church and members of Lincoln's own Cabinet.

Hanchett examines these conspiracy theories and the people who put forward the theories in an attempt to find out if a higher authority, civil or religious, ordered John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators to kill Lincoln and members of his Cabinet. By examining each theory individually as well as the motives behind those who suggested the theories, Hanchett does an excellent job of refuting some of the more unlikely theories.

Like most of Shakespeare's comidies, LLL involved a couple of very independent women falling in love with a couple of guys who were in love with them too. It also brought mistaken identities into play and, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, it had a play within the play. The humor was mostly in the form of puns, most of which were hard to understand the first time through. The ending was really bad, though, because the girls didn't get together with the guys like they should have if Shakespeare had planned a happy ending. All-in-all, I would only recommend this play for really serious Shakespearean scholars, as it is almost too dense for us laypeople

this is witty play about four guys who vow to sequester themselves for three years in serious study, but who are forced to forswear their vows when four attractive women show up and upset their plans. the humor is mainly in the form of wordplay, as only shakespeare can do, and the verbal jousting between berowne and his lady is especially entertaining, and anticipates the tete-a-tetes between petruchio and katherina in "taming of a shrew" and benedick and beatrice in "much ado about nothing". definitely worth a read, and if you can get it, the bbc television production of LLL is also worth seeing. last of all, i disagree with the other poster who complained of the ending. i thought it was pretty clear that the couples would get together in a year's time. so the ending was implicitly happy. only someone who is accustomed to instant gratification could find fault with it.