The day I met Dr. Lee on the airport in South Africa I thought he would be a person who are too educated to talk to. You see he have at least 10+ doctorate degrees, so the assumption is, one will have difficulties talking and understanding him. The truth - his is one wonderful down to earth person. And he really knows his Bible. So if you want to have the Bible Book Revelation revealed in a Bible study book commentary - easy to read and follow, then get this book - even if it is only for the very informative footnotes on the pages. I have to admit at first I did not like the many footnotes ( I skipped it), then I start reading them and found how Dr. Lee incorporates his knowledge in books, so that everybody can follow. In short - a very-good book!

our linear algebra class prof. told us that this is the most readable math book, that's why the math dept. switched to this book this year. =)

The author has a healthy respect for Drake without becoming too enamored. The author points out at near the end of the book that Drake was the right man at the right time. On Drake's later expeditions (that were failures) the Spanish had fortified their holdings in the new world to a point that made it more difficult for privateers. This, however, does not detract from Drake's earlier success which would not have been accomplished by men of lesser genius.

The volumes of Systematic Theology provide clear chapters on some of the most substantive questions of systematic theology. The various authors do a good job of making clear the mysteries of the Catholic faith. One can't read these books without gaining a better sense of how the Catholic tradition understands such topis as revelation, eschatology, the Trinity and Christ.

"Apocalypse Now! Redux" is celebrated as one of the most powerful anti-war manifestos. One of the reasons for its long-term success is, without a doubt, its precocious post-modernism. The Air Cavalry scene, in particular, conveys a message that will become part of the post-modern intellectual credo. Most core Western cultural symbols, old and new, are intrinsically violent, "barbaric." "Apocalypse Now!" is not only a harbinger of this vision, it takes it to the extreme. In it, even the counterculture, in other contexts celebrated as a "liberating force," is intertwined with the lethal vines of death. In the new release of the movie the Playboy culture and the untrammeled eroticism of the sixties become central driving forces of the Vietnam war. In Coppola's own words "This is an L.A. war." His synopsis of the movie sums it up: "The American War 'to bring civilization to the ignorant millions' is merely the extension of mercantile colonialism[;] the horror and savagery lie not in the jungle, but in the American culture itself, with its powerless [sic] technology and pop culture."

Although not very original-the idea goes all the way back to Marx-this vision, combined with a daring cinematography and paranoid atmosphere, made the movie into a landmark cinematic event. At the time (1979) it sent shivers down, for different reasons, obviously, many liberal and conservative spines.

When I first saw "Apocalypse Now!, behind the Iron Curtain, I found it an exhilarating visual experience. It gave me a glimpse into, I thought, a new world of meanings. Particularly intriguing was the idea that one can talk about war, usually associated with the "shoot 'em up" clichés of the "Dirty Dozen"-kind, without using grandiloquent musical scores and images. War can be "modern." Soldiers can smoke weed and listen to rock-and-roll. The Rolling Stones and the Doors had to shape a war that took place in the middle of the Aquarian era. This could be accurate and honest in its intents, if not in details, I told myself until recently, since we are talking about an expressive work of art. I never gave a lot of thought to how much this really fit the ways of the American military or its war in Vietnam. Up to a point it sounded quite realistic to me that crazy American colonels could be surfing aficionados and that their use of technology would be as reckless as their military machinery would allow them. Why, I could not precisely tell, probably ignorance about the ways of American military would be the best explanation.

But, then, I had yet to hear about the Ia Drang battle. The eye openers were the movie "We were solidiers," released in March, 2002 and the book with the same title. They recount the 3-day battle of November 16-19, 1965 between units of the same 1st Air Cavalry Division that appears in Coppola's movie and the 33rd, 66th and 302nd North Vietnamese Army regiments, infiltrated in South Vietnam from Cambodia. The movie, far less esthetically ambitious than "Apocalypse Now!," is however painstakingly accurate. It helps you understand not only the Vietnam War but where Coppola's "Apocalypse Now!" fails the test of a truly great work of art.

Coppola fails to penetrate to the raw reality of the Vietnam war. This is because he utilizes and refines in his movie derivative material. His characters and icons-human, intellectual and historical-come from a large repository of artistically already transfigured-with a political-radial agenda-materials.

The movie draws on journalistic work directly influenced by the counter-culture. Some of them seem lifted directly from the famous, for its partisanship, photo-essay "Vietnam, Inc" by Philip Jones Griffith and prefaced by Noam Chomsky. The scene in which Kilgore offers water from his canteen to a Viet Cong fighter wounded in the gut, saying "Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from my canteen any day," it's obviously inspired from a similar episode depicted in Griffith's book. There, a young Vietcong, although wounded in the abdomen and keeping his intestines inside with a wash bowl, was taken prisoner only after three days of fight, winning the respect of the American soldiers, who offered him water with approximately the same words used by Kilgore.

In another scene, Kilgore is shown flicking "death cards" atop of Vietcong corpses. This is a "creative" reinterpretation of a war folklore theme. Peter Cowie, the author of the companion book launched with the new version of "Apocalypse Now!," explains that this is "a slight [sic] perversion of what occurred during the toughest phase of the war." The sic refers to the fact that in the real incident, presented in Michael Herr's "Dispatches," the Americans are the victims. "Once after an ambush that killed a lot of Americans," cites Cowie the "Dispatches" passage that inspired Coppola, "the NVA covered the field with copies of a photograph showing yet another young, dead American, and on its flipside a mimeographed message: 'Your x-ray have just come back from the lab and we think we know what your problem is.'" This is a quite surprising act of "artistic license" since Herr was directly involved in the movie.

In consequence, the themes and people presented in "Apocalypse Now!" spring not from reality but from the meta-reality of the anti-war movement. Nothing betrays more the fundamental shortcoming of "Apocalypse Now!" than Coppola's inability to put in perspective the fact that the officers who lead the American troops in Vietnam were, by and large, the same people who saved America and the world from the Nazi and Japanese totalitarianisms. They had little in common with the sixties and with the counterculture. Their personal cultural style was influenced much more by Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda and Humphrey Bogard than by Elvis or the Rolling Stones.

Everything I read in "We Were Soldiers" convinced me that, for example, Lt.-Col. William Kilgore is a very distorted representation of reality. He has very little to do with history and everything to do with the "post-colonial" caricature of the Vietnam War. The average battalion commander in the 1st Air Cavalry Division is much more like the author of "We were soldiers" himself, lieutenant general (ret.) Harold (Hal) Moore.

In 1965 a Lieutenant Colonel himself, commander of the 1st battalion, 7th Cavalry, 1 Air Cav. Division, his career and lifestyle do not betray any shadow of frivolity. Originally from Kentucky, father of 5 children in 1965, a West Point graduate, he commanded two companies in the Korean War and had spent many years abroad, in Europe and Asia, before returning to Fort Benning, in Georgia, to join the 1st Air Cav. An accomplished aviator and master parachutist he was a "straight and narrow" soldier, remembered for shaving, and demanding his troops and the occasional war correspondent attached to his unit to shave, too, every day, even when on the frontlines.

Moore's 1st Air Cav. commanding officers were made of the same stuff. Some of them were recruited from the heroes of the "greatest generation:" the battalion and company commanders of Salerno, Normandy and Bastogne. As Moore describes him in his book, the division commander of 1st Air Cav., "Major General Harry W.O. Kinnard, a native Texan [...] was West Point, class of 1939, and Airborne qualified in 1942. Kinnard was one of the shooting starts of the 101st Airborne in World War II. He was Brigadier General's Tony McAuliffe's operations officer, G-3, at the Battle of Bastogne in the Bulge, and the man who suggested that General McAuliffe specifically respond to German surrender demand with one historic word: "Nuts!"

I was disappointed to see that this book doesn't contain the original version of the Apocalypse Now script, by John Milius. It could have at least contained one of the later Milius/Coppola rewrites, such as the final revised 1975 version, which is easily found online. The simple fact is, those scripts provide a better reading experience; you're better off just watching the movie than reading this one. And, if you're a fledgling screenwriter, you're certainly not going to learn anything about the craft of scriptwriting from this book.

The reason being, as any viewer of the excellent documentary "Hearts of Darkness" knows, is that Coppola basically gave his actors free reign in expanding and ad-libbing their dialog on the set. Having read the earlier Milius/Coppola rewrites, I know that a lot of the lines in Apocalypse Now were in fact from the script. But many more of them (particularly Brando and Hopper's dialog) were in fact made up by the actors themselves. So to publish this book and say that it's a pure creation of Milius and Coppola is a bit misleading (something which Coppola himself vaguely asserts in his introduction).

A straight-up publication of an earlier version would have been preferable, if for the simple fact that it would give amazing insight into the twisted path this film took, from script to celluloid. For example, the '75 version mentioned above (the script Coppola started with on the set, but eventually rewrote day by day) not only opened with a psychedelic action scene, it also ended with one: a surreal, apocalyptic (of course) set-piece that involved untold VC, rampant destruction, and drugged-out GI's, with "Light My Fire" blaring over humongous stereos. It's interesting to imagine what the movie would've been like, had Coppola stuck with this ending, though from the beginning he claimed he had a problem with it; he found it too much like a comic book. Still, many have complained that the ending of Coppola's actual film is a bit underwhelming; there are many who would have in fact preferred the climactic sequence Milius envisioned. As for myself, I like both.

There are other interesting differences in the early Milius/Coppola drafts. For example, Willard is more of a devil-may-care super-soldier; he shares his joints with the PBR crew, and takes easily to murder: in one well-written sequence, Willard, realizing the French Plantation owners are attempting to trick him out of crucial fuel and ammo supplies, fools them by murdering some Vietnamese guards and planting their bodies in empty supply crates - crates which the French believe contain fuel and ammo. Kurtz as well is different, a blond-haired he-man who kills hundreds of VC single-handedly. Hardly the character Marlon Brando played in the film!

Actually, it's unfair of me to review these earlier incarnations of the script. The fact is, the version published here is far removed from them. But even though I'm unimpressed with this book, I still can't give it a poor review; even though it's mostly just a transcription, still, it's a transcription of my favorite movie, so that means it can't be ALL bad.

Alright Apocalypse Now (AN) fans, here it is, the complete screenplay of the recently released Apocalypse Now Redux (ANR). If you are looking for insight into this classic film, I suggest that you check out the appropriate books by Eleanor Coppola, Peter Cowie, and Karl French. If you want to enjoy this movie in a literary fashion, then look no further and pick up this book. Written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, this screenplay covers everything that you saw in AN and ANR. It's a great way to enjoy your favorite bits of dialog as well as to explore the restored scenes. It's a shame that there are only 8 pages of color and b&w photos (with only one shot from ANR) though. With the release of the expanded film, I would have expected a few more extras here. Anyway, this is a must have for all AN/ANR fans. And remember, Charlie don't surf!!!

John Russell wrote this "biography" while Francis Bacon was very much alive and tends to emphasize the influences on Bacon's work more from an environmental standpoint than an art historian view. But to jump into Bacon's raucous life "in medias res" is a gift that now can be savoured, like picking the grapes off the vines that in years to come will become a fine vintage wine. A diversion, and only in black and white reproductions, but a rather important comment in retrospect.

Like many biographies, Russell's work concentrates more on the man's times than on the man himself. While we learn a lot about what was going on around Bacon, what he himself experienced is left unexplored. Granted, Bacon made gathering biographical information very difficult, but I would have appreciated more insightful analysis of Bacon's life and its connections to his work. Overall it is a very good introduction to Bacon's career and total output, and includes a huge number of pictures that make the book extremely valuable as a reference. Unfortunately though, while there are many color reproductions, they are outnumbered by black and white ones that take away from truly experiencing the power of Bacon's work.

Well i really think that Francis Bacon is a great artist. I just stratid reading about his art work and he has so many goos drawings like Henrretta Moraes, and his selft portrait. They are veri nice drawings.So i really think his greatt.

When I finished this book I was disappointed that I had spent so much time on it. The solution to the mystery was unrealistic and there really was no way to see it coming.

In addition the characters acted very strangely, especially Cuddy's girlfriend. The main character himself had very little personality and the book just kind of moved along to its end.

There were lot's of Red Herring and interesting angles to the problem, but in the end I felt that the author had pulled a fast one.

Boston has been suffering a spate of divorce-attorney killings and Woodrow Wilson Gant, a womanizing former assistant D.A., joins their ranks in a brutal roadside, execution-style killing by someone he knows. Hard - fingerprint - evidence points directly to Alan Spaeth - the husband of one of Gant's clients. Spaeth's motive is clear - Gant, acting for Spaeth's wife, has crippled him financially and demeaned him socially. Spaeth, a racist, bigoted and obnoxious jerk, threatens the African-American Gant during a deposition in front of many witnesses.

As John Cuddy embarks on his investigation some gut twinges and troubling anomalies tell him that Spaeth just might have been framed. As his investigation continues - more evidence against Spaeth emerges - but threats against Cuddy indicate that he's probing into areas that at least some people feel are uncomfortable. Cuddy weaves his way through a series of red herrings and violent deaths to eventually uncover what appears to be the surprising truth, although a retrospective reading shows that the clues were there all along!

This is not a courtroom thriller. Put it on your list if you like solid, workmanlike detective stories.

One does not read Jeremiah Healy for a deep or insightful story. His books are enjoyable to read without becoming a cozy. I have read several short stories with John Francis Cuddy and I also read one of her previous novels. I enjoy his stories but I cannot say that they are memorable.

Cuddy's latest case involves the death of Woodrow Wilson Gant, a prominent African American divorce attorney, who gets gun downed from his car. His passenger is the mysterious blonde woman, who was drunk and oblivious to what happened. Once she wakes up and sees what happened she flees leaving the reader curious as to her identity. The accused turns out to be a racist bigot by the name of Alan Spaeth who threatened the lawyer after a messy divorce. Cuddy may not like the guy but he finds too many coincidences that prove that Spaeth is innocent.

There are too many characters involved in this novel. Everybody has a story. Some of their stories were touching and others were funny. Someone suggested to me that it almost seemed that Cuddy was trying to become Columbo visiting suspects continually until the truth is revealed. At the beginning of the novel, Gant's killer said three words to his victim before he died. If one is attentive to the book one can easily find out whom the murderer is. The mysterious woman with the blonde wig was a different story. There were several red herring candidates but at least when her identity was revealed it was not something out of left field. This just a comfortable read and I plan on reading some of his other novels in the near future.

This book was published in Dec 01 which means it was written using .NET Beta 2. It is now completely out of date and many of the examples just don't work. To be fair, there is an "Update" document available for download from Wrox but wht not just buy an up to date book in the first place. My recommendation is "Applied XML Programming for Microsoft .NET" by Dino Esposito, # 0735618011.

VB or C which is it? I don't mind books the have syntax for both VB.net and C#. I also don't mind books that have JUST C#(since I don't know C# why would I mind this?). I Like books that have JUST VB.NET since thats what I like. But this book doesn't do any of these! It provides C# only on many occasions! And as a VB.NET only programmer its awfully hard to build on C# examples. It's almost as if the authors didn't know how to code everything in VB.NET and just skipped it sometimes.

Very interesting title and content. This book is very helpful to learn XML .NET features.

For what seems like the millionith alternate future X-Men story, the characters find themselves in a world that exists because Charles Xavier died before he could form the X-Men, and this brought about decades of human/mutant civil war.

Welcome to hell on earth. North America is ruled by an evil mutant called Apocalypse. His kingdom only lives by one rule: Survivial of the fittest. Humans are regarded as the lower class and even not all mutants will be survive in this world. This all happened because Professor Charles Xavier never existed. Thus he never got to form the X-Men to appose Apocalypse.

In this book, you see how life can be for a few of the chosen. The ones who are "worthy to live". Like the righteous born leader Cyclops, and his jealous brother Havoc, who only acts out of his jealous and ignorant emotions.

The art is above average (again) and the story is a bit hard to get into. It's a drag at the start and a bit too boring and predictable. But it gets better when you get deeper into the story, as in the characters.

These stories won't mean much if you haven't read this AoA storyline from the start. If you get this, I recommend you get all the other AoA TPBs too. For a complete reading list of it, see my X-Men: LegionQuest review.

If you liked this, I'd recommend the graphic novel "Tales from the Age of Apocalypse: Sinister Bloodlines", which tells about what happened Scoot and Alex's parents in this alterred timeline.

I really loved this Trade Paperback. It had great art and writing, and it had a great message to children. BUY IT!!!

I really want a book like this, but this isn't good enough. I want a book that gives me a ton of conversational Chinese in Pinyin so I can get a lot of language "practice" with the vocabulary, grammar, etc. used again and again in all kinds of scenarios.

This provides all of that but, frustratingly, it's of no use.

My wife and her family are from China. I let my wife see this book once (the Chinese character edition), and she quickly scrunched up her nose and said, "Nobody talks like this!"

Later, when my wife was out, I tried the same test on my wife's aunt (who doesn't speak any English). She seemed reluctant to comment. I think she was afraid of causing me to lose face, so I showed her another Chinese text that contained hanzi (Chinese for Today, Beijing Languages Institute) and asked which one she thought was better. After about 20 seconds of page scanning she got very excited and said (in Chinese), "Oh, yes, this is the normal way people talk" (yiban de shuofa), and "you should study this one".

Unfortunately, Chinese for Today probably contains less than 10% of the total quantity of example text in Beginning Chinese, with not very useful vocabulary and skimpy grammar explanations, so I'm not a big fan of that one, either.

But despite the wonderful quantity of example material in Beginning Chinese and its sequels, it's of no use to me if what I'm getting so much great practice in is bad Chinese. I can come up with plenty of bad Chinese on my own. ;-)

To be honest, I don't know how much of the "bad" is just the Mainlander's reaction to Taiwanese Mandarin, but my wife and aunt (who like to watch Taiwanese dramas) claim "they don't even talk like this in Taiwan". (I never mentioned Taiwan until after they had rendered their verdicts.)

If only the publishers would update this series to make the language sound natural to the ears of educated Mainlanders, it would be one of the most useful Chinese texts on the market. If that happens, I'll recommend it to everyone.

When I studied Chinese back in the 1970's this was the beginning text we used. I was not extremely satisfied with it then, and I am even less satisfied today. Arguably, it covers the subject of Chinese grammar in considerable detail, but my overall impression of the material presented is that it simply isn't the "way that Chinese really speak" - that is, it really doesn't reflect colloquial Chinese as it is actually spoken, even taking into account that it is supposed to be Taiwan Chinese. It is as if there is too much interference from English grammar in the way it is presented.

I am even less satisfied with it nowadays, with the large amount of language study material now available from China. While some of the material printed in China can be a bore, some of it is really extremely good - Beverly Hong's "Situational Chinese" springs to mind as perhaps the best book on colloquial Chinese I have yet found. I'd suggest to the would-be learner to review the material available from Beijing before investing any of the books in the old Yale Asian series.

I have been studying or trying to study Chinese for many years now. Most books seem more geared toward travel conversation(how much does it cost? etc). This book seems to really teach the language. I think that all languages change fast enough to make any book out of date quickly, this book seems to go deeper and really teach the structure and grammar that can be applied with newer slang. The fact he is aware of the differences between Taiwan Mandarin and the Chinese spoken in the PRC says alot to his credibility. However, the book is dry as are all books of this nature. It does provide a great beginning to learning the language. I think the other levels are now out of print.