Dana Filmore is the first African American Secretary of State. She is smart and attractive. She is also in danger. She learns of the President's plans to do something that could affect the lives of millions of Americans. She must stop him. However, she cannot trust anyone to help her. She meets Kasi Martin, an African American District Attorney. He is smart and handsome. When they meet at a social function, they instantly like each other. Still, Dana isn't sure if she can trust him.However, Dana is forced to trust Kasi when her life is threatened. Dana and Kasi find themselves together on the run from someone who wants to kill them.This story is a noble effort. William could have written more about the actual political maneuvers and less on the character's thoughts. Although this story is fast past, it is also predictable. The murder is weak. The reader instantly knows the murderer and the victim. That could have been a mystery.Dana and Kasi are credible characters. Their intelligence saves them in many situations. They also are secure in their identity and their roles.I still recommend the book. It is an easy read.

Excalibur's Defeat is a great book. The time and research you put into this book shows. I really enjoyed your ability to allow the readers to access the mindset of your characters. Power, politics, looks; murder etc. is a perfect fit in this book. With any of these subjects you could have written separate books but your talent allowed us to have all of this in one book. It's fast pace and the characters are well developed. You definitely have what it takes to make it. Keep up the good work.

Good mystery. Face pace. Quick read. Mr. Wright "ain't" playing around. Most of the characters are pretty well fleshed out. Never thought I enjoyed political thrillers too much; but, I must confess I enjoyed this one immensely. I guess what enhanced it even more was the African American "flava" that was flowing throughout the book. Ms. Filmore is an Intelligent sista. Definitely, held my interest. Maybe only compliant was that it was too short. I wanted to learn more about certain characters. Overall, definitely, it should be on a summer reading list. Not too heavy; but, not too light, either. Just right.... Hey I'm so proud to see fellow brotha's and sista's doing their thing with writing. Much continued success in your future endeavors and I can't wait until the next one....

If you're looking for a page-turner, read no further. But if you're a high- octane prose addict who takes pleasure in watching an author torquing up everyday life until even the banal has the power to perforate the senses, then, you've found the right book.

According to Wright, we live in a culture where too much free time and a gulf between the haves and have-nots is breeding gratuitous acts of cruelty. In this novel we watch how such a state affects a group of well-educated, acquisitive Americans who have nothing to do with one another in any narrative sense.

The link between them is a character named Wylie Jones, who suddenly abandons his upper-middle-class life and begins roaming around America, either committing acts of murder or seducing women under different aliases.

Going Native, a more elegant way of saying ''reverting to the primitive,'' is a well-chosen showcase for Wright's raw, poetic sensibility. Author of the 1983 novel Meditations in Green, he portrays the effects of violence with hypnotic intensity. An ex-hippie truck driver gets knifed by a hitchhiker, and the blade stuck in his belly pulses to the rhythm of his dying heart. A well- educated woman about to be gunned down at close range in her own kitchen ''could see the terrified mouse that was her mind running round and round, searching for an exit.''

Composed of panoramic prose and comically hip dialogue, Going Native has the impact of an X-acto knife slitting open the bloated belly of American life.

I truly loved this novel, so much so that I have read it now completely through three times. The structure, presented as a series of fully self-sufficient short stories each interlinked by the presence of Wylie (or whatever his name may really have been), at first only peripherally, and then increasingly more emphatic, until at last we are completely inside his head (without much extra room, at that), is not only brilliantly conceived, but also spectacularly realised. The way Wright uses language is maximal, to say the very least; his leisurely pacing and complex sentence structure are almost reminiscent of Faulkner (as is the book's unrelenting darkness), but his hip appropriation of popular iconography is unique. His characters are every stripe of crackpot and schemer, and the way he contrasts the lives and thoughts of each, stretched out in thickets of languorously-phrased prose, with the brutal and abrupt way each is touched by Wylie's increasingly deadly actions forms, for me, the greatest appeal of the novel. The section on Borneo, in which the filmmaker and his wife "go native", is perhaps the most extraordinary of the pieces, although the entire book is stunningly written and as fine and unforgettable as anything I've read in years. It inspired a renewed interest in me in reading modern short stories, and I read both of Wright's other novels as well, although clearly this is his best to date. As David Lynch once described Eraserhead, it is a dream of dark and disturbing things. It's certainly well worth the effort.

You've got to love Amazon readers! There were at last count, 580 reviews of Grisham's The Brethren, and 10 (counting mine) so far of this vibrant, challenging, tour-de-force novel. I think this state of affairs would put a sardonic smile on Wright's phiz. It comes as no surprise that the reader from New Jersey didn't like Going Native. One look at his "more about me" list of reviews will tell you why (no offense, guy).

If you love satire of the darkest variety and enjoy reading authors who don't rely on cliches or hack conventions in painting their portraits, then give this one a go. It's the most mordantly humorous book I've picked up since I last read Celine. If Wright's view of American culture is too jaundiced for you, then I would suggest you stick to the sugar-coated variety of fiction that meets your requirements. There's nothing sweet about this vision. If you're afraid of having a bad trip, avoid this book. Because if you open these pages, you are, in Betty Davis' vernacular, "in for a bumpy ride." If you can't handle the truth, look elsewhere.

This is one of the four or five books that are automatically on my list of recommendations whenever someone approaches me on the subject of reading. Absolutely more than five stars.

As a Harley Davidson mechanic I was impressed with Clymer's Evo Sportster Repair Manual.There is a wealth of information in this book for the do-it your-selfer.Not as complete as a factory manual but the average person won't ever miss the oem manual.I recomend it,crankpin74.

Stephen Wright is one of the most original and inventive novelists working in the English language. His work is shocking, provocative, astonishingly rich and subtle, and peopled by characters so lifelike you can practically smell them. Wright's imagery borders on the poetic, while his satirical viewpoint is one of unparalleled ferocity and intensity. If you want fiction that changes the way you see the world around you, Stephen Wright is for you.
While M-31 (his second novel, published in 1989) is not quite as bold and polished as Going Native (his third and last to date, published in 1993), it is still the work of an apalling talent. Presently, I am tip-toeing through his debut, Meditations in Green, a booby-trapped novel set largely in the Vietnam war which may well be the best fictional representation of that conflict ever written. But like all his books, it defies genre and easy categorisation.
One day, perhaps, Wright will get the recognition he so richly deserves. Until then, he's the best-kept secret in contemporary literature.

Very accurate and detailed algorithm. Easy to be used in the real world application.

The Red Badge of Courage is interepted as many as being an anti-war novel: it is not.What it does do is present the horrors and psychological aspects of war war without glory, but not without heroics and courage.Henry Fleming is in many ways an every-soldier: he joins the army out of patriotism and to prove his manhood; when the time comes to fight he doubts himself and runs away out of fear. It is at this point Henry comes to the crossroads of his young life: instead of completely deserting his unit he returns to his regiment and the battlefield out of a sense of duty and also out of shame and anger at himself. Once he returns he peforms heroically on the battlefield. I feel Crane's purpose in this books is not to make some overblown anti-war treatise like All Quiet on the Western Front, but to portray what he believed( and may soldiers who read the book agreed with him) to be the emotions and feelings of a soldier in war and also the true motivation behind courage and heroism. Crane shows through Henry, that heroism and courage in war is not something that comes naturally to man(or any animal, as shown by the squirrel scene in the forest) or can simply be conjured up out of blind obedience or extreme partiotism. Crane in fact argues the opposite: courage in war(or in and courage in reponse to violence) is something unatural, something that must be accomplished by overcoming our own natural fear and flight instincts.Henry is able to perform herocially because of anger, his sense of duty, his feeling of brotherhood toward his regiment and out of something deep inside himself that even Crane ( and nobody) could not totally understand . This is a great book about heroism, courage , brotherhood, duty and the psychological aspects of war. It is not a books that glorifies war ,nor it is it an anti-war treatise. It simply tells a story about war in a world where war exists.

When Stephen Crane wrote THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE it was hailed as a masterpiece of war fiction, more so especially when its readers found out that the only experience Crane had in war was the kind that most of his readers had: from books and articles. When readers discuss the book, they tend to focus on its two outstanding elements: Crane's use of symbol and imagery and the maturation of one soldier from cowardice to courage. Clearly Crane does use language superbly to create in the reader's eye an image of a callow youth, Henry Fleming, who starts off the novel in fear and finishes it in a blaze of glory. But such considerations, when used in isolation, tend to diminish Crane's more subtle attitude toward war and man's attitudes toward war. Crane tends to picture war in a generic sense. Many of his characters have no name. They are referred to by type: the 'youth,' the 'tattered' soldier, the 'dying' man. Battles have no geographical name. What the reader gets out of Crane's refusal to particularize the war is his belief that all soldiers in all wars react much the same as Henry Fleming to the rigors of battle. Further, Crane's use of color imagery, his investing nature with human qualities (called the pathetic fallacy), and his use of symbols (the flag, the wafer-like sun) all combine to suggest that war is so inherently chaotic that it resists any attempt on a literary level to concretize its horrors.
Crane's focus is squarely on Henry Fleming and his perception of both himself and his environment. We never know what the other soldiers think. We can infer their thoughts only through the evolving view of Fleming himself. And what he thinks is that he will turn yellow at the first opportunity. As he thinks this, he rationalizes that all other soldiers think as he does. Further, he sees nature itself in harmony with his thougts. If Fleming lacks courage, then so must the rest of the universe. Serious literary critics point to even more subtle and archetypal images of birth versus rebirth and retreat versus advance in order to bolster their respective claims concerning how Fleming's moral regeneration began. I have no problem with this focus on Fleming's conversion, but not many readers question the sincerity of this conversion. By the middle of the novel, Fleming has been humiliated, bashed on the head with a rifle butt, separated from his mates, and is generally battling with some serious issues of self-worth. And then he changes. For no apparent reason, he now is brimful with courage in battle and hatred of the enemy. Further, he feels a deep shame towards those boys in blue who now exhibit the same lack of courage that formerly characterized him. Yet, it does not follow that courage must spring forth from a mere recognizance of one's own failings. What Crane would seemingly have the reader believe is that Fleming turned his life around quickly and seemingly at will. Yet I quibble at this conversion. It is more likely that Crane wanted his readers to see that the innate chaotic nature of war is so alien to human understanding that the concepts that we call 'courage' and 'cowardice' are mere tags to describe on the most superficial of levels a multi-faceted series of strands of emotions that under stress blend into one another so that the excess of one is seen as the deficiency of the other. Fleming's new-found courage, then, in charging for the grey guns, is less the permanent sense of abiding bravery than the temporary sense of fear turned upside down, a result which mimics but does not actualize true heroism. As Fleming holds onto his red flag while wearing his red badge of courage, the redness of both flag and badge are reduced to empty posturing, that paradoxically enough entitle their bearer to accolades of heroic merit by those others who have not yet undergone a similar conversion. Therefore, it is this superficial conversion of and confusion with deep-seated fear and suspect heroism that marks Crane as one who sought to reveal the terrible chaos of war by suggesting that those whom we adore as heroes perform their acts with less obvious motivation.

While in junior high I failed to jump on The Red Badge of Courage bandwagon when everyone chose it as a book report book because of its length. I am sorry I missed out. The length certainly makes this book easy and accessible to people of all ages, but it is so much more. Not only is it very fast paced, unpredictable, and the best character study I've ever read, but it is timeless. It is about war, specifically the Civil War, but there are no politics or specifics about that war, it is about the emotions of a youth at war and the world through his eyes. There is no difference between what he is thinking as his regiment is charging and what a 20 year old in a modern war would feel. Though Crane had never seen a war before writing this book, he paints an incredibly powerful, honest, and realistic portrayal. It is a fantastic book and one that deserves a very careful, detailed reading, but can also be enjoyed and finished in a couple hours.

I knew there was a problem when I found that the index shows chapter 7 as "GM V6 and V8 Engines"! Chapter 8 is shown to be "Ford V8 Engines" and chapter 13 as "Lower Gearcase (1964-1977)! Jumping from automotive to marine, chapter 12 is labled as "Stern Drive Removal, Installation and Upper Gearcase Overhaul"! The book is actually about only 3 models of Yamaha Snowmobiles, (not all inclusive as the cover suggests) but errors abound. Laughable, AND THIS IS THE FIFTH PRINTING!!!

I rented this book from the local library and found the information in it usefull, but it had a lot of information that I did not need. In some areas it is so details that it drives you nuts and in others the information is missing or wrong.

This book I've heard is copied from the yamaha OEM shop manual. And they leave many things out of it that you are left to guess what they mean. But they do have diagrams and photos that the OEM doesn't have.