It's been said that the ultimate compliment you can extend to a tv writer/producer is to do an adaption to his material. Well, "Close Encounters" does that to Steven Spielberg, Chris Carter, and the filmmaking team behind ID4. First the timing and premise of the book struck me as peculiar. The story of alien encounters was obviously written in response to the popularity of INDEPENDANCE DAY. The fact that the story takes place in the California desert close to the infamous Area 51 seemed to contrived. The male/female duo of FBI agents who investigate paranormal phenomena is straight from Carter's X-FILES. And at last, the title is lifted from Steven Spielberg's monumental 1977 film. In short, the story was a quick, fun read; but it needed a good dose of originality---beginning with the title!

One of the best alex mack books! I especially liked the part where the ravine flooded!

If you are beginner and want to use wordperfect 9 for dailly use, this book is just for you. It starts from bottom and take the reader strait trough the end. Tools and technics in this text processor are described in enough detail so it will not be confusing even for total beginner (for 'dummies', remember). Perhaps there is insuficient info about different file formats (.txt, .rtf, etc), but that is acceptable for this level of knowladge. If you have experiance in some other text processor, you will probably find your self comfortable within WordPerfect.

After reading such fabulous works such as Orwell's 1984, disappointment was large in M.T. Anderson's Feed. Anderson's book is told through a teenage boy who lives in a futuristic society controlled by a device called the feed. The feed is a computer chip that is implanted in the majority of the population's brains. It allows one to shop, chat, and have access to any bit of information he or she so desires. The narrator, who has been equipped with the feed since he was a small child, is obviously uneducated due to the fact that everything he needs to know can be simply looked up on the feed. The reader soon realizes that the book jumps between narrator and several italicized passages that represent what is happening on the feed. The book had an overall poor storyline that left the reader questioning its worth.
As Orwell captured my attention throughout his book, my concentration was hard to keep after the first fifty pages of Feed. Anderson tries to keep the reader's interest through a love story between the author and a girl named Violet. However, after the two become boyfriend and girlfriend, the story turns boring and drab. The story's setting did keep me reading the book though. Anderson sets the story during futuristic times that include travels to other planets and upcars, which are vehicles that fly around rather than stay on the ground. Moreover, people live in bubbles and are not allowed to go certain places, such as the ocean, without certain protective gear. Unfortunately, Anderson did not create this society enough leave me impressed.
All in all, Feed may capture the minds of young readers, but as for the more experienced reader, it is a disappointment. With a little more thought and drama, this book could have been comparable to 1984 as well as Fahrenheit 451. However, a word to the young reader: this is a good start to mind provoking books that leave you with the question of what will happen to society in the future.

Imagine instant-messaging your friends in your mind. Imagine all those obnoxious computer pop-up ads happening right in your brain. Imagine retailers knowing precisely what you've ever bought, your favorite color, your shoe size. Imagine liking it. This is the scary, weird world described in M.T. Anderson's "Feed". Titus and his friends are average middle-class American teenagers of the future. They take for granted the weird convergence of technology, corporate intervention, and mind-control they live with known as a feed. Enter Violet; a girl Titus meets on spring break, a girl who wants to 'fight the feed'.

There are important and compelling issues raised in this novel about advertising, privacy, conformity, individualism and technology. It's a book that demands discussion, explanation and consideration. Unfortunately, I think that much of it may be over the heads of its teenaged target audience. Readers who need things spelled out may be challenged by this book because significant aspects of the setting (and what a grim future it is) are implied, or only mentioned in passing. I think few teenagers will be satisfied with the ending. And fewer still will probably spend much time thinking about the issues in the story after they've put it down. It's too bad that the profanity and few mild references to sexual situations will keep this book out of most classrooms, because it's really a story that deserves to be discussed, especially by young adults.

I do recommend this book for advanced and thoughtful teen readers. Sci-fi fans in particular will enjoy it. Other readers should appreciate the accurate portrayal of teen dating, cliques, jealousies, insecurities and friendships. I hope the larger, more important themes of the book will be grasped as well.

This is a not-to-be-missed look at a not too distant future, where technology has been taken to the next degree. Implanted in the brain when a child is just an infant is the Feed, a link to an on-line world with instantaneous hype.

Take a trip to the moon, and the Feed automatically clues you in to where the "in" places are to go. The Feed knows your buying preferences, your entertainment preferences, how to plug the latest fashion to fill your every want and it knows how to generate your next "need". This is consumerism on steriods.

And, speaking of steroids, there is a trip to the tissue farm, where filet mignon is growing in the fields.

The dialog is so real; the consumerism is so possible; the degradation of the global environment is so near. This book paints a picture of a world that is truly more frightening than horror stories.

All of this is ingeniously included in a boy meets girl story of seemingly normal adolescence.

Scariest of all: it seems almost inevitable.

An outstanding effort by M. T. Anderson.

Ever wondered what happened when the Enterprise returned home after its 5 year mission. Captain Kirk gets promoted to Admiral. Spock goes home to Vulcan. And McCoy haves some Medical Lectures. But All in all the crew reunites and this story has 2000 years in the making rather then 5. I enjoyed this tale. It keeps my attention span. A good edition to the star Trek Library.

"The Lost Years" starts 'The Lost Years' series, wich tells us the tale of the crew of the original Enterprise in the years between the original five year mission and "The Motion Picture".

"The Lost Yaers" the novel is very well written by Jean Mary Dillard and contains great characterization, but lacks seriously in terms of plot developement.

The book begins with the crew leaving the ship behind, an overly long phase with painfully uneventfull scenes, that contribute nothing important to the story, and offer frustratingly few character insights.

This phase is followed by the unsuccesfull introduction of some of the characters' (mostly Kirk's) new lives after Enterprise.

The story kicks in far too late, and is as predictable as expected from a plot that only covers the latter half of a book.

The biggest problem with this book is the fact that almost all characters involved in the story just happen to be the familiar characters of the Enterprise crew who are introduced to the story via ridiculously unbeliavable coincidences. Mix that with two-dimentional additional characters, magic, Tarod reading and prophesies, you get a slightly entertaining book with no credibility to back it off. A waste of a good premise.

this book. It was a good account of the period after the original 5 year mission. I enjoyed it so much I have bought the next 3 books in the Lost Years saga.

This book has good points and bad points. On the good side, it is very tongue in cheek and humorous, if one likes that sort of thing, though some puns were used over and over. I can't count how many times the alliance of countries was likened to a marriage.

On the downside, it was not an ideal textbook. My class is using it for our AP US History class, and it really does not suit the purposes of a high school course. The authors obviously spent so much time attempting to be humorous that they forgot to put facts into the book. The section on the Webster-Hayne debate said absolutely nothing about what the actual subject matter of the debate, only described the orators themselves in great detail and made jokes. It also contains a lot of useless information a high school student would never need to know, such as a physical description of each president and the exact parallel of every territory's boundary.

It probably suits the purposes of someone trying to learn and study American history on their own because it is amusing enough to keep the reader interested. It is not suited to a high school class trying to learn and memorize straight facts.

This book handles its subject very well. It was the basic text for my 11th Grade history course, where it provided a good balance of mildly amusing wit and genuinely useful information.

The main advantage of "The American Pageant" is that the author is not trying to push a major political agenda. It lacks the patriotic drivel for which "traditional" history texts are often denounced. However, it also lacks the negative, depressing Socialist philosophy which makes Zinn's "People's History of the United States" so difficult to read.

The end result is a history text which does a history text's job: telling what happened. The book covers politics, economics, and major events in a style which is sometimes amusing and usually informative. Although not overly political, it also pays due attention to such important issues as race and gender.

Not a particularly "specialized" book, but an excellent survey text.

I can quite clearly remember the amazement with which I first read the opening paragraphs of Bailey's American Pageant six years ago in high school; and even now, after graduating from college in a field completely unrelated to history, I return to this text to read in my spare time just for the sheer enjoyment of it. I hesitate to even call it a text: rather, it is almost a work of art. Personally, I am flabbergasted by some of the negative reviews I've read below. Of course someone will not like this book when they haven't read it all semester, and then they have an approaching final and try to quickly skim the text and learn all the "important facts" of this nation's history. This book isn't written to satisfy the poor study habits of a mediocre, disinterested student who could care less about history; it is written to express history as seen and studied and understood through the eyes of an absolute genius: Thomas Bailey. For those who believe the book is opinionated, I'll agree with that notion. That's what historians are supposed to do -- they shape and mold historical events into tangible, real entities that one can relate to, rather than just relate dry facts and statistics. (That's what an encyclopedia or government records are for.) If I could, I would give this book more than 5 stars -- surely it deserves as much.

On a whole, the Cambridge Latin Course is a much better way to learn Latin. The four books are much better layed out and the stories are less depressing. (except when mons Vesuvius goes off!)

I have been using the book and I have a problem. My teacher wont help me and it is to hard so I am trying to find the translations in english. I need help.

This is the first text book I used when I learned latin back in fifth grade (many a year ago!), and I still value the approach it took in awakening my interest and understanding of not just the language, but the culture, the history, the politics, the context of the Roman people and their language. The text is filled with short 'stories' written in latin that encourage students to interact with the language in a living context, rather than treating the language as a dead, unusable language, as most latin texts do. This text engaged my imagination, fascinated me, and inspired me as an an adult to visit Italy to see the ruins, the town of Pompeii, and other sites that I first learned about through its pages. I thank this text for allowing me to translate latin I encountered in European Cathedrals I visited, as well.

There are few texts from my grammar school years that I can recall, let alone praise (hint, I'm nearing 30...), but Ecce Romani is one that still cherish for the impact it had on me as a student, and the lasting effects I've been able to trace in my life.

As a life-long Chicagoan, I grew up riding buses and the El. For 16 years after I graduated from law school, I lived on the North Side and didn't own a car -- public transit and cabs were all I needed (and I didn't have to worry about parking). Over the years, I've come to love the City's transit system, and if you ride long enough and pay attention, you have to become curious about its history -- you'll notice El spurs that go nowhere, rail tracks peeking through street pavement, and so on. And of course the politics of fare increases, capital improvements, expansion or contraction of routes, and regional planning and cooperation are all fascinating.

So I had high hopes for "Chicago Transit," which I expected would answer a lot of questions I had about a subject I enjoy. Unfortunately, while there is a lot of information here -- lots and lots of facts and figures, in mind-numbing detail -- the story of transit in Chicago seems to have gotten lost. There are glimpses of it -- a few pages on the career of Samuel Insull, some details on the political machinations behind the creation of the Regional Transportation Authority -- but most of the book is about how the various forms of transit were organized and set up financially, whether they made money during any given period, how many miles they covered and how many riders they served. The technological changes from horse to steam to electric to diesel power (for buses and suburban trains) are discussed in some detail, as is the impact of the car, although here Young seems in over his head -- he understands that the car had a major impact on urban development and planning, and indeed claims several times that the car is actually a form of "mass transit" since it is used by masses of people -- but he does not really address how the car affected public transit. He concedes that most people who arrive in the Loop (5 out of 7) do so by mass transit -- so does decreased ridership mean that fewer people work in the Loop? Or that fewer shop in the Loop? Or that fewer people use the El or buses in off-peak hours to get around the rest of the City? None of these questions were answered to my satisfaction.

A couple of choices add to the confusion and piling on of detail. As noted, Young does not confine himself to public transportation, but also devotes a significant amount of space to non-commuter rail traffic and to the development of the car and of highways. Obviously you can't really write a history of public transit without discussing those subjects, but Young devotes whole sections or chapters to them, taking a big detour from his main subject. Young also tends to go through the history of one form of transit (street railways, for example) in one chapter, and then turn to another form of transit (the El) in the next chapter, leading to a lot of repetition and jumping back forth in time. Even within a chapter, Young may cover 50 years of history of the West Side El, and then go back to the beginning to talk about the South Side lines.

Overall, there's lots of data here, but very little story and only a few (questionable) conclusions. There is nothing on the impact public transit (or the absence of it) has on the lives of people everyday. There is a nice selection of black-and-white photographs, mostly featuring the railcars of various eras. If you need a resource for basic information on Chicago transit, you will find this volume useful, but if you are a general reader looking for an interesting and thought-provoking read, you had best look elsewhere.