Woody Allen Books

My 12 year old son, ...loved reading this book. I planned to assign him to read 1 chapter a day and expected the usual struggle to make him read it, but he loved it so much that he finished it in short time and kept telling me what a great book he thought it was. He just didn't like when a dead character came back alive to fight Rolf, or the witchcraft parts, but otherwise wanted to read more books by this author...

Allen French has translated some of the old Icelandic sagas, including GRETTIR THE STRONG, but this is a novel, using some of the locations and settings and even some of the characters of the sagas. I first encountered this book at about the age of twelve, read it many times, and always wanted a copy. The story has plenty of adventure, some interesting twists, and is a good read, but it also deals with how to face adversity and the danger of pride. It's an excellent book for teenagers and adults will probably also enjoy this story.

The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow is one of the best recrafted narratives I have ever read. Allen French brought to life this story that he originally found as one of the Kolbieters. (The Kolbieters, founded by JRR Tolkien, was a group of friends that read ancient verse in their original languages.) I would recommend it to any history buff, Tolkien fan, fantasy reader, or just any one looking for a well written story.

This book was an amazing story. You will read this book again and again until you've memorized it. What happens is that Rolf a young viking boy is the best archer in the land. He lives a happy life until someone kills his father. He leaves his land to find someone who can out do him with the bow by three yards. I'm not telling you anymore about this story. Read this book and find out what happens. I'm sure you will have a blast reading Rolf and the Viking bow.

Swords Of Talera harkens back to the days of my youth when I discovered John Carter of Mars, Carson Napier of Venus, and Tarzan of the Apes. All of course by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In this new novel, Mr. Grammlich's character is transported to another world of exotic people and exotic creatures, forced to battle his way across it in search of his brother. If you ever liked these interplanetary romances, this is the book for you. It's well worth buying. Do yourself a favor and get it.

I just reread this book today (in one 5-hour sitting.) Not only does this novel bring to mind (& surpass,) the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc., but it includes a strong woman & a noble hero, both refreshing changes compared to most modern media messages!

Talera is swashbuckling high adventure. Swordplay, alien races, beautiful maidens, this book has it all!

Ruenn is a two-fisted hero capable of going toe to toe with any of the heroes of Pellucidar, Mars, Cimerra, Atlantis or the jungles of Tarzan's Africa. Rannon is noble, beautiful and tough as nails herself. One almost expects her to step out of a Frazetta canvas.

This is a tale well told. The characters are vivid, true to life, and stay with the reader long after the final page is turned. I can't wait to read the rest!

I found this book to be a real page-turner, as I kept picking up the book every time I sat down, even for just a few minutes. I really enjoyed the John Carter of Mars series and this gave me a new dose of that 'sword and planet' genre. The author does not quite go into the depth of world building that Edgar Rice Burroughs did (Burroughs was a master at it and few authors can match him), but the story and the heroic adventure moved along well, and there was enough world building that I was very satisfied.

Gramlich proved to me he understands this genre and I will definitely buy the next book in the series when it comes out.

I found this book much more interesting than the average classroom textbook. It seems to be the best answer I've seen so far in the battle against illiteracy. I believe this book should be required reading for aspiring literacy specialists!!

I found this book to be a refreshing and enlightening view of the challenges these middle school kids face and the love they receive from their teacher. Reading this book was like an invitation into the lives of these kids trying to overcome their literacy challenges and it was truely heart warming to see the adoration Kyle has for these children. She truely has made it her life's work to help these kids become better readers and better members of society. It's refreshing to see a teacher who cares so much. Each of her students are special people to her, not just names on a class roster and it's obvious that the kids feel that open love. She cares that she has made an impact on their lives, not just their middle school experience. Everyone has had that special teacher that they'll never forget and it's abundently clear that for these children, that teacher is Kyle Gonzalez.

I used the strategies in this book with my 8th and 9th grade students, and suddenly I found ways to get students to read who had never read a book before because they hated reading. Now, they are voracious readers. Give it a try and don't worry about age limits. We CAN hook them all if we are patient and try a variety of strategies.

I found this book rather by accident and was amazed at the insight and experience that the teacher, Kyle Gonzalez, was gaining by creating a literacy program in her classroom. The area she charted with assistance from Janet Allen was completely new territory to her and the students.

Kyle's skill in crafting this wonderful story, really bringing me into the classroom, was wonderful. I am not a teacher and I still found this book very useful in understanding group dynamics as well as bringing me back to the classroom when I was a student. Kyle managed to compile a list of resources, how-to-guides and step-by-step instructions on how to create a literacy project in your own classroom and home as well for the interested parent. Literacy is such a problem in our society and Kyle's book is really a great stab at understanding why and how to address it.

I do have the good fortune to meet her when I was in Florida one time and she is as wonderful a person as she is a writer. Truly a unique, intelligent, and interesting person.

I hope for future books and find myself interested in pursuing this type of career if not only to see what a joy it can be when you see the individual impact you can make in learning.

i rarely write reviews unless i'm ticked off.

i own a used copy of the original hardcover, back in the days before amazon.com, when it was a real accomplishment to find a rare used book. fred allen has been a favorite of mine since i was 12 years old and discovered old time radio. in fact, it's in hommage to f.a. that i have always typed in all lower case, as he did in his letters (see the other great book in the allen trio, "fred allen's letters". "much ado about me" is also wonderful, but unfortunately not quite finished when allen passed away.)

so my criticism is painful. . . i was so excited to see this book reprinted that i actually posted an announcement to the old time radio internet digest, encouraging folks to check it out. i ordered a copy myself, even though i own the original, just to throw a teeny bit of financial support at such a surprising endeavor. it seems quite unlikely to me that enough folks have even heard of fred allen these days to make this reprint a financial success (which would then, hopefully, spur more of this material to surface).

as i paged through the book i've read 100 times already, i could tell that the reprint was made from the original plates. the ink bleeds badly on many pages, and one page (which i can't seem to find now) was even printed slanted. the front cover is acceptable, even if as minimalist as one could make it given that it features a hirshfeld drawing. the back cover looks just awful, a plain white page with a bar code at the bottom and a small paragraph describing the book.

it's just simply a very cheap affair, despite the quality of the writing itself.

one other note: be aware that at least 50% of the book consists of script excerpts. when the book was published in 1953, no one had even conceived of the idea that one day people would be listening to these shows on reel to reel tapes, then lps, then cassettes, then mp3s. so to give the reader a sampling of the flavor of the show with these excerpts made sense.

now, however, anyone with enough interest in f.a. to buy this book most likely has had access to the shows one way or another. having a large collection myself, i was disappointed that i had heard many of the shows excerpted already.

but this is a minor reservation on a truly delightful, honest, witty, and funny account of allen's days in radio.

"Treadmill To Oblivion" is the definitive book of Fred Allen's wit, humor, and charm. It traces his adventures in radio from 1932 to 1949. Within, we get samples of rountines, brilliantly funny jabs (Bewtween he and Jack Benny) and insight into the comic, concentrated mind of Fred Allen; one of America's greatests comedians. Also, there are sevral humorous observations, asides, and quips that reveal Allen's biting ever-throbbing wit. A MUST-READ for any lover of wit, wisdom, and humor. A good companion to this book is the honestly warm "Much Ado About Me", Fred Allen's subsequent book, telling the tale of his life before radio. Regardless, READ THIS BOOK!!!!!

"Treadmill To Oblivion" is the definitive book of Fred Allen's wit, humor, and charm. It traces his adventures in radio from 1932 to 1949. Within, we get samples of rountines, brilliantly funny jabs (Bewtween he and Jack Benny) and insight into the comic, concentrated mind of Fred Allen; one of America's greatests comedians. Also, there are sevral humorous observations, asides, and quips that reveal Allen's biting ever-throbbing wit. A MUST-READ for any lover of wit, wisdom, and humor. A good companion to this book is the honestly warm "Much Ado About Me", Fred Allen's subsequent book, telling the tale of his life before radio. Regardless, READ THIS BOOK!!!!!

Have owned & loaned both.In Treadmill To OblivionFred tells of his greedyagent booking him into themuddiest place in AustraliaHis early bookings & dealings with this agentare an Allen gem. All About Me was mostly hisradio scripts. Finished byhis daughter. Excellent forwriters of comedy. Successto all that follow in hissteps.

I first checked out this book from our public library, among other books with a Christmas theme. My five-year old daughter loved the story and the pictures, that she asked me to renew it twice. I decided to purchase it for her. We still read it although Christmas has passed. This is the story of a little boy who learns about Christmas (when trees are decorated with lights and ornaments) from his mother who grew up in the Unitied States before coming to Japan where they now live. The illustrations are beautiful, you learn about a number of customs. For example, the connection between oragami and wishes, the food that he little boy eats, that his parents planted a tree to symbolise and as a wish that he lives a long life. They make a snowman, in Japan their snowman has two balls, not three like here in the United States. The book has a timeless quality.

There is a distance in Allen Say books, a calm and separate peace.

Using his beautiful artful pieces with children is always an interesting moment. I read this today with my 1st graders. We are studying Asian works, cultural experience. We are folding paper cranes, making kites. We are trying to articulate the experience of cultures. We are living the experience of growing up figuring out who we are in "this" moment. And so this book suggested its way into my afternoon between a bluegrass band from Alaska with my returning from an AM test rather loopy and the need to have a lovely Friday.

I went looking for a book to speak through which I could convey feeling and thoughts not entirely within my grasp verbally or in written form.

That led me of course to Say. His work unique for children.

This story is beautifully/distantly told (and I'll try hard to capture that here) through his artwork and speaks to a child's ability to take an experience from childhood that shapes him through perhaps a mistake, or a discomfort, a broken request, an intrusion into things unknown and maybe a bit frightening. It reads as an auto-biographic work. It does touch a child's guilt through the commission of a wrong that is translated then into their life as an avoidance, an impression, it symbolizes I think in a concrete way a door being shut.


The child does what the mom has requested he not do, she fears, has always feared, he will drown in a carp pond. He then is drawn to the pond, falls in and lives of course. But immediately he is sick needing her comfort feels her withdrawal. He has physical care but senses an emotional distance. It is a symbol-laden piece. My children sat riveted, utterly riveted. Able to talk to me a great deal about this disappointing a mother with his exploration.
When Say relates the child's impression of his mother's response to his falling in the carp pond, the feeling of disapproval breaks all over you.

Sometimes I think coming out of my work with children, and my own past, sometimes I'm not looking for books about perfect harmony and comfort, compliments and the falseness of the etiquette systems that separate us from truth. Sometimes I am grateful and want to shout my thanks as a roar, or adoring and want the weeks of wagging my tongue on the ground in lapping love, sometimes I'm feeling a dissonance and want the strangeness wearing my hats, sometimes I am wanting to look at artwork by Dali, or the images of Close. Sometimes a Philip Pearlstein with the blue veins of a headless nude draped in a kimono in a rocker looking heavy and liquid is the type of concretization of this internal place I'm in and I want to look for a long while at an ugly thing. Say manages I think to catch a feeling that children do know. They would like I think to examine it a bit.
We know the relationship to other, be it in a mother or in the partner we ultimately are drawn to know better. A space, distance, curtain is drawn to our finding perfect understanding. My girl friend and I were speaking of the receiving of the female the holding and as I felt I understood for a second what becomes a oneness in the two partners male/female in the relationship it rose right out of my mind and fled. Seeking wholeness and unification I am lost in the way. Cannot intellectualize to knowing.
But not necessary to our acceptance. And that I think is important.

In this story the child feels the mother has withdrawn from him in someway from his actions and then time moves this into learning something more of her unexpectedly.
She later that evening folds paper cranes to decorate a Christmas tree. A kind of combining who she was, her-ness with the very different place they are in now. He senses from this there are currents underground in his mother. She is an "otherness."
And she is sharing this with him within this particular context so that it can be known. He has a second of awareness.


Two times in particular in my childhood I recall in the relationship to my mother and several more with my father incidents where the situation almost of my innocence lead me unexpectedly into a territory beyond my ability to process or speak about. Just found out something. And the resultant feeling of being left alone there with that, of being fully alone, a being separate was uncomfortable. But I recall it viscerally. In one particular incident when I learned of my mothers first marriage and her life before me just mildly asking her about a ring in her jewelry, it brought me a sense of disassociation. It is to this Say allows into his work here.

They suggest this is falling out of finding way to address his two-culture gap that certainly would fit here, a Mom of California with Christmas traditions and a life in a traditional Japanese home. This would fit my feelings I think a bit marrying into a very different kind of family, moving across a country, working in very different cultures than my Appalachian one in a South Central or a Salinas Valley Migrant town and then having my children while struggling to interpret "me" to them in these different contexts. My sense of them unable to "know" me and my own struggles with the roles, responsibilities, the carrying of my background, my talents, my feeling of the challenges has been so much like the experience of art. I understand it through art but that was my background.

The audience of an artwork receives within an other, an audience, a "themness." It is not the place that made the work but there may be echoes or ripples in the lake. Sometimes the work made cannot speak through all of these veils. I recently read a long involved review of a painting. Long explanations of the artist's circumstances, life, loves, techniques, developments of style, their historical context, actually the writing was a showpiece of encyclopedic and interpretive writing of a critic. As I read I felt less and less confident, more and more unworthy of looking at this piece, further and further removed from the meanings. With so little knowing to this level I thought perhaps I have no right to look and be with this work at all. I almost lost my stance in front of the work as if falling through the floor. Tilting.
And looking up I thought of myself as I paint and make. Thinking of my own meager work. But still considering the process and the pieces. Would I want all of that life and that evaluative interpretive critical layer really to be known by someone looking at the work? Could that be the way it should be seen? The evolution of my style, my statements or what I am deeply saying? Could anyone know, do I know? Was my making just there because I had no way to speak to things I do not know how to say?

Art is a separation in the talk. It is frozen time, it walks into the evoking of responses in the viewer. But what happens then often surprises me. When I looked again at this piece , about which I read, regaining myself I preferred my set of connections, though I was not hurt or disturbed by the interpreter/critic piece. I just heard something from an artist and it was special to me too. It is that dissonance I always find in Says' stories. It speaks to me very privately and my private feelings we hold alone.


Origami cranes brought me to this book too, expressions of flight, of folding them for the celebrations of the fleeting nature and beauty of a life. I like to make them. I like to touch paper. It is a kind of religion for me.

I just received beautiful gifts donated for my class. The gesture of this very moving to the whole school, or those that know of it, with many aware. It was the loveliest of things to do I'm actually shocked. And I did disassociate really. I connected to the kind of feeling that my children in my class know a teacher that speaks a language they are just learning, experience daily the discomforts of interpreting me, a very different person, the school, the differences from home. They know there is a world, but not yet if it is a town or a country, not really where a friend might be thinking of giving them a gift.
But I watched. They know the concrete joy of playing with the blocks, or setting up the reptile habitat, or the joy of hearing a book. But they grasp fleetingly something more than this. They are able to grasp that I hold something "else" that comes into play as I share these special gifts with them. We sense the things speak other languages to me. I am honored. And in my way these things honor for me the importance of my children.

Like the paper cranes that are folded within this story to decorate the Christmas tree of this child's mother with her distances, the cranes are folded as symbols beautifully dimensional, momentarily alluding to the ideal of the gesture. The flight, the crane as it lifts up and into the sky. A paper to say my heart lifts to you dearly; your kindness is folded into the totality of where I am now, lifting you into the mind's eye.

Or so it is for me.

Say's child senses that his parent is him, yet not him. They have been united; he was inside of her womb and shares their past but that their flights are their own. As soon as we hold the painting to go to something I can use to explain, in the time of our looking, in our flash of insights it escapes us into a kind of flight. Our next meeting, our next experience to be both familiar but also the possibility of a different, refreshed, unknown newness for us.

This child carries sadness from this day and a joy, something felt as his mistake, he could not know playing in the carp pond again without feeling that he would evoke disappointment from his mom. I relate this a bit to my gifting, I would like to be able to share with these friends something that might be worth their kindness, my class being so dear to me I share them as the beautiful and special persons that I hope will live in their world touching the lives of others as positively.
I wish almost with wistfulness that these children could really be known as expressions of the miracle of life, the possibility in life. I had a child last year so dear to me. I look at her photo knowing that I shared her with a friend, writing of her adventures, to try to give something of myself and this place we live within lacking anything else really of worth to ever give.

Ah. Maybe I am not up to the expression in words of Say. He made a book that I find unique in children's literature It asks of us a willingness to be uncomfortable, to be changes, to speak to deep rivers running through us. As we reach the sea a part of the humanity of the life we have experienced a book such as this allows us to say that there is so much we will not know, never explain, that affected us profoundly and moved through us. A part of the water, the river the sea and yet held within the self, our concrete self. A drop. Look at his cover as a child tries to understand who he is.

I loved this book enough to, in pre-Amazon days, put in two special orders (both failed) through Crown Books and finally, after two years, find a children's specialty book store that could get it for me. It is the story of a small boy learning to obey his mother as well as the story of his first Christmas. The book's strength is its astonishing illustrations. The luminous pictures of the family's Japanese home, the small pine tree with the silver origami cranes and candles, and the emotion on the face of the little boy captivate my son, who is not yet two and a half. Even at his age, which is much younger than this book is intended for, he really responds to the poetic text, the relationship between the boy and his mother, his struggle to obey his mother and deal with her disapproval of his misbehavior, and the beauty of the tree of cranes. This is a peaceful and gentle text, and I am grateful that I can finally read my son this story that both helps to build his character and exposes him to the beauty and grace of Japanese form.

This autobiographical story of author Allen Say's discovery of Christmas is gentle and beautiful. As a little boy in Japan, he wasn't supposed to play near the neighbor's carp pond, but he did, and fell in! Mother was a little mad at him, but she was preoccupied with making origami cranes. She put them on a tree that she brought in from the garden, and explained to her puzzled son that this was called a Christmas tree. (She had lived in California as a girl.) The boy asked for and received a Samurai kite as a Christmas gift. He never forgot that day, because it was the first time he learned about Christmas, and he never played in the carp pond again.

This lovely story introduces us to a traditional Japanese family and to a child who experiences two cultures. The illustrations are quite unique and are almost shiny. The simple text is easy to read and children aged 6-8 love this book.

While the stories in this book may appear wordy or (dare I say it) even dreadful at first, as you read them more and more (and I garuntee you will) they will grow on you as they did on me and my toddler!

This collection of stories has a central group of characters, which even the youngest of children can seem to become invovled with. The stories include plot lines that invovle lessons like teamwork, commradery, honesty, modesty and being humble. The stories are fun and have action (which is more then I can say for some of the Thomas books).
It's really wonderful to see my two year old acting out "Thomas Goes Fishing" with his toy trains or the day I realized he had "Terence the Tractor" memorized. This book has really reached my child!

Okay, Ringo Starr is not the best narrator, and the pictures are a bit fuzzy and not all that great having been taken from the TV series video tape and enlarged past what their quality would support; and Thomas (on the cover) does look like his going to `hurl', but little people just don't seem to care and so we give this book and cassette, Four Stars.

There are 4 stories in this collection:

Trouble for Thomas
Thomas Saves the Day
Thomas Goes Fishing
Terence the Tractor

For those of you who can't remember the plot lines I have summarized them below.

In `Trouble for Thomas', kind Edward trades jobs with Thomas so that our favorite Steamie is off to end his boredom by pushing freight cars instead of coaches. The cars get the better of him though because he hasn't listened to Edwards advice. (A frequent Thomas problem.)

In `Thomas Saves the Day' it is poor James' turn to get into trouble with those troublesome trucks. They force him to go off the line. (Wooden brakes, you know). Thomas saves the day by quickly getting the break-down train to the scene, where fortunately James is embarrassed, but unhurt. At the end of this story, James gets new brakes, and Thomas gets his own branch line and Annie and Clarabel.

In `Thomas Goes Fishing', we find out that Thomas loves to stop and watch the river, unfortunately fate and his driver seldom allow him to do so. When he meets the other engines he repeats his dissatisfaction and says, "I want to fish." But they would all say the same thing in reply: "Engines don't go fishing."

Trouble comes when Thomas stops at the river station for water and the pump is out of order. His driver and fireman use a bucket to top him off, but unbeknownst to them, they have put fish in Thomas' boiler. Steamie chaos (and a bit of a stink) ensues.

In `Terence the Tractor', Thomas gets himself into trouble when he bangs up his much hated snowplow so that he actually can't wear it. And when a heavy snow falls, he gets stuck. Terence comes to the rescue and Thomas finds out that `caterpillar treads' are good things indeed.

Four Stars. My son plays this tape over and over and over, all of its faults forgiven.

My 3-year-old son listened to this cassette repeatedly with a walkman when we took a 4 hour flight. A stress-free flight courtesy of Thomas.

My son loves Thomas the Tank Engine and this book, with the cassette, helps him with his pronunciation of the words that he is having trouble saying. I wish that there were more then 4 books on tape with Thomas.

The 3 Sue Brothers are always coming out with books about Abnormal Psychology. I have read their texts while in both undergrad and graduate school. It provides a lot of good information about abnormal behaviors that are commonly seen in mental illness.

I highly recommend this textbook as a keepsake in your Pysch. library. As an undergrad, we used this text in Personality and Psychopathology. As a grad student of Social Work, I have still referred back to this text book. Very comprehensive and formatted perfectly.

As an undergrad currently grappling with an Abnormal Psychology class, I find this book both instructional and interesting. Its many colorful graphs and charts help illustrate points and most importantly, the writing style used is engaging and comprehensive -- fantastic for helping keep the reader awake!

As a college student, I appreciated the quality of the material contained in this book and the clarity of it. No sitting with a dictionary to try and read a textbook. The layout of the book was wonderful as well as the descriptive manner it was written in, the pictures that accentuated the points delivered by the text. All around, an awesome text!

This book is written in the no-nonsense style that has made Mr. Allen such a successful government teacher; it can be read very quickly. However, the message will stick with the reader long after the last word is read. It is a delight to witness Abe's emotional growth following the death of his father. And while the trail anecdotes are the heart of the story, non-trail hikers will find this gem as enjoyable as trail enthusiasts. I would recommend this to almost everyone, but it is a must-read for Pomperaug High School students. Perhaps this can be substituted for Thoreau's Walden in the Junior English curriculum. But one question does linger: what happened to Katie?

I enjoy walking in the outdoors but I don't usually read books about hiking. A friend recommended An Unfinished Appalachian Trail: A Memoir to me. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down and finished it in an evening. It's quite a book. The author's stories are memorable. However, what really impressed me was the profound nature of the journey. The author's passion for hiking and the trail are evident from the dialogue. This story takes one far beyond the Outward Bound-type experience. It provides a unique perspective on what hiking the Appalachian Trail is like. This is one you don't want to miss.

I enjoy walking in the outdoors but I don't usually read books about hiking. A friend recommended An Unfinished Appalachian Trail: A memoir to me. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down and I finished it in an evening. It's quite a book. The author's stories are memorable. However, what really impressed me was the profound nature of the journey. The authors's passion for hiking and the trail are evident from the dialogue. This story takes one far beyond the Outward Bound-type experience. It provides a unique perspective on what hiking the Appalachian Trail is like. This is one you don't want to miss.

The best book I have read about the Appalachian Trail. This is not your typical day-to-day hiker journal. Abe Allen's memoir describes how the trail experience impacted and shaped him as a young man after the death of his father. The opening chapters tell about how Abe prepared for the hike, his reservations, and the help that he received from his mentor. The book is a fast read, full of interesting stories about trail experiences and adventures, and interspersed with personal reflections. This is an enjoyable book. Highly recomended.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Although the Internet and web commerce is still very much an American phenomena, there are many signs that it is about to change. After many years of explosive growth, the curve of new Internet users in the United States is leveling off. Recent articles point to other countries, Brazil in particular, where there could be an explosion of new users. Argentina, India and China also show signs of being poised to enter the only true global market.
To compete in this arena, it is necessary to understand how to display the characters of the "local" language, and for that, you need Unicode. This book is absolutely the best reference on Unicode that currently exists. Often overused, the word definitive is an understatement. Created by the members of the Unicode consortium, it is difficult to conceive of an aspect of Unicode that is not covered in this book.
However, Unicode is more than just characters in spoken languages. With significant sections devoted to mathematical and other commonly used symbols, this is a reference for all who wish to communicate effectively. In every area, there are some references that are essential, and this is one of them.

Everyone who wants to know more about how to make The Secret work for them must read these books!

I will tell you a story. After reading this book, I wondered if I had a counterpart anywhere near my home!! I asked in my mind to be shown this person, if there was one, and to be shown in such clarity that I would recognize him or her!! As I sat in a cafe, about a week later, a man came into the cafe with a small child. He was wearing the exact clothes I was wearing, down to the running shoes. We had the same shirt on and khaki pants! We had the same body shape, he being a bit taller. He had gotten out of a silver Mercedes( I used to dream about owning one!) Every hair on my body stood up. The child with him had a t-shirt on which read "Sister". My own sister in this life lived one day, "died" in 1942. I had this most wonderful feeling of peace. Just coincidence? No, I don't think so. Cheers!

In this book (two volumes) Seth adds depth to some of the concepts introduced in Seth Speaks (Reincarnation, Probabilities) and adds new flavours (Counterparts, Families of Consciousness). Excellent and intriguing as usual but you should have read and enjoyed "Seth Speaks" or "Nature of personal reality" before you dig into this one. However, I just finished reading it for the third time and (again) it's been like a new book to me.

This book, along with any other Seth book, can open your mind to new ways of seeing yourself and the world we live in. I can read one page, sometimes, one sentence, and have something to reflect on for hours, if not forever. Highly recommended if you want to expand your awareness.