John Hughes Books

I'm not sure how to put this, but, this book has some of the best, most clearly written, and logically organized introductions to various aspects of the class concept in C++ programming. I had been struggling with the concept of the class constructor for about a month, rereading material in several different texts, but not really understanding it. This book iterates and reinterates the subject material so that there is no confusion. For example, on the constructor, the book explained the distinction between objects and classes, the concept of instantiation, provided examples of such and of member types, and the purpose of the class concept, and then, at the right time, explained it so: "The purpose of the constructor is to initialize an object of its class."

T H A N K Y O U !!!!

In ten minutes, I understood everything I had been struggling with for the previous 30 days. The book does the same thing with polymorphism, overloading, templates, and so forth. So -- I'm not sure if people who are specifically interested in Collections and Container Classes will get what they want from this book -- I'm not at that level to judge yet -- but this book is great for the beginner as a supplementary support text. Beautiful diagrammatics also.

Quite a bit of the book is spent reviewing object oriented principles and data structures. Also, the title doesn't say it, but the book concentrates almost exclusively on the standard template library.

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I bought this book believing it discussed US construction contract law and management. It is very good and explicit, BUT it discusses UK and not US laws.

I penned the introduction to this collection, not because I know Mike Heffernan (never met him) but because these stories are great! Sharp, insightful...and twisted in a marvelous way. Following are a couple notes I made in the introduction:

In the title story, "Exposed," Heffernan paints a world not unlike that of Stephen King's "Running Man." But in this dark universe, the "runners" are former celebrities now scrambling to hide from their former notoriety. And the good folk - the old and infirm - are their ironically potent enemy as they watch a game show that combines the violence of "Running Man" with "America's Most Wanted."

Then there's "Cold Deck," which offers one of the volume's most effective explorations of the (in)human condition. In it, Heffernan imagines a society where the men have literally replaced their limbs with saws and other logging implements to become the most effective tools for their jobs. And in typical human fashion, the faceless corporation that benefited from their dedication leaves them behind. And in typical human fashion, the women, not the men, take the decisive retributative action.

While the denizens of "Cold Deck" may be hapless victims of the uber-machine, the lead character of "Stains of Life" is a willful acceptor of enslavement. Here, Heffernan paints another distopia - a land where the government imprisons and exploits drug-users. Except that, before they were imprisoned, they weren't hooked on the stuff. Again freedom, liberation, is a central theme. And the personal decision on whether to choose freedom - at the potential price of death - is played out in a haunting denouement. Another key theme for Mike is that while everything may look cozy...the acceptance of a veneer of happiness is dangerous. While everyone in "Stains of Life" is getting their fix, one character says "Don't let appearances fool you. It isn't as innocent as it looks...This is a terrible place."

None of Mike's stories are as innocent as they may appear at first glance. They are terrible places, made so because they live close to where we live now; they are places that are only two steps to the right of today. It's not so hard to see the drug-concentration camps come true. Or the corporate genocide, of sorts, of a whole adapted blockade of workers. Or the persecution of an entire societal segment via a TV show.

He also knows that appearances lie. In Heffernan's fiction, it's deadly to dig through the smooth, masking walls to discover the truth of what's really going on behind them.

And truth is really at the heart of seeking, of living, isn't it? Mike has a strong sense of dark humor, and in "Open 24/7" he postulates an Art Bell scenario that would appeal to anyone who has spent several days with insomnia. Perhaps there ARE things out there waiting to help us. But help us accomplish...what, exactly? Is it really the truth that those things unveil? Or is it something worse. More primal?

This collection posits all sorts of questions about the dark motives behind the human condition. And every story entertains as it explores. I really enjoyed reading Exposed! I think you will too.

From the flooded nightmare of Hurricane Katrina to the dusty roads under a post-apocalyptic sky, Mike Heffernan's "Exposed!" brings us ten tales of the heart of darkness.
Heffernan clearly understands the underpinnings of modern horror fiction. The tension and build-up to his gory, gruesome, or creepily-ironic climaxes are very well done, and the details (always a make-or-break point in short fiction I find) are right on the money. At 203 pages you can hardly call "Exposed!" wordy, and perhaps most telling of his talent is the fact that none of the stories in it feel unfinished, incomplete, or rushed.
For fans of the genre, I would put "Exposed!" on a rough par with short story collections like Stephen King's "Night Shift" or "Skeleton Crew", with the caveat that "Exposed!" is both somewhat narrower in scope and about as consistently entertaining as the above titles. "Exposed!" borrows much of King's style (in a good way) to make the horror therein reverberate with a very human tone. The things that go bump in the night are just as often vanity, jealousy, hunger, lonliness, madness, and pain as they are Cthulu-like Lovecraftian monsters.
For me, the stories that stood out were the eponymous "Exposed!" which could (as Heffernan tells us in his notes) have been much longer, "24/7" a story about the waking nightmare of working on little or no sleep, "Starved to Death" which makes my current dieting regime seem positively indulgent in comparison, and the deliciously terrifying "Home is Where the Heart Is". Of this group, the only one that involves anything truly supernatural was "Home is Where the Heart Is" about a monster beneath the flood waters of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Among these, my favorite was probably "Exposed!" because of its gruesome, paranoid gleefulness. Heffernan talks about his influences in an author's introduction, and they clearly shine through in the stories. When reading this collection, you will hear the echoes of "Soylent Green", "Logan's Run", "The Gunslinger", "Night of the Living Dead", "The Running Man", "Thinner", "Insomnia", "Army of Darkness" and many others. Heffernan doesn't make the mistake of assuming we haven't heard his stories before, and instead gives us more of what he knows (as a horror fan himself) that we like.
Which is not to say that there aren't wildly original moments here as well. The story "Cold Deck" features a camp of lumber workers who have had their arms replaced with saws and other tools so they can do their jobs more efficiently. This sort of imposition of semi-horrific things on the human body tends to be a recurring theme, and I think works very well in context of most of the stories. Also, it is in "Cold Deck" that Mike starts experimenting with local dialect, and it lends a welcome clarity to a story that otherwise would have been far too surreal to be truly entertaining.
I only have two complaints about "Exposed!" and they are both concerned with presentation, not content. The first is the hideous cover image. Not only does it not have the effect that was intended, but it is so comically off-putting that I fear many who would otherwise read this book will pass it over based on that image alone. Despite the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith being a possible thematic tie-in, I think that "Exposed!" will suffer because of it.
My second complaint is the Introduction by John Everson. Given the content of the eponymous "Exposed!" short story, one might think that even Heffernan could appreciate the irony of this blatantly vain and unnecessary stroke-fest. Most tellingly, though, is how the Introduction (which is phrased and titled in essay style) fails to give us any valuable insight at all, and serves merely as an extended and puffed-up commercial for the stories that follow. I didn't mind the intro written by the author himself, or the three interesting-but-almost-irrelevant-to-the-story epigraphs that Heffernan included, but by the time I got to Everson's overblown Introduction I found myself wondering if this was done solely to push the book over the 200 page mark. I personally would rather have had two or three more stories than 15+ pages of extraneous DVD-Extra Features-esque pontification.
Minor flaws aside, "Exposed!" is an excellent read, and a worthy addition to the Stephen King/Dean Koontz/Richard Matheson section of your bookshelf. I think we are only just now seeing the first output of an author that will continue to grow and mature with time. Also be on the lookout for "A Dark and Deadly Valley" and "Aim for the Head", which are slated to be released in the near future.

-Reviewed by Mark R. Brand, author of "Red Ivy Afternoon" and "The Prince and the Pitchman"

The author traces the historical bases of Reformed worship from the Jewish Temple through the Reformation, thereby connecting the Old and New Testament practices. His explanations of the many facets of worship; e.g. ministries of praise, prayer, word, and sacraments, and the cited examples are clearly stated and readily understandable. Where scripture references are appropriate, they are given and serve to enhance and amplify the reading. The entire book is enriching, serving to make the Reformed worship more meaningful.

Review by Rev. George van Popta

In this book, the author introduces all the different aspects of Reformed worship. He treats the following parts: baptism; the Lord's day; the ministry of praise; the ministry of the Word; the ministry of prayer; the Lord's supper; daily prayer; alms. In each case he discusses Old and New Testament roots, development in the synagogue, the early church and the middle ages, and reformation. Old has clearly mastered his topic on both the large and small scales. His bibliography is extensive.

In the final chapter," Tradition and Practice," the author enumerates a 15-point program for the renewal of worship in American Protestantism. He wants to avoid two extremes: the first is a sort of archaeological reconstruction in the English language of classic Reformed liturgies that do no more than mechanically and unthinkingly reproduce the tradition; the second is an ignoring of our traditions and of giving ourselves to perpetual liturgical revision (or revolution) thereby losing sight of the great value and importance of having a set liturgy. A tradition radically changed every generation is not a tradition.

This is a good book and very pleasant to read. The one who reads it will learn much about the biblical and church-historical roots of the different parts of the worship of the Reformed churches and be led to reflect on why we do things the way we do.

Here are two interesting quotations from the book. This first one (p. 148) is in the context of an argument to renew the classical Reformed practice of daily household worship:

"For classical Reformed spirituality, morning and evening family prayer was one of the foundations of piety. It was at the heart of the day to day exercising of Christian faith. This made sense to those for whom Covenant theology was so formative. The unity of the family was a significant feature of Covenant theology. With the coming of pietism, daily family prayer was unfortunately replaced with private devotions.

"Pietism was very individualistic and many of this persuasion had a hard time understanding why children should be baptized. There was no sacred unity in the family. Each single human being stood before God alone. With the demise of pietism, private devotions began to develop atrophy. They finally became not much more than "five minutes a day." Today as we seek to recover a Reformed spirituality, we need to reach behind pietism and recover the older classical Protestant discipline of daily morning and evening prayer."

I'm confident Old is not advancing an either-or dilemma between family worship and private devotion. Surely both are important. He is writing in a North American context that eschews the corporate for the individualistic in matters of relationship to God and neighbour.

What follows is the concluding paragraph after the author has put forward his 15-point renewal program for (North) American Protestantism:

"This program for the renewal of worship in American Protestant churches of today may not be just exactly what everyone is looking for. In our evangelistic zeal we are looking for programs that will attract people. We think we have to put honey on the lip of the bitter cup of salvation. It is the story of the wedding of Cana all over again but with this difference. At the crucial moment when the wine failed, we took matters into our own hands and used those five stone jars to mix up a batch of Kool-Aid instead. It seemed like a good solution in terms of our American culture. Unfortunately, all too soon the guests discovered the fraud. Alas! What are we to do now? How can we possibly minister to those who thirst for the real thing? There is but one thing to do, as Mary the mother of Jesus, understood so very well. You remember how the story goes. After presenting the problem to Jesus, Mary turned to the servants and said to them, "Do whatever he tells you." The servants did just that and the water was turned to wine, wine rich and mellow beyond anything they had ever tasted before."

This book is for real world NDS applications. This book wont help for taking the Novell D&I test as this book is how it should be done. Novell's test is not interested in the right way.

This book is the standard. If you are installing NDS this is the book you MUST read before you begin. Critics of NDS are typically those who do not understand what a directory is and what it can do for you. This book will set them straight. Complaints about NDS installations arise due to poor installations. This book can prevent that. This book breaks down the information and is very easy to digest. This is an amazing book, and if you can find a copy of it, buy it. It's all about doing it right the first time, something far too few IT professionals understand. If you work with Netware and NDS, this is book should be in your library.

This is surely the best single book you can purchase for a guide to the Morgan models and history until 1992, The work is well organized, pleasantly written and beautifully illustrated. At the end, you wish there was more. There is much detail on different changes over the years, often presented within an anecdotal context.

This is the first Morgan work to buy. Others stem from here.

Great source for information with abundant color photographs. This book really deserves a revision of the type that Bill Piggott's Original Triumph TR recenently benefitted from (the original addition, which covered models from TR2 through TR6 was expanded into three volumes didicated to TR2/3/3A/3B/Italia, TR4/4A/Dove GTR4/5/250/6, and now TR7/8 as well). With a 35 year production history, the +8 certainly merits a volume of its own, as do the three-wheeled models. My personal interest would be in greater documentation of the evolution from the flat radiator cars to the now more-or-less current low line cars. By my count, +4 two seat roadsters were produced in seven defferent body styles (I include flat-rads factory converted to cowl-rad to reach this number). Owing, presumably, to space limitations, only one of these types is included in the selection of photographs (3 different cars). The variations in DHC bodywork over the years of production are similarly underrepresented. These limitations aside, I would recomend this book to anyone interested interested in Morgans. The photographs are beautifully done, and the text is the most readable of any of books in the "Original" series which I have read. Other recomendations: MORGAN: THE LAST SURVIVOR by Chris Harvey, and Ken Hill's COMPLETELY MORGAN trilogy (both out of print).

I'm a postgraduate student and I've Virology as a focal point in my studies. My professor in Retrovirology wasn't really structured in bringing the stuff over to us. Besides studying in a language which is not your own (german) deteriorated the situation. As a consequence, I was in search of help and I stumbled over this great piece online. I'm more than satisfied with it; it covers all the sections I became mixed up with during the lectures and more. I would call it the bible of retro virology. I've my exams in a few weeks time and I look forward to it with optimism. I just need to do some thorough revision and I think all should be okay. So I strongly recommend this piece.

A last word to the authors, I think publishing an updated version won't be a bad gesture. The current version is three years old and we all know there is strong research going on in this biological discipline.

Best regards

A.D. Saningong

Dear Dr. John M.Coffin! There is Dr.Adelya R.Kalinina, M.D.,Ph.D., Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry Russian Acad. Sci., Moscow, Russia.

Take my admiration about your book!

I would be very thankfull for you if you could send me sheme(illustration) of Mouse Mammary tumor virus...It's very important for me, because I want to use your data for lectures materials for student study. Sorry, right now we (Russian scientists) have not possibylities to use modern scientific literature in full volume.

Thank you very mush.

Dr. Kalinina Adelya.

we the owner of www.hiddenbrains.com are a leading php developer and solution provider, making e-commerce applications,web applications, developed more then 200 websites using php and mysql, we are allways using this book for our reference.
regards
jugal kishore chhawchharia
http://www.hiddenbrains.com

I love this book! You know how you sometimes get a little bugger of a problem while coding? Chances are you'll find a solution for it in here. This book has saved me countless hours while coding -- skip searching and get the solution right away. Plus I used a coupon from UnderTag.com, so it was almost free for me.

I am a newb when it comes to PHP, but not when it comes to programming in general. The Content is very cleanly laid out. It is straightforward, but by no means simple. For using some detailed code, I was surprised at the lack of commenting on the code. He steps into some areas not expected by me. For instance, he lays out some XML / XSL based code that I was itching to know and now I do!

However, he also covers some topics that are so basic that I felt it hurt the book overall... I learned most basic code from such books as Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 hours... so to cover the few basic topics like he did felt more appropriate for a beginners book... But he does make up for it with some VERY in-depth code. Just wish he commented his advanced code to help the newbs a little more...

If you're going to get a book to help you with specific issues? This is your book... (as long as your issues are his) If you want to learn PHP? Get Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 hours...

Either way, do yourself a favor and check out the Index here on Amazon... You might just find exactly what you are hoping to do, in which case, his coding is great...

Like a true cookbook, this book gives you recipes for how to make certain meals. It doesn't explain every tool and ingredient in your kitchen: that information can be had anywhere.

The authors present several example projects, then go about solving them, introducing you to certain PHP fundementals (and not-so-fundamentals) along the way.

If you are trying to learn PHP from scratch, then maybe this isn't the book for you. This isn't "PHP Cooking for Dummies" ... and I, for one, am glad.

I'm not the type of programmer that likes to copy & paste other people's code in my applications, however, every so often I run into problems that I'm not quite sure of the proper way to solve; this book has become invaluable in these cases, whether it is performing HTTP Post requests (hint, use cURL), or parsing data with regular expressions, the book provides a handy reference for all the common and not so common tasks that you might encounter.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the book is that it is written by two PHP core developers, and they often show their knowledge, telling you what goes on behind the scene, offering a variety of different solutions, and then offering the best solution. I've found this information helpful in solving future problems, as I learned what was going on under the hood, therefore, I knew how to optimize the solution.

An excellent book, if you want solutions to problems that you'll constantly encounter, its meant to be a reference on the programmer's bookshelf, not a way to learn PHP (although it definitely has _improved_ my PHP knowledge), ....

...

I liked this book. It is a short, lively readable book, describing the clash between Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, over their political philosophy. Most of the book is story telling, not in the sense of making things up, but in the sense of relating an entertaining anecdote. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained story, given a lively and dramatic account of some time period or incident. One chapter, for example, gives us the the Quasi-War with France, during the John Adams Administration, the XYZ Affair and the the political fallout from it. Other chapters give us the Election of 1800, the Burr Treason Trial and the late decisions of Marshall's Supreme Court. All in all, a good read. I recommend to anyone looking for a short book on the subject.

Just do not expect too much from it. While you get the dramatic stories, you do not really get much context or larger discussion. First, the book is not a biography of either Jefferson or Marshall. It gives incidents from their careers, but that is it. Second, the book does not discuss fully the nature of the clash between the two. Clearly, Jefferson and Marshall disagreed over ideology, but the book really does not explore the ideology of either of them -- or their parties -- in any detail. Instead, you get a quick, broad-brush description of what they were fighting about, but then alot of details in the stories.

To sum up, I think you could say Simon is a good story teller and an accurate historian. He does not give any profound new insights, however, or teach us a great deal that is new.

James Simon, Dean Emeritus of the New York Law School, has written a seminal work on the history of the early republic, comparing titans Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall--Virginians, cousins, lawyers, and political enemies. What Kind of Nation recounts the struggle between America's first political parties, Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans and Marshall's Federalists, over the future of the federal judiciary and the future of the democratic experiment called the Unitied States.

After losing the 1800 election to Jefferson, John Adams attempts curb Jefferson's Republican influence by filling the judiciary with faithful Federalists. His most influential and lasting appointment was John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Over thirty four years leading the Court, Marshall secures the independence of the federal judiciary through brilliant legal arguments and skilled political maneuvering.

In Marbury v. Madison, Marshall led a unanimous court in securing the right of judicial review of the consitutionality of all actions of both the executive and congressional in a case that on the surface was a loss for the Federalists. In deciding the case against Adams' midnight appointments for lack of jurisdiction, Marshall makes the the Supreme Court the arbiter of consitutionality for all time to come. Jefferson had argued that consitutionality was the domain of all three branches of government, and in his Kentucky Resolution he contended that states could determine a federal law to be null and void if it was unconstitutional. Marshall's interpretation stands to this day.

Simon is one of the few scholars who sees Jefferson for what he was, a stalwart party man whose hyperbolic condemnation of his opponents though successful in the short term, was ultimately rejected along with his vision of America. Jefferson saw the United States as a loose confederation of powerful states, all pursuing a bucolic ideal of an agrarian economy that rejected banks, paper money, and all things industrial. Instead, the vision of Hamilton and Marshall, the chief representatives of the Federalists, comes to be. The industrial revolution takes hold in the Northeast and the backward looking vision of the agrarians is finally put to rest after the South's defeat in the Civil War.

In reading What Kind of Country, one comes to realize that Jefferson is not a true progressive visionary. In fact, he is the reactionary in this morality play. Industrialization was the future in the early 19th century; agriculture was the past. Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, envisioned a country of political freedom but economic and indealistic bondage to the land, which in point of fact, would never allow true political freedom.

John Marshall isn't often mentioned in the same breath as figures such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, or Thomas Jefferson, but Simon makes a very good case for doing so. Just as these other figures played crucial roles in determining the shape of the nation, Marshall is perhaps the key figure in establishing the practical role that the Supreme Court was to play in U.S. history, and the key figure in making the judiciary truly independent. The latter cannot be emphasized too strongly, for as Simon demonstrates, Jefferson had a vision of the judiciary that would have made if subservient to the executive and legislative branches. Jefferson wanted to be able to replace judges with relative ease--a move that would have created a permanent timidity on the part of the courts and would have made them the easy toy of party politics--and he wanted the notion of popular democracy to extend to the courts. No matter how one feels about Jefferson on other issues, and no matter how one feels about such issues as judicial activism, I would imagine that most Americans are relieved and grateful that Marshall's vision and not Jefferson's prevailed. The system of checks and balances works because each branch of government has the genuine capacity to precisely that, whereas if Jefferson had succeeded, the courts would have of little or no consequence.

Simon tells the story of the struggle between John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson through discussing the ins and outs of several key judicial controversies. The most important of these was, of course, Marbury v. Madison, in which the U.S. Supreme Court found for the defendant, Secretary of State James Madison, but in doing so established the precedent of assuming for the Court the ability to adjudicate the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress. This precedent vastly outstrips all of the issues of the case itself, and could very well be seen as the charter for all else that the Court would do in subsequent centuries.

There is an image in Wittgenstein's Preface to his PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS that I often think of when reading books on early American history (or, for that matter, on any subject area to which one returns). Wittgenstein states that the issues he is going to explore need to be approached from a number of different viewpoints, so that in the end investigating his subject is very much like exploring a landscape, approaching once from this direction and then from another. Reading about the founding of the United States is unquestionably like this. Studying it by on one occasion reading a biography of Hamilton, another by reading about the Constitutional Convention, another by reading about the writing of the Declaration of Independence, another by reading about the FEDERALIST PAPERS, another by the age of the Federalist party, or reading a book about the Adams-Jefferson correspondence or the correspondence itself, or by reading a book about the struggle between Jefferson and Marshall on the limits of the judiciary are all ways of going over the same intellectual landscape, and the more ways that one finds to traverse the region, the stronger one's grasp. Simon's book is especially valuable because it approaches an important issue and focuses on it in a way that sometimes is obscured by more popular issues. Reading about Marbury v. Madison is simply not as exciting as reading about the mutual slandering that occurred in the 1800 election between Adams and Jefferson.

As a side note, I read this book while commuting to and from work each day to my job in the Loop in Chicago. Each evening as I ride the Brown Line home my train would pass by the John Marshall School of Law, established to honor the chief justice who was crucial in maintaining the long-term integrity of the rule of law in America.

This is a most relevant book. It is the story of two cousins who consistently and relentlessly clashed over just what kind of nation the United States would become.

Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall were political polar opposites. Jefferson, the Republican, was a fervent believer in State's rights. He held forth strongly that unguarded concentrations of power within the Federal Government would ultimately lead to the destruction of the United States. He was right.

John Marshall's views were just the opposite. Marshall subscribed to a strong central government. He passionately believed that left to themselves, each State's regional self interest would lead to the destruction of the United States. He was also right.

Therein lays the conundrum that faced the early republic and led to the formation of the first political parties. Both sides were right and both sides were wrong. Both men lived to see their fears of unchecked concentrations of power in the Federal Government or in the States lead to exactly the assaults on liberty that each feared. But in a larger sense both men, probably without realizing it, truly lived the concept of checks and balances both subscribed to and cherished within the Constitution.

This is an amazing story of continual, unrequited confrontation. Make no mistake; these men did not like each other. Each defined the other as what was wrong with the early republic. Ultimately, John Marshall prevails in his bid to establish the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the Constitution and the authoritative voice for the constitutional supremacy of the federal government over the states. More than 150 years after Jefferson's and Marshall's deaths, their words and achievements still reverberate in today's constitutional debate and political party battles. You will be fascinated by this work. Theirs was a confrontation that continues to define just what kind of nation the United States should be.

Lawyers often make poor historians. That might strike some as counter-intuitive as precedents are by their nature `historical'. But legal precedents are a narrow technical field and though they can encompass the political, economic and social issues of their day the legal logic and argument that surround them are usually- with some major exceptions- divorced from them. And perhaps it's that their [the lawyer as historian] early years have been shaped by legal reasoning and in spite of exposure to history such as an undergrad or grad degree, this legal mindset often limits a more holistic approach to the subject matter.

Not so with James F. Simon's "What Kind of Nation". Simon writing eschews the sort of legal analysis best left to law textbooks in favor of a clear, fairly encompassing and biographically based approach. And a fine approach it is. With healthy portions of legal analysis but an even finer biographer's paintbrush Simon comes close to bringing to life many of the individuals and their ideological stands.

At the center is of course Jefferson and Marshall. Both get sympathetic, but honest treatment from Simon. Jefferson, the idealist, strongly holding the belief that favored the limiting of government and the Federalists as the greatest threat to liberty in the young nation. His horror at the Sedition acts and the steps taken by the Republicans are highlighted as are the equally strong beliefs and actions taken by the Federalists to implement them.

Marshall is painted in an even finer light I think. Perhaps it's because Jefferson's more volatile temper got the best of him at times or perhaps Marshall's nature was to be a more moderating influence, he comes across a intelligent and subtle thinker. Read his approach to Marbury, where he takes the long road to come to his final conclusion. It was an approach that made upheld many of the Federalist tenets yet gave the victory to Jefferson. Masterfull.

Simon does a great job in describing two important events in that era. The first is the impeachment of Samuel Chase a justice on the Supreme Court. Simon presents the legal arguments in clear precise prose. But he does more than that, he describes the individuals involved-their strengths and weaknesses, the drama behind the scenes and sets it all in the context of the political mechanizations of the era. Equally compelling is the description of Burr's fall from grace and subsequent trial for treason. Marshall and Jefferson's role in both events are given in some detail and their rationales analyzed within the framework of the issues each was faced with.

James F. Simon has given a well written and immensely interesting picture of the dynamics between Jefferson and Marshall and the era in which they lived. With a clear, precise and entertaining writing style and with one foot firmly planted what seems like a historian's mindset I'm anxious to read more of his works. I would love to read a more in depth study of Chase or Burr- for example- written by Simon.

Highly recommended.

Interesting read, closley follows JFK Murder Solved web site. James Files did it with help of others.

I recommend this book to anyone. I got hooked into reading the whole book, by just the first page. It is an interesting book that will even get those loyal JFK fans thinking!!! I wish i'd known about this book a long time ago. If you have not read this book, then you don't like learning the history of this country.

Reviewed by Joanne Benham for Reader Views (8/06)

There have been so many books written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one would wonder why someone would bother writing another. There are two schools of thought about the assassination. One theory is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman, working on his own initiative. The other theory is that the assassination was a giant conspiracy involving the FBI, the CIA and the Mafia.

One name that comes up time after time in the conspiracy theory camp is Sam Giancana, the Mafia chief of Chicago during the late 50s and 60s. This book is co-authored by Sam's daughter, Antoinette, who had intimate access to several of the main characters named in the conspiracy theory. Her co-authors are doctors in the fields of neurology, neurophysiology and neuropsychiatry who provide expert analysis about what could and could not have happened that day in November, 1963.

The authors lay out a logical sequence of events, showing the strong links between the Kennedy family and Sam Giancana; links stretching back to prohibition days when Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger with a contract on his head for running his rum through Mob territory without permission.

Whatever theory you believe, this book is fascinating, delving into the inner workings of politics and the Mafia. I could hardly put the book down, although I had to keep skipping ahead to follow a particular story thread because the authors would throw out a tantalizing bit of information and then tell you they would explain it more fully in a future chapter. I couldn't wait to get to that chapter.

This is an outstanding book. It reads nicely and easily and gives a good overview of the case, also for beginners. This should not come as a surprise from me as I conversed a lot with author John Hughes and shared some of my research and materials for this book. Nevertheless a few tiny errors slipped into the last two chapters that deal with confessed grassy knoll shooter James E. Files. Such as that he used a .221 bullet, while in fact it was a .222 bullet. But these small errors are forgivable since they don't take away from the big picture, although the involvement of the CIA and the highest elements of US government could have been emphasized more. But then again, any child can grasp that Organized Crime alone could not have executed this coup d' état, not to mention its cover-up.

Five stars.

Wim Dankbaar

- author "Files on JFK"

Absolutely astonishing. Being new to the whole Kennedy assignation field of study this book was my first introduction to this intriguing subject. I was so fascinated by the information presented by the book I was even inspired to purchase the DVD of the taped interview with "Deadeye". I would highly recommend this book largely due to the fact it has kindled an interest in me I never thought I would have. I am still amazed at the idea that the man responsible for the shooting of JFK is alive and well in a prison in Joliet, IL. Even more remarkable is the thought that the world doesn't know