Tabu Books

The title means "Taboos at the Turn of the Millennium".

This book can be described as a summary of Esther Vilar's most important essays. She wrote it in 1998, looking back upon her own publications in the past three decades. It's so convincing it can almost be called the "world formula" in the fields of psychology and sociology. It's an eye-opener, enlightening, also witty, entertaining, and some passages will shock you! It deals with many different subjects, like religion, crime, the battle of the sexes, the modern phenomenon of "beautism", and a phenomenon the author calls "pleasure in non-freedom." What fascinates me most is the author's ability to explain the logical links between her theories in the different chapters; that's why you can only understand each chapter when you see it in the context of all the others - when you see the book as an integrated whole.

Too bad it's only available in the original German (BTW there's a new version now titled "Denkverbote : Tabus im 21. Jahrhundert") and in Spanish ("Prohibido Pensar"), but, seemingly, not yet in English...

...you American people (especially males) don't know what you're missing!

I am a sucker for a story with a flying man in it

What does that have to do with The Crown: Ascension?

One thing,

There is a flying man in it

But I didnt know that when I purchased it

I purchased it from Amazon a while ago because I am a fan of Hannibal Tabu and his other Web Serial Faraway, availible at his site, the operative.net

I was enamored when it arrived. It took a few weeks before I could sit down and read it. I cracked it open in a diner while waiting for my eggs on a Sunday morning. I did not put it down for the rest of the day. I read until 3 am just to finish it.

I was thoroughly impressed.

The Plot: Theres this woman named Tonya who stopped aging at twenty. If you are lucky enough for her to fall in love with you then somehow her love passes super powers to you, and you can run super fast, lift heavy stuff, and best of all, you can FLY.

James is the lucky SOB who gets to fall in love with Tonya, and they unravel her past while kicking butt and taking names of forces that have plagues Tonya for years.

It is hard to discuss this book without gushing or telling you all the stuff to look out for. I will begin with the dialogue, it is solid, and the characters seem real. James is the everyman with a cool demeanor and a sense of humor. He wants to protect his woman despite her long lifespan and tendency to whip out magical spells and techno wizardry.

The situations are of course fantastic, in that, he keeps flying around the room sort of way which is why I love it so much. And they fight Yakuza for mystical objects, and there is a woman made of hair and I cant even get started on Damien Dare, who you will loathe, and love when you meet him. He is the other immortal who is a thorn in Tonya and James side and he is the most enigmatic bastard you will read about all year.

An intelligent piece of fiction with imaginative scenarios dripping with the type of verisimilitude that only nights of research can provide. Hannibal took time to craft this work and it shows in the page. It is a quick read, full of zeal and panache. The characters are earthy and realistic. The world of Tonya and James is inhabited by eclectic people with multiple motivations and fantastic designs that at times Tonya and James are the catalyst for, and other times they are simply along for the ride.

The book isnt for everyone, I mean, I would not suggest it to my mother, who just wouldnt get into the whole flying man thing, but everyone who sees flicks with me and listens to me when I talk television shows should pick this bad boy up.

For those who know and love the Sci-fi, Action movies, Kung Fu, espionage, secret societies, and mythical tales should definitely stop to read the book.

I would say that you could borrow mine but I want you to go to Amazon.com and buy it so Hannibal will get the cash, and then he will be compelled to slow down the Karaoke and world domination plans and write more.

I can not say enough how much I loved this book.

Did I mention that James flies?

Did I mention the part about him punching through the roof of a building at 900 mph like a human missile?

Did I mention Tonya is an immortal who also kicks major butt?

You will see more of that in book two where they hunt down some fanatic immortal hunters who want them dead.

I cant even begin to tell you how much I am in love with this book.

How much I know you will love it too.

I will sing ringing endorsements of this work of literary fiction from the rooftops as I am more than impressed by it, astounded, if you will.

It is not Shakespeare,

It is African Mythology wrapped in a Matrix coating, dipped in a super heroic candy shell.

It is a love story about the strength of the black woman, and the power she gives the black man

It is a metaphor for sexuality and gender role stereotypes

It is superpimptastic

And you will not forgive yourself for not checking it out

Seriously folks, buy the book.

If you've already read the book, then odds are you've seen the name on the foreword. Clearly I'm biased.

But rest assured, gentle reader, I come by it honestly.

Now, in a burst of inspired laziness inspiration, I will quote liberally from said foreword to coughfillercough enhance this review:

The Crown is your standard-issue love story. Boy meets girl. Girl and Boy fall in love. Boy begins to float like an F-16 and sting like a meteor strike.

Well, not so much "standard issue" as "OMGOMG I gots to read this, STAT!"

Unless, of course, you have no soul and cold plutonium beats within your chest.

... there are many ways to take this story: as societal metaphor; as Hannibal's treatise on gender dynamics, as a portrayal of competent intelligent African (Note: and African American) characters; as the infinitesimal peak of an iceberg that will smash the world of literature into new and exciting pieces within a couple of years (Oops. Did I say too much?); hell, you could just come out and say this is kick-ass comic-book style action and you'd _still_ be right. It's all in the exegesis, baby.

It's all true; this book kicks behind on many levels.

Well now, class, have any of you ever heard the saying `Behind every great man is a woman kicking his ass'? What? Isn't that how it goes? Ok, then `Behind every great man is a greater woman'. Still not right? Hmm, then let's try this: think of a society where power is wielded by men but is held by women. The most immediate result of this would be that men are important not for who they are but for who they marry. Kings would only become king by marrying a queen.

Feminists, take note. Hannibal is on your side too :D

Let's digress momentarily with another saying "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Now, consider the king mentioned above. It would be kinda hard for him to be a brutal dictator when being in the doghouse means getting kicked out of the palace, isn't it? Perhaps we need to relearn some of the old ways.

Draw your own conclusions. While I have a ... significant amount of inside information to draw on, there's still plenty of thought-provoking stuff for those of you not in the inner circle.

But you'd like to know what it all means, right? No one can answer that question until they've read the book - like the Matrix! But I'll give it a go: every single character in The Crown, from the protagonists to the most vestigial of extras, is an aspect of the human psyche as a whole and Hannibal's in particular.

More insider trading from yours truly ...

Tonya is of course the essence of reaching beyond your grasp, the unattainable ideal that keeps us striving to do better. James is the down-to-earth ordinariness that we all succumb to or rage against, just as much of a motivator in its own way as high ideals. Damien Dare ... well, Dare is the id of course; the fight-or-flight survival imperative, the Nietzchian will to power, the dark half of your Manichean inner universe.

Conclusions I drew on my own. Your mileage may vary, but not too much.

And speaking of Damien Dare,

I love the character, can't you tell? Don't laugh, you will too. Any decent God-fearing person who reads this book would think it absolutely shameful that people could like Damien Dare, him being old, bored and here to hurt the innocent. Yet, to paraphrase Laurence Fishburne, the character is unstoppably readable. Deep down (in my case, not so deep), we can't help but identify with him.

Every man on this planet secretly wants to be Damien Dare - some of us just have a hard time admitting it. I have no such problem :D

But this is all getting a bit too literary, isn't it? All this character analysis and such is starting to get all highbrow and even - dare I say it - pretentious. I mean, this ain't exactly _War and Peace_, numsayin'; we've got immortals and other superhumans kicking each other's asses all over the world.

If you're still reading, then this is probably right up your alley. Sold!

Believe it or not, a complete stranger wants you to read a book by a person he's never met. You can take that as a testament to how good, how intelligent, how utterly fricking _cool_ The Crown is.

Hyperbole? Heck no; I stand by this 100%. Buy it.

PS
Want another reason? Even the pages smell nice!

PPS
"But, Chinedum, don't you have anything negative to say about the book? Surely it can't be "perfect."

It is too!

ok ok, so i wish there were even more fight scenes. And that a certain character hadn't died. And that I got to see more of a certain hacker ... but then again, everybody would like to see more of her.

It's perfect, damn your eyes!

*wanders off while continuing to rant incoherently*

Hannibal Tabu has taken the "head over heels in love" metaphor to new soaring heights with this superhuman-mortal romance and action tale. I really enjoyed taking in 8,000+ year old Tonya and 20-something James' love affair maybe because the fight scenes are so intertwined with how the story could end and Hannibal's characters are so intriguing. But maybe I really read the book to find out how Tonya still looks 22 after all is said and done. The Crown: Ascension is a great book. (...)

Probably the most bloated book I've ever encountered. It seems like this isn't targeted for computer science students. It was completely impossible to read it without falling asleep, because the book could go on and on for pages without presenting anything new except that 1+1=2.

The best source for learning about tabu search would be to read a basic book about (combinatorial) optimization just to teach the vocabulary (like an exact neighborhood etc.). After that, just head to springerlink and download a few articles from the Lectures in Computer Science-series or use some other source for papers relating to applications of tabu search to various optimization problems.

This book is quite good for a reference though.

It's good to read the book that the writer and inventor of theory are the same person. Glover and Laguna conduct this book in a self-comprehensive book. I've never found any good resource of Tabu Search as great as this book. Only drawback is the price... too expensive for student. I only read it in the library though. I'm glad to know they have the paperback edition but I'm not sure about the quality of printing. Lastly, get it whenver you can afford it!. It's worth your money every characters.

This is a very useful book. It starts by introducing very important and interesting techniques in optimisation i.e. genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search and neural networks. It continues by giving examples of how the techniques have been applied in various case studies. The book also contains code so that users have a head start in implementing the techniques described. This book is good for beginners because it describes the basics of the techniques. It is also suitable for more advanced researchers because the case studies provoke ideas for further work. In conclusion, this book is a useful addition to the bookshelf of any researcher interested in intelligent optimisation.

I bought this book because it has source code for simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, tabu search and neural networks.
I have used the three first source code and ... they are so buggy.
They're wrote in C but doesn't compile due to evident syntax errors (so evident, are they here so as to made these source code unusable ?).
The content of the book is not equilibrate (some metaheuristics aren't discussed thoroughly).
If the authors use there source code, I think evereything presented in this book is completely false.
Don't buy it, there are some better books to buy.

This book gave a superficial coverage on 4 optimization techniques in Chapter 1. Out of the 4 techniques, only Genetic Algorithm was explained slighty more in detail. The rest are merely short examples. That is about all you will get from this book (one brief Chapter on ALL 4 techniques).