Oliver Books

Great book, for overall penetration testing, vulnerability assessment - even policy development.

Good for managers and technical people alike.

Hunt Brent down at Blackhat/Defcon and pester him to sign your copy.

I am a senior engineer for network security operations. I read this book to learn best practices for improving the security of my enterprise. I was very pleased to learn that "Hack Proofing Your E-Commerce Site" (HPYES) was not another "hacking book," like so many published recently. HPYES offers a wealth of practical recommendations and solid guidance for anyone responsible for host and network security.

Syngress' motto for their "Hack Proofing" series is "The only way to stop a hacker is to think like one." That slogan may be true for vulnerability assessment or penetration testing, but it does the material in HPYES a disservice. This book is less about the thrill of compromise and more about the measured peace of maintaining a well-protected enterprise.

HPYES is noteworthy for its mature, reasonable, thorough, and clear approach to explaining security practices. The diagrams and screen captures are excellent. The seven authors consistently present topics through the security tenets of confidentiality, integrity, and [availability]. I believe even managers of technical staff would find this book rewarding.

My favorite chapters discussed incident response (10), financial transactions (6), and policy (4). Chapters 6 and 10 were especially enjoyable, as they contained material I hadn't read elsewhere, like descriptions of electronic commerce technologies and a comparison of responses to web site compromise. (Imagine -- original material in a security book!)

HPYES offered a few disappointments. I was dismayed to see an installation of Apache on Windows, vice UNIX. Page 336 mentions SSH as "Secured Socket Handler"; I believe the community knows SSH as simply Secure Shell. Chapter 7 also suffered from awkward English, but compensated by introducing Nessus as a sample vulnerability assessment tool. Appendix B was probably not needed, as it's just a reprint of "Fast Track" material from individual chapters.

Overall, I recommend HPYES to anyone responsible for enterprise network security. This book won't receive the manufactured hype of books like "Hack Attacks Revealed" or "Hack Attacks Denied," but you will quickly recognize the HPYES authors are both skilled practitioners and effective educators.

(Disclaimer: I received my review copy free from the publisher.)

Anyone with an eCommerce site can benefit from this book. Especially if you have been concerned whether you have covered all of the potential vulnerabilities associated with such sites. It is quite comprehensive in the treatment of risks, vulnerabilities, threats, and how to mitigate them. It is not a How-To book. You won't find absolute answers for firewall configurations and bandwidth requirements. It won't even tell you how to run UNIX commands or code HTML pages. What it does address is the fact that you need to ask the questions. Then it helps you determine the right answers for your site. It certainly helped me become aware of some things I had missed.

To the outsider, Jewish philosophy, like the religion of Judaism itself, can seem somewhat mysterious. Yet in the 20th century, many of the greatest philosophers came from Jewish backgrounds, such as Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Walter Kaufmann, Hannah Arendt and many others. Philosophy has had an interesting if complicated relationship to the Jewish faith and way of life, yet Philosophy is strongly indebted to the meditations of people like Philo, Moses Maimonides, Spinoza and others when it comes to deep philosophical questions, especially relating to the Philosophy of Religion.

This volume contains a number of essays written by leading scholars on Jewish philosophy, and ranges from Jewish Philosophy in the time of Philo Judeaus to Jewish philosophy in the 20th century. Scholars and students in philosophy, theology, comparative religion or those who are interested in Judaism will have a rich addition to their knowledge of Jewish culture and Philosophy.

It's a daunting task to survey the whole of Jewish philosophy--one could write just as large a volume (934pp) on the medieval period alone. Nevertheless this book is a great summary of and introduction to Jewish philosophy, with the drawback that it doesn't bring any original texts (the same editors composed a Reader for that purpose). While it could be larger (for instance, the Hist. of Islamic Philosophy, of the same series, is a two-volume work) and both the contemporary and ancient periods should be expanded, I recommend it for anyone interested in Jewish philosophy in general. For a volume presenting the background to and contexts of Jewish philosophy (which could usefully be studied along with this one), see the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, by the same editors.

This massive book, consisting of contributions from 35 scholars, is obviously a valuable and learned resource for anyone interested in Jewish philosophy, and it contains much illuminating material. However, that it is "accessible to general readers as well as to scholars", as one of the blurbs on the back cover of the book reads, is true of only a few of its 39 chapters. The bulk of the book is certainly not suitable for anyone who is not already familiar with philosophy in general, with technical philosophical vocabulary in particular, or has a good knowledge of Judaism. In no way is this book comparable in approach and style with books written for the general public, such as Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (or, for that matter, my own Philosophy and Living). Indeed, the style of writing can sometimes only be described as constipated.

True, it is difficult (though not impossible) to write lucidly for the general public about medieval philosophy. The medieval chapters acount for some 400 of the 900-odd pages of the book; and very tedious they are, as philosophers debate over and over again such questions as whether the world was created ex nihilo or not, whether God has attributes or not (some thinkers considering attributes a derogation to God's unity), and how Free Will can be reconciled with God's foreknowledge.

The trouble lies in the relationship between Philosophy and Theology. Aquinas differentiated between, on the one hand, "Revealed Theology", which starts with Revelation about God as an indisputable given and as the basis of Faith from which Reason then makes certain deductions, and, on the other, "Natural Theology", which starts with the experience of nature or created things and uses Reason to argue from that experience - a process which, for Aquinas, aims at - and, rightly used, must lead to - an intellectual knowledge of God. Many medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers took the same line. Philosophy and Theology will part company when philosophers not only do not accept (as most medieval philosophers did) that the knowledge of God is the aim of philosophy, but actually use Reason to challenge the truth of revealed knowledge, including in extreme cases, the truth of the existence of God. Until that happens, however, it is not always easy to tell whether a certain argument is theological or philosophical.

The book under review raises this difficulty on occasions, but is then prepared to discuss as philosophy some positions which, to me at least, cannot be called philosophical at all. The most outstanding of these is the mysticism of the Kabbalah, the subject of a particularly obscure chapter (chapter 19) in the book. It is a legitimate philosophical position to show that certain parts of the Torah lend themselves to metaphorical interpretation so that they can correspond with Reason; likewise there is a legitimate philosophical case to be made that we need to allow for mystical experiences which are not subject to Reason. But to go beyond that and to describe as philosophical an exegesis of Biblical texts which depends on numbers or on letters to which numerical values are given is, to say the least, a distortion of the rational procedures which philosophy requires.

And what does it mean to describe any philosophy as specifically Jewish? It is most obviously Jewish when it concerns itself with matters that are peculiar to Judaism, such as the nature of God's Covenant with Israel. It is less uniquely Jewish when it applies the same philosophical concepts to Jewish sources (the Jewish Bible, the Talmud etc.) as Islamic philosophers apply to the Koran, the hadiths and the sharia. And what if the author is known to have been a Jew, irrespective of any specifically Jewish content in his philosophy? What about Spinoza, excommunicated by the Jewish authorities, consequently (as the chapter on him shows) evincing bitterness and hostility to Judaism, and developing a philosophy which has nothing to do with Judaism?

Spinoza arguably draws less on the thinkers of other traditions than any of the other philosophers mentioned in the book. I would argue that he is one of the four Jewish-born thinkers whose originality has massively influenced European civilization. (The other three, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, are not included in this book, the first two presumably because they are not considered philosophers.) What the book brings out very strongly is how all the other major post-biblical Jewish thinkers were influenced by the non-Jewish environment in which they lived and so by the thought of non-Jewish philosophers. It traces the influence of Hellenism on such as Philo of Alexandria; of the Islamic Aristotelianism of Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroës on Maimonides and the Maimonideans; of the Enlightenment on Moses Mendelssohn; of Hegelianism on the Wissenschaft des Judentums; of Kant on Samuel Rafael Hirsch and Hermann Cohen; of Herder and nationalism on Zionism. Only Maimonides, though himself influenced by Arabic philosophy, in turn exercised an appreciable influence over Thomist Christianity; and Spinoza, as I have already said, was central in shaping the Radical Enlightenment.

Spinoza could do this because in Holland the Jews were emancipated. Likewise there was briefly some relaxation of persecution in Renaissance Italy, in which context the Jewish Kabbalah was taken up by Pico della Mirandola and led to the development of a Christian Cabbalah. But these were exception between the time of Maimonides and that of Mendelssohn. During that period hardly any intellectual interaction between Jews and non-Jews took place. It was during that period that the Jews in most European countries were ghettoized and to some extent also ghettoized themselves intellectually, in that the rabbis at the time welcomed and reinforced this isolation. Although the ghettoes still existed in the time of Mendelssohn, he was himself accepted by the philosophers of the German Enlightenment; and once the ghettoes were abolished by the French Revolution, the fruitful interplay between Jewish and non-Jewish thought could again resume.

This is a great story of hockey success in a city better known for its music industry than its stick handling. Craig Leipold tells an inspirational story of how he put the Nashville Predators organisation together from scratch in a very short time period.

The book, in my opinion, is let down in the way that the material is presented. There seems to be no logic in the way the story is told, both on a macro and micro level. On the larger scale the story seems to vaguely follow a kind of chronology, but there are regular jumps both backward and forward in time. On a smaller scale, I also found the paragraphs hard to follow, as they too would randomly criss-cross the chronological flow of the text.

In addition to the above criticism, I found the writing to be very dry, and without direction. Many chapters had no clear focus, and others had no climax when it was clear there should have been. One example of that was in a chapter where (if memory serves me correctly) the authors were setting the scene for a big game against Dallas, and the tension was clearly building towards game time where we were going to see if the Preds could defeat the Stars. As the tension was rising, the authors flippantly give away the final score line -in parenthesises no less- making one wonder where the chapter was really going in the first place.

These criticisms aside, the book is still a good read, and is engaging enough that in the end I felt an emotional attachment to the Predators, and I know that I'll think of them differently next time I watch them play (on TV of course!), and in some way consider myself a fan.

Making hockey successful in the middle of the bible belt was no easy task, and this is a remarkable story of management excellence. Predators owner Craig Leipold and renowned management author Richard W. Oliver combine to tell an unforgettable story. It is a must for fans of good management as well as hockey.

For anybody thinking about getting into sports management or becoming a professional athlete, this is a must read! It provides an insightful view of what is expected of professional athletes and how to successfully manage a pro organization. Being a successful athlete in this day and age goes well beyond just raw talent. Highly recommend this book for high school and college athletes.

I met Mr. Oliver at The Camera Company in Madison, Wisconsin where he has his photographs printed. I am also a photographer and writer (advertising copy), so I couldn't resist picking up a copy of Andy's book, "If Photos Could Talk."

Having met the author, I intended to read a few chapters, more out of curiosity than anything else. To my surprise, I ended up reading Photos from cover-to-cover. Andy has an engaging style that keeps you turning the pages.

And even though he writes for children, I found myself thoroughly involved in the mystery of what happened to Mr. Snider. If you are looking for a wholesome source of entertainment for the adolescent readers in your home, I highly recommend, "If Photos Could Talk," and the second book in the series, "Haunted Hill." While you're at it, give yourself a treat, and read them, too!

If Photos Could Talk: A Sam & Stephanie Mystery is a chapter book for young adults about twelve-year-old Sam and Stephanie's search for an elderly neighbor who has gone missing. Set modern-day southern Wisconsin, If Photos Could Talk tells of their venture into their neighbor's mysterious house filled with strange noises and hidden secrets. The strong bond between the young protagonists forms the heart of this exciting small-town adventure.

I read about this book in a local paper and so read it out of curiousity. When I was a boy, I used to devour mystery stories. This book seemed a little different from most youth mystery books I've read. In my opinion, the protagonist (Sam) seems a bit too mature for his age, as he narrates the story it didn't seem like the speaking style of a boy. Also there seemed to be sexual nuances which I found jarring in a youth mystery (Sam keeps "noticing" Stephanie's rear end, and in one scene a bad man pulls Stephanie's pants down.) Depending on your point of view, these nuances are either cute (young love?) or scary.

However, the story includes lots of clever ideas and plot twists which make it very original, and kept me turning the pages.

This is such a great book.And such a surprise.The writer does a great job in keeping details non boring with her stories of who has had these wonderful dogs and how lucky we are today to still have the breed..She covers the basics and then some.Facts can be boring to us who dont no the history of the breed and who shows what, but the way the writer plays on telling facts inside of details makes for fun, exciting non boring read.I was not sure what to expect from buying this book since it had not been reviewed..and Im ever so glad I took the chance and plunged ahead with getting it.It has delightful pictures.. It makes for very good reading,and not just a one time read either.Youl find yourself reaching for it again and again and it will make for a good read everytime...B.W.

This is the first IG book that I purchased when I got my first IG (mind is an older edition, I think). I found it extremely useful in getting to know the quirks of IGs (and mine have many) and the photos are beautiful. I would note that this is NOT the breed for everyone. They are hard to housetrain (especially for those of us with irregular schedules) and they have tiny little bones. However, you can't beat them for sweetness.
I've not read the "IG in the 21st Century" book, but this is the best of any of the ones I have seen on the subject so far. Gave 4 stars only because this is a newer edition than mine and may have some changes.

Not as comprehensive as Italian Greyhounds 21st Century, this is an excellent book. It mostly features European, esp. British, IGs in the discussions. It is easy to read while including a lot of detail about the breed. I had not seen some of the information on the personality of this breed and how that affects training in other books I've read and that was very interesting to me. This book is much better than some of the light-weight glossy breed books [yes, it does have many high quality photos].

Great insight into how Warren Buffett and other successful investors invest in stocks.

I just started investing seriously a couple of years ago, and am still learning. Mr. Boroson's book was invaluable to me. It contained a lot of concise, well-thought-out advice that was immediately relevent to today's uncertain investment climate. Most books about investing I've read are either too simple, or so complicated that you need to be Warren Buffet himself to understand them. I liked Mr. Boroson's book because it helped me think through decisions more clearly without trying to impress me with a lot of complicated terms and ideas that won't help me build a winning portfolio. I'm already putting some of Mr. Boroson's strategies to work!

This is the best book yet for small investors. Warren Boroson's previous advice made it possible for me to take early retirement. Now, he takes us hand-in-hand with the "big guys" and shows us the paths to take and to avoid through today's volatile market. Good sense with good humor. A "must read."

Wonderfully written, insightful. Felt as if I began to know the Malones and to appreciate their vision.

This book does a wonderful job of telling the life of J. Walter and Emma Malone. Their vision of a Christian College has changed many lives including mine. Not only that, but Editor John Oliver deserves credit for his devotion to the study of Quaker/Friends Heritage.

It's a wonderful book that is enjoyable to read. Not only is it interesting, but its editor, John Oliver, is a wonderful man who deserves much credit.

This is a detailed and helpful guide book which appears to cover almost all of the questions a visitor to Brittany & Normandy might ask before and after arrival. The Contents page shows the variety of subjects covered. Among the many sections, there are recommendations on preparing for unexpected health problems; there is a brief language/phrase section and a glossary for quick French/English or English/French one word references on a travelor's most commonly needed words/translations. For each area reviewed, there are brief commentaries about history, points of interest and transport. In the Directory section there are suggestions and telephone numbers and references for finding rentals, camp sites, hotels, restaurants, culture, shopping, and regional attributes and regional agriculture. There are contact numbers or addresses for variously priced lodgings and overnight accommodations as well as other services. Much information, including small maps, is squeezed into this 368 page book to read and savor ahead of the trip, as well as for every day reference while touring. This little book could be the only Brittany & Normandy guide book needed, tucked into your carry-on...and kept in pocket for use from landing until departure.

This one does exactly what it says on the packet. Accurate, up-to-date (it's a year newer than its competitors) and easy-to-use. A bit low on illustrations and pictures, so not got the coffee-table factor, but that's not what it's for. Very good on camp site info.

I hesitated to buy this book to plan a recent tritp to Normandy -- with a high-speed connection to the Internet, doing research with travel books seemed so pointless and expensive. Besides, buying the book seemed to open Pandora's Box -- we're doing quite a bit of traveling nowadays, and if we bought this book, shouldn't we buy a book for every country we're visiting in the coming months? This could easily rack up expenses for frugral travelers.

It turned out to be a great decision to spend the dozen or so dollars on this book. Jam-packed with helpful information and wonderful maps (besides the ones in the DK travel guides, Lonely Planet offers better maps than any guide book I've tried to use), I referred to this book over and over again during both planning and travel.

The information in it is occasionally outdated, but no book is ever completely up to date. For example, prices have gone up and hours have changed. Not a problem though, because the book offers phone numbers and websites to check the info. We used it to find campsites and places to visit. It pointed us to things that we would otherwise never have known existed -- e.g. the Pont du Normandie and the Route des Traditions. And it steered us clear of some cities so that we could spend more time on what we were interested in.

The book also includes sections on the history of the area and information about local foods and customs. It's just chock full of everything you'll need to plan your trip -- info about tolls and transportation, French phrases, etc. Definitely pick this one up!

I was disappointed in this heroine. What a wimp! She just fluttered by on her looks, bringing her five year old to live in the house Gresham kept for his mistresses while her mother enjoys a few weeks of the good life, supposedly never thinking there was something odd about the situation. Were they going to raise the girl in the house of her mother as prostitute? Did Gresham ever think of that? Did the heroine never think about that? There is a difference between innocent and stupid and this woman tripped all over it. It was funny because I was yelling at the book. I am addicted to these regency books, bloody hell.

In this book we meet again the Marquess of Gresham, the cynical character from 'Miss Drayton's Downfall' who helped to save Mansfield's marriage to Cassandra and, in doing so, lost his own heart to Cassandra.

Here, the man who believes himself incapable of any finer feelings finds himself attracted to lovely but impoverished and increasingly desperate widow, Lady Sarah. He helps her out of a number of difficult situations, telling himself that his actions are merely a means of making her dependent on him and eventually giving her no option but to accept his carte blanche. She eventually does, but... things don't turn out as Gresham expects.

We learn just why Gresham has lost all faith in love and in women; and we see him undergo the difficult journey towards rediscovering his faith in humanity.

This is a book which I highly recommend on its own, but is even more worth acquiring as part of Oliver's Seven Corinthians linked series. One of my favourites in this series of novels, along with An Unsuitable Match.

Patricia Oliver has another winner with Lord Gresham's Lady - and I'm amazed more people haven't reviewed this excellent book. Sarah Stanton is an impecunious widow whose only means of support for herself and her daughter is to marry a man she dislikes intensely. Until Lord Gresham comes on the scene.

Gresham, for those who've read other books by Patricia Oliver, made his first appearance in Miss Drayton's Downfall; in that book, he was portrayed as a cynical rake who would even contemplate running off with another man's wife. Here, he is immediately attracted to Sarah, and is very willing to assist her in her predicament, too... but only if she becomes his mistress. Despite her refusal, he is willing to use whatever unscrupulous means he can in order to get what he wants.

However, as is frequently the case, when someone gets what they want it turns out not to have been everything they expected, and that's certainly so here.

As usual with Patricia Oliver, this book has plenty of excellent character introspection, angst, and a brilliantly-written resolution at the end. I've already read my copy several times, and - as with the rest of her Seven Corinthians series - this is definitely a keeper.

Considered by John Robert Moore as a work by Daniel Defoe and contested by A. W. Secord (with the discovery of a real Robert Drury). This work is important not just because its investigation into Madagascar, but because it has been wrongly given as the work of Drury. It was transcribed by Defoe from meetings with Drury. See Moore "Defoe in the Pilory and Other Studies."

Assikuh, tih menf ughast ifg ushphizxim. Medhabis Vif igyamas, neu semmotes nosdervji inh aghs der mixz iphouteh. Parcsec mi jeemma iveg noh genna, fegiz no hadaghshi.

Having been raised and then later worked in southern Madagascar, this book could not have been a rewrite of "Robinson Crusoe" as has been often been the critique of this rare jewel. You can find a copy of this rare book in the Western Bank Library of the U Of Minnesota. A must for any serious anthropologist studying southern Madagascar culture!