Nicholson Books

It says in the bio the writer teaches at Princeton, but based on the writing, listless and without a compelling narrative, I can only hope the gentleman works as a subsitute teacher, rather than someone fully tenured. For a far more gripping story, both in information and narrative style, read MERCHANTS of IMMORTALITY. Science writing at it's very best!

I received the book only a few days after I ordered it and it was in great condition. Thanks.

I find it very interesting reading. Lee Silver brought the complexities of the reprogentic labs to the grasp of the layman. It projects into the future of reproduction and it looks like the American society one day will finally come to accept cloning as an option, though expensive.

I found this book exceptionally delightful. The author's views are extremely solid and he does not, through out the course of the book, waver in his judgment. I especially enjoyed his conclusion. All in all, this book is very well thought out.

This book is an excellent read for anyone with an interest in reproductive technologies. I submit that it is important for everyone as the issues in the book are rapidly becoming less science-fiction and more reality. Cloning and genetic selection are especially important. Both positive and negative scenarios resulting from the use of these and other technologies are presented. They may seem far-fetched at times but nonetheless possible.
I had the privilege of taking Prof. Silver's class at Princeton and listen to him lecture on this book and others on the subject, and I am so glad that I did.
Right now most people are terrified of the unknown future of cloning, genetic engineering, and other technologies. Please, read this book before making up your mind!
The best part about this book is that it does not get too bogged down in technical details. A non-scientist can read it and understand, but someone who knows more about the scientific aspects can still learn from it. There's something for everyone!

I have long suspected that music must be connected to language and that the evolution of language was somehow linked to our musical ability. Steven Mithen's exploration of this subject leaves me reflective, impressed and with a great deal to think about. His scientific curiosity -- as we have seen in both The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science and Religion (1998) and in Before the Ice (2003) -- is epic in scope and yet critical in its method and approach to data (or the lack of it).

In this book, Mithen culls together a trove of evidence relating to the possible origins of music in our species' evolutionary past. I think it needs to be granted from the outset that such a subject is not going to have the same kind of hard, precise evidence that something like skeletal evolution or the evolution of upright walking has in its favor. Given this, Mithen does a superb job of marshalling what evidence there is for music's origin and evolution, and makes you believe it possible, even as you remain critical of his hypotheses. You can see the weakness of some of the lines in his argument, but also the strength of others. Mithen seems humble enough before his subject, without getting wishy-washy in the face of the gray areas of uncertainty.

All together, a fascinating read; very informative--and courageous. This book will stand as a defense of music -- against its detractors (such as Steven Pinker) as a valuable part of our cultural human 'tool kit' until even more archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence becomes available.

If you love music and powerful feelings it evokes, then you'll love the author's incisive and clear-headed style as he unwraps the origins of music.

This book so wants to demonstrate that music was a crucial component of human evolution, as if the author, Steven Mithen, wants to explain why he felt the subconscious need to spend so much money on CDs by Queensryche, but he ultimately fails to prove causality. There is nothing inherent in music creation that helped the human species survive the ravages of hunger, disease, pestilence, and war. There was no "battle of the bands" being waged on the prehistoric Serengeti plain to demonstrate defiance of environmental pressures to adapt. Much of this book is pure conjecture, and Mithen again demonstrates that scientists are the worst group of people to explain music to anyone.

Mithen is a well-published serious evolutionary psychologist, and this book is therefore carefully grounded in current understandings of biological evolution and its relevance to the development of human capacities. His argument is that musical and linguistic abilities are separate evolutionary developments and that whereas in Homo sapiens the linguistic has undercut the role of the more primordial musical; Neanderthals exploited the musical but did not develop linguistic capacities. Mithen's argument is admittedly speculative: he often argues from silence, for instance. But these speculations are informed extrapolations, and exploring them with his help is a highly stimulating, mind-expanding experience.

+++++

"The Neanderthals who inhabited Europe and south-west Asia had brains as large as those of modern humans but behaved in a quite different fashion, one that indicates the absence of language...So, what were the Neanderthals doing with such large brains?...Answer: the Neanderthals used their brains for a sophisticated communication system...[that I call] `Hmmmmm'...
'Hmmmmm'...proved remarkably successful: it allowed them to survive for a quarter of a million years through dramatic environmental change in ice-age Europe, and to attain an unprecedented level of cultural achievement. They were 'singing Neanderthals'--although their songs lacked any words."

The above quotation comes near the end of this fascinating book (and explains its title) by Dr. Steven Mithen, Professor of Early Prehistory (at the University of Reading, England), archeologist, and leading figure in the development of `cognitive archeology.'

What is the aim of this book? Mithen explains:

"We can only explain the human propensity to make and listen to music by recognizing that it has been encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species. How, when, and why are the mysteries that I intend to resolve [in this book]...This book sets out my own ideas about how music and language evolved, and evaluates the proposals of others by exposing them to the archaeological and fossil evidence...The result is a complete account of not only how music and language evolved but how they relate to the evolution of the human mind, body, and society."

As one who thoroughly enjoyed this book, I can validate what Mithen says above. He does examine a large array of data and proposals from many others and critically analyzes this information. Be aware that to understand the book's conclusions (one of which is quoted above), you have to carefully read and comprehend all the material presented beforehand. Mithen proved (at least to me) that he was well-adept at sorting through all the neurological, linguistical, psychological, biological, and archeological information (to name just some disciplines he delves into). (Don't worry! Mithen explains everything quite well so you're not expected to be an academic with a Ph.D.)

The book itself is divided into two parts. The first part (excluding chapter one which is an introduction) is concerned with what we understand about music and language today. Part two uses those features presented in part one to explain the evolutionary history of language and music.

To give the potential reader an idea of the breadth of this book, I will give the sub-title of each chapter:

Part I: The Present

(2) The similarities and differences between music and language
(3) The brain, aphasia (loss of using or understanding words), and musical savants
(4) Acquired and congenital amusia (inability to recognize or reproduce musical sounds)
(5) Music processing within the brain
(6) Brain maturation, language learning, and perfect pitch
(7) Music, emotion, medicine, and intelligence

Part II: The Past

(8) Communication by monkeys and apes
(9) The origin of `Hmmmm' (an acronym) communication
(10) The evolution of bipedalism and dance
(11) Communication about the natural world
(12) Is music a product of sexual selection?
(13) Human life history and emotional development
(14) The significance of cooperation and social bonding
(15) `Hmmmmm' communication by "Homo neanderthalensis" (Compare this acronym to that of (9) above)
(16) The origins of "Homo Sapiens" and the segmentation of `Hmmmmm'
(17) Modern human dispersal, communicating with the gods, and the remnants of 'Hmmmmm'

There are twenty figures peppered throughout this book. These are interesting and aid the discussion.

Finally, did I agree with everything I read in this book? Of course not. What Mithen is attempting to do is extremely difficult. There has to be some speculation and there is much of it in this book. However, it is reasoned speculation and I was impressed with how Mithen put everything together into a coherent whole.

In conclusion, this book attempts to explain the mystery of "the origins of music, language, mind and body." If you like mysteries like I do, then you should thoroughly enjoy this fascinating book!!

(first published 2005; 17 chapters; main narrative 280 pages; notes; bibliography; picture acknowledgements; index)

+++++

Sean Nicholson had a great idea for this book, and I wish they would have allowed him another chance to fix it in the updated Inside Dreamweaver MX (which I don't recommend), but the update was assigned to other authors.

I use this book for a college class...along with dozens of pages of workaround documentation. There are obvious oversights in the methodology of web development, such as using absolute rather than relative URL references--so, that the menus don't function when you publish to a server, which is how web development works in reality.

There are Dreamweaver issues that the author ignores, such as the fact that you can't put Server Behaviors in both the site template and individual pages--you have to choose one or the other. If you blindly follow the instructions in the book, you'll reach several points where you blow away the work of previous chapters due to the template issue.

There are page elements constructed as placeholders in early chapters that don't work in later chapters, and then are problematic to update.

Overall, I'd have to guess that the actual sample site on the web was hacked at the code level, as it can't actually be created with Dreamweaver tools as demonstrated by the book.

Unfortunately, there aren't many choices for advanced site tutorials using Dreamweaver for ASP/JSP/PHP. Most books cover basic web development and Flash. So, while this book is flawed, it is useful...but be prepared to ... your way through it.

I am an IT masters student, and needed to do a project using Cold Fusion. I wanted to use Ultra Dev to do this project, so this book seemed perfect. While the opening chapters of the book talk about the ability of UltraDev to write in ASP, JSP and Cold Fusion, I became severely bogged down during the book project when hand coding was required, and the only syntax offered in the book was in ASP. No Cold Fusion equivalent was offered (or JSP either, for that matter). To make matters worse, the instructions offered by the book while using the Ultra-Dev querie builder were riddled with errors in more than one occasion. Input instuctions for many of the other necesary Ultra Dev tools used in the project were in error. Since Utra Dev creates so much code behind the scenes, it is next to impossible to debug, especially when the project gets into advanced concepts. I spent no less than 40 - 60 hours on the project, and after overcoming many errors caused by shoddy authoring, finally had to give up. Upon e-mailing the author about several obvious errors, I received one reply, where he apologized, and promised to get me some answers. After several more days, I have never heard back. Save your self a big headace and DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!

This is a very well written and easy to understand book. I hate to not give it five stars, but there are two problems that prevent me from giving it more than four. This book is a tutorial that walks the reader through the construction of a fictional company that uses the web to display and sell their wares. The books focus is on using UltraDev 4 along with ASP and VBScript to create a database-driven website. If you are new to doing this, then this book will be great for you. If you have done this in the past and hand coded the project using ASP and VBScript, then you should consider using UltraDev to simplify and speed up your development time. Overall "Inside Dreamweaver UltraDev 4" lives up to its promise and I am pleased with the book.
One major problem with the book comes to the reader in Chapter Eight. There are some steps that are misprinted and you will not be able to progress until you check the book's web site for a correction. My advice is to do this before you reach it in the book. The site is on the back cover and a link is on the first web page labeled "click here to download the book's exercise files and view errata."
The other problem is not really a problem with the book, but more so with the style the book is presented in. As a tutorial you are exposed to every thing needed in order to get the site up and running, but the core concepts are not taught in such a way that you will find easy to remember and duplicate on your own. Once you set out to build your own database-driven site, you will most likely not take the route that the authors did to create theirs. This is when a good reference book on UltraDev may be useful. Personally, I enjoy tutorials as a learning tool with the addition of reference books as help in the development process. Overall this is a very good tutorial on using Dreamweaver UltraDev to build database-driven web pages with Microsoft Access, ASP and VBScript.

This book is a great companion to New Riders' other Dreamweaver text, Inside Dreamweaver 4. (Buy that one, too!) While it devotes a chapter to basic page design in case the reader doesn't own a book on design, it doesn't retread the contents of the other volume. Nor does it attempt to be everything to everyone.

Instead, this text focuses on what sets Dreamweaver Ultradev apart from the basic version of Dreamweaver (and from other web page design tools): its ability to create data-driven web pages. Author Nicholson takes the reader through the base foundation one needs to undertake the building of a "live" web site, and then guides us step by step through a practical tutorial that builds upon each acquired skill.

The tips in this book are worth the price alone. I find myself making big read asterisks in the margin next to most of them. Like its companion volume, and other New Riders books, this book does not take a "cookie cutter" approach. Mr. Nicholson is not afraid to say that a certain feature doesn't always work well and may require a workaround (which he gives you). Both books present Dreamweaver in the context of best practices in web page design and application development, so you not only learn the tool you're reading about; you learn solid principles of good design.

Yes, the book has some minor mistakes, for which the author has courteously provided errata on the companion website.... Frankly, I know of NO computer book that doesn't have some mistakes, and the problems I encountered in Chapter 8 of this book only made my troubleshooting skills stronger.

Of course, if you don't have the time to create the files from scratch (or simply don't want to), you can download the files from the web site. But you're short-changing yourself if you don't try creating the pages yourself, because you will learn some good design tips and Dreamweaver shortcuts.

Don't be mislead to think that you won't need to touch any code if you use Dreamweaver Ultradev, or even the regular version of Dreamweaver. The product is not designed to shield you from coding completely. A little (or a lot of) scripting knowledge can never hurt.

I can't say enough good things about this book. I have seen other, more voluminous texts that aren't nearly as useful or direct in their approach.

I'm not kidding this book is best one I've ever found on the web site.

If you are planning to build a database-driven website from the ground using UD4 then I'll say you just found the right book. As matter of fact, this is my first time to build a dynamic web site and have no idea how to get start. Especially, when I, first time, used UD4 I was confused by the UD4's tutorial such as define a site, local Info, Remote Info etc I have no idea what they are and how they work.

This book troubleshoots all my problems after I finished the chapter exercises. The beginner should start from the first chapter, trust me you will learn alot step-by-step. You can also jump to any chapter you want, the author has the guide for the skipers i.e. the exercise files, by charter but each chapter's files will cover previous chapter's so you'll never get lost.

Best of all, Sean Nicholson, althor, help me out for the web server database, SQL Server 2000 on the web, connection via IP address problem from email. Note I had been struggled for the connection for weeks, and I spent days by searching the solution from forums.macromedia.com and other places with no success. Finally I gave it a try see if the author can help me out or not so I sent email, sean@insideultradev.com, to him(I don't expect he would answer me). Thank God, he just did.

So appreciate for Sean's support.

Jee Fong

IRI Consultants to Management
440 E. Congress, Suite 400
Detroit, MI 48226 USA
(Pho) 313-965-0350 Ext: 366
(Fax) 313-965-7545
fongjee@irisolutions.com
www.irisolutions.com

Elizabeth Romer chronicles a year in Tuscany. As someone who lived in Italy and even honeymooned in Tuscany, I looked forward to this book. I wasn't really sure what it was. Part cook book and part story of a year in Tuscany, I felt it lacked focus. More importantly, it lacked romance. Her characters seemed distant, almost cardboard figures. I wasn't drawn into their lives. Say what you will about Frances Mayes, but her book brought alive the magic of Tuscany.

Don't expect this book to be another "Year in Provence" or travel in the Italian wilderness book. Elizabeth Romer documents the reasons the Tuscans -- and their predecessors -- eat like they do, plant like they do and live like they do. It carries us back to Roman times and tries to explain why Tuscans consider somone from the next valley to be a foreigner. A fascinating read for more than just cooks.

A few months ago I reviewed two books on Tuscan life and cuisine, `Ciao Italia in Tuscany' by PBS series host Mary Ann Esposito and `Simply Tuscan' by New York City restaurant chef / owner and curio shop impresario Pino Luongo. Neither book impressed me as giving a genuine picture of life in Tuscany, especially as it was before EuroAmerican homogenization took over. This book, `The Tuscan Year', Life and Food in an Italian Valley' by textile artist and Tuscan resident Elizabeth Romer is the real deal. The venue is an isolated valley in the southeastern corner of Tuscany, genuinely rural in that it is several dozen miles from the large cities of Florence and Sienna. The feeling the author gives about this lovely environment reminds me of the admittedly artificial feeling of lyric isolation from the cares of the world in the very obscure movie `The Hidden Valley' based in an isolated Swiss valley community surrounded by the ravages of the 30 years war.

The major text of the book is in twelve chapters, one for each month of the year, beginning with January and ending with December. There are very few illustrations, limited to a few simple line drawings opening each chapter. The text is divided roughly equally between culinary information and recipes and non-culinary tales of the domestic, agricultural, and animal husbandry. The highest praise I can give this book is that it has a strong kinship in the style and quality of its content to Patience Gray's great culinary journal `Honey from a Weed' which I have been attempting to accurately review for over six months now.

The main characters of the story are not the author and her family, but a native Tuscan family of Orlando and Silvana Cerotti "of the remote mountain area between Cortona and Castiglion Fiorentino. They have a single son and they run their estate and live their lives in a traditional manner. They do this from choice not necessity. Their lives are bounded by the land, which they use to its fullest extent, and in this way they are virtually self-sufficient. Their property is extensive, stretching over 400 hectares, and includes acres of forest and arable land, streams, vineyards, many small houses and their own imposing fattoria with its surrounding walled kitchen garden, olive groves, chapel and outbuildings."

The most enheartening part of this story is the fact that the Cerotti's and their family and farm hands have been successful in maintaining a lifestyle that has the feel of dating back to the Renaissance, if not earlier. This is not a story of an agricultural estate in irreversable decline, although the family has cut back on some farm resources such as the herd of pigs. Rather than maintaining 100 swine, the family buys a pig each year and has it slaughtered and butchered by a professional travelling butcher. All the `charcuterie' is done on the premises by the butcher or the family. The hams are cured by Silvana and hung to dry in the attic. Orlando takes care of sausage making with the butcher.

All the recipes are given `in context' in the month when their ingredients are in season and, where appropriate, in the liturgical season most appropriate for the dish. There are precious few culinary tips in the recipes and all are written in a narrative fashion, with no neat lists of ingredients and careful quantities, well-defined prep instructions, and numbered steps in the preparation. This is as much a book on anthropology as it is on things culinary. That is not to say the recipes cannot be made by an American suburbanite. If you have basic cooking skills and good instincts, you should have no problems with these recipes. Just be sure to read the author's notes on measuring at the end of the book. She is very much the student of Elizabeth David when it comes to weights and measures, using the proper Englishman's teaspoon, tablespoon, soup spoon, and teacup as measuring devices. The author gives some correlations of these devices to our shiny stainless steel measuring devices, but as Ms. Romer points out, Silvana used no measuring devices at all, so if I were you, I would get the lay of the land and proceed to measure things out by the seat of your pants. You will probably get a much more desirable result than if you try to exactly translate the measurements into the metric or something equally precise and irrelevant.

My only reservations about the culinary contents of the book are in the recipes for brodo (stock) and in the absence of a recipe for the salt-free Tuscan bread. The brodo recipe calls for boiling the stock for three hours, which violates absolutely every single stock recipe I have ever read, in that stock ingredients are to be just brought to the edge of a boil, then simmered. Also, the rationale for the saltless Tuscan bread is given in great detail, but there is no recipe for same, and, I suspect you may have a very hard time finding true saltless bread in an American suburb. My local megamart carries a Tuscan loaf, but I will bet more than a few lire (or euros) on the fact that salt was used in the recipe.

This book is first and foremost a delight to read. At the same time it is a valuable scholarly source document for a lifestyle which seems to be disappearing from around the world. Grab onto it and savor it while you can.

Highly recommended to readers and cooks alike.

Life and Food in an Italian Valley (subtitle) is a memoir, cookbook and record of a Tuscan farm family. I found the book to be a better read than Mayes' "Under the Tuscan Sun" for it gives a more comprehensive look at daily family life rather than one person's experiences. The tweleve chapters--January through December--provide the reader a glimspe of the monthly activities of the Cerotti estate offering a look at their lives including their food, work, family and celebrations. Romer gave me a sense of being a part of the Cerotti household for I became engaged with them as if I were a family member. Sitting at Silvana's kitchen table allowed me to learn much about traditional Tuscan food which has been handed down from one generation to the next.

I found this book very disappointing. It could even be said to be boring. I guess I didn't read the description/reviews properly as I was expecting more of a story line, perhaps like Frances Mayes in Under the Tuscan Sun or Peter Mayle in A Year in Provence.

Isaac Swift is a mathematician who has had a long love affair with numbers. Throughout his life numbers have been what drives him, stimulates him and yet he is still just a middle of the road mathematician. Having never solved anything worth publishing in Numbers has been a thorn in his side. Giving up his love life and regular life to try and solve the Wild Number Theorem becomes an obsession.

I found this story to be heart wrenching, funny, and entertaining all at the same time. The characters are flawed, but in a very natural way. They are real living breathing people. You don't have to like numbers or math to find this story enjoyable!

I am sorry to say, I didn't like this book. The story is about a mediocre mathematician, struggling in his career, who thought he got a proof to the Wild Number Theorem. However it was flawed. But there is this eccentric old-age student of his who declares that the mathematician stole his proof. The story is not that attractive. Compared to this Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is far more attractive - in narrative, in thrill, and in mathematics.

It's a quick read along the lines of "Uncle Petros" but not as sinister or incisive. Academics can see themselves or their colleagues in the math departments characters; satisfaction with the denouement might relate more to just deserts than the ingenuity of the author.

I don't share the point of view of some reviewers that the book portrays the life of a mathematician or his/her mind in a way that I could feel comfortable to call it typical or illustrative.
To me the book uses the subject of Math more as a setting for the drama of a character who is frustrated by his mediocre life, both professional and personal than as the driving force for the story. The author passes to the reader a protagonist that is tired of being lonely, rejected, unproductive and helpless in a life that has passed him by, leaving him numb, taking shelter in observing and criticizing others around him to the point where he is forced to look on the guy in the mirror.When he gets a golden opportunity to make up for all his inertia, he obsesses and loses control, but despite of finding solace in his downfall, the plot gets somewhat diluted or even circular(as Larry would have said :).I expected more of the mathematical glitter to be explored and developed creatively without necessarily sacrificing the character's inner struggle. Some very good ideas like Vale's character, Larry's professional greed and even the several possible and potentially thrilling outcomes from the police inspector's investigation are used inefficiently or not at all and simply vanish towards the end, leaving the reader wanting.
It is a nice snapshot of a human anguish and, to a point, self-discovery, all having a mathematical backdrop,and it flows OK (the thinness of the book comes in handy on avoiding tediousness to take over) but I didn't feel that Math or mathematicians were as central to the essence of the work as I would like and expect from an author with such a technical baggage.

As a pseudo-mathematician going through a mid-life career crisis, I empathized with the main character (Isaac Swift) in this book. After proving an enormously important result, Isaac reasons why he should be the one to prove it when so many superiors had tried and failed before. He checks and re-checks his work many times over, being afraid to present it to a superior mathematician for fear of making an embarrassing error. When he is eventually convinced that the result is correct, he takes extreme care to protect himself, as if conveying his new result is the purpose of his existence. There are several other characteristics of Professor Swift that I am sure many mathematicians can relate to, especially in social situations.

Just a cautionary note: at the beginning, I found the book a bit artificial and not so realistic. But as I read on, it got much better, and details were revealed that made the artificialness disappear. The book just gets better as you go on, and surprisingly accurately captures the mind of a mathematician. This is a definite read for anybody in mathematics, especially younger people who may be debating whether their career choice is right for themselves.

I really enjoyed this book and loved learning about the sides of a great city that I didn't know about...very entertaining.

I was attracted to this book by a magazine's reference to it as a book capturing the feel of London. Nah. What a waste. Dumb and dry fiction with cardboard characters shuffled chaotically by the pretending but never delivering author.

Like the main hero's plan to visit each and every London's street this book idea may have sounded cool, but the book itself plain and unfunny.

The only laughing matter here is author's constant helpless trying to imitate Martin Amis-style cool wit. It never ever comes close to it, being barely amusing at its best.

Half a star for the good title. Let it be the only part you happen to read.

If you haven't visited London as yet (and you certainly should), chances are you might put off your trip if you were relying solely on this book as your travel advisory.

London through Nicholson's pen is a dark depressing place, where things are much smaller than your monopoly set would have you think (even though that's partly true), people do very strange things in public (and also in private), and tourists live for walking tours of the city.

Beginning with an attempted mugging and working backwards, the plot starts off pretty well. The first three chapters introduce three very different characters, all doing something interesting, but then it kind of slides downhill, as the characters weaknesses are harshly exposed.

One is a half-way decent bloke, on a mission to salvage the honor of his girlfriend, who happens to be a stripper. Two is a kinky map seller with Japanese roots, who's plotting a map project of her own, and is a tad mentally confused. Three is a married man, who walks for a living, and decides to extend his occupation into a hobby.

Inevitably, these three have to connect in one way or the other, but Nicholson's style is not to make things believable, and sometimes he hits and sometimes he doesn't.

This is London from the cheap seats, and a bleeding lot of words that ultimately say very little.

"Footsucker" may have had a cheesy plot, but "London" rambles to an ending that comes out of nowhere and leaves you there.

Amanda Richards, February 5, 2005

This wonderful novel is ideally enjoyed while living in or visiting London, seeing as how the city is a central character in it. With his typical offbeat humor, Nicholson weaves together the lives and stories of three of its denizens. Stuart is the owner of a company that does walking tours of London; burned out, he has decided to walk every single street in London in a quest for fulfillment and meaning. Julie is a native Londoner, although half-Japanese and thus is constantly being forced to prove herself a native. She keeps detailed maps of the locations of all her sexual encounters, as well as those of her partners. Mick is a Sheffielder whose stripper girlfriend was gang-raped by six well-to-do Londoners. He's come down to the unfamiliar city he hates in order to mete out some revenge. Both these and the supporting cast are wonderfully drawn characters, their paths through London are a treat.

Bleeding London is one of the quirkiest, darkest and funniest novels I have ever read! (That says a lot, for I have read thousands of novels.) It focuses on various characters whose experiences in London are both sinister and funny. Mick, Judy and Stuart are quite different, but are somehow brought together in strange ways. They all have a different take on London -- Londoners feeling foreign in their natural habitat while out-of-towners see it as an exciting and daring challenge.

Nicholson does a great job with the description of a big city. As a New York City native, I am able to identify with the story line and the dark message the author is sending. The backdrop of London is different from all of the other British novels I have read -- it shows a more realistic view of the city.

Thought provoking and darkly funny, Bleeding London should be read by those who enjoy a unique literary experience.

It is no small irony that Schmidt takes his title from his curmudgeonly Eighteenth Century ancestor, Samuel Johnson. The irony is that Johnson, while judgmental, was at least interesting in his thundering declarations.

I cannot for the life of me understand why all the other reviewers find this work daring or controversial. Schmidt says nothing new. He is, in fact, the most diplomatic of judges. And I challenge any reader to find an unequivocal take on any of the poets. He inevitably has both good and bad things to say.

A further irony is that the title of the book is a misnomer. Yes, Schmidt provides a few scanty biographic facts, but a better title might be The History of Metrics or something of the sort. The book is mostly concerned with the form English poetry has taken over the past several hundred years.

Above all, Schmidt hates exegetics. Don't expect in depth explorations of a poem's meaning or the evaluation of poet's oevre. Truly, this book reads like a hopscotch through the history of meter and rhyme. No wonder it only took him ten months to write the 900 or so pages. He didn't have to think!

Schmidt's history opens with an occasion on which he chaired a debate between Heaney, Walcott and Brodsky, contemporary giants - hence a portrait of himself in situ with the Gods - but its true opening scene is a typically more casual one mentioned in aside - where he tells us that his father disclaimed any further interest in his prospects when he announced his intention to publish poetry; he had put himself beyond the pale, made himself "a gambler" at best, and it is this chatty comfortableness along with self aggrandizement which holds the charm of this survey. Schmidt's paternal conference has the air of "Brideshead Revisited" as the painter Charles's father wonders aloud what became of a cousin who had run through his allowance early, gone off to Australia perhaps? Wherever possible in his account of the poets from Langland and Gower to his own stable of Khalvatis and Cissons Schmidt tries to give the impression that he was there, in spirit if not in person, and it is his identification of publishers' base motives not less than poets' fleeting visions which conspire to make this not so much a critical sourcebook as a story of how English poetry wound its roots into a tree.

Of the eighteenth century Tory publisher and clubman Tonson, whose Kit Kat club saw writers gathering with him to eat superb pies, he remarks that it was clever of him to gather writers round him so that he could pick off their completed works like berries ripened off the bush. It is just possible, he allows, that writers and publisher actually enjoyed each other's company socially. Of the printer who bought out Milton's copyright from his widow for an additional eight pounds after a total payment of fifteen, he observes that this was a good buy. The fathers of poets are viewed by Schmidt companionably as "men of substance", if they have wealth, and the sorry ends of poets who do not have such means or a career besides come to seem regular as passing calendar leaves. Spenser's work went up in flames, he ended very poor. Charlotte Mayhew, a favourite of Hardy's, consigned to a friend the copy of her poem taken in that great man's hand, and drank bleach. These, as well as the publishers' copyists, scribes and outgoings for paper are the cost of eloquence: a life in foolscap.

What emerges from the trawl of centuries is a generalism not common in this age of political axe grinders for critics: Schmidt sees that the ageing rebel turned conservative Wordsworth ("the silent muser had become the comfortable talker") echoes across centuries the radical turned arch-conservative Eliot, both critics in their age who turned their backs on ground broken. A half page on the dogs at poets' sides and what they tell us of their owners - Pope, Byron, Elizabeth Barret - is a gem. The readings of the poets are quirky but often fair: Browning left nine tenths of his work not worth re-reading, but that leaves a tenth that stands, a huge amount. Donne gets a quick seeing to - too clever and abstruse - Raleigh, with his deathbed nerves of steel, is "a man of flesh and blood". More often than not it is a chain of well chosen adjectives that makes Schmidt's prosecution or defense briefly and irrefutably - Johnson, despite his sloth, had "put so many projects into motion" that he achieved them, Dryden was happy to be top of his heap and did not "struggle with himself" to get higher. He quotes the great critics and sources so regularly - Aubrey, Wharton, Hazlitt, Eliot - that the intrusion of an occasional croney of his own - Cissons, Donald Davies - draws you up short. We had come to believe Schmidt was ensconced there in the Mermaid Tavern, what does this latter day vaingloriousness here? In these bowings to others' views he sometimes loses his tone - at his best he either lifts great critical cases outright or makes his own gruff motions to the jury, often digging up a soul long lost to view in the dungeons of posterity's Old Bailey.
It is a vast book. I have still not reached the twentieth century, though those I've browsed of the contemporary listings do not retain his scabrous touch. Pity. He leaves to other publisher-writers the honour of regaling us with tales of chicanery in his own poets' contracts. Or he reveres too much his comfortable perch with them to risk scaring his own poets from his own pie shop. Still. It's not possible to skip while reading through his earlier centuries. His greatest achievement is to make English poetry live like a story you do not wish to miss parts of - you never know when Burns will echo Piers Ploughman, you do not know when Schmidt's map, like a three dimensional model, will let you see the Pearl poet peeping up at the bottom of the sea beneath a fishing trip by some contemporary craft.

Schmidt's boldness is nearly unmatched among literary critics. For this reason alone, his book, Lives of the Poets, is a stimulating read. Of course, there are problems with the book. He spends nearly a third of his book on the last fifty years, after swiftly encompassing the rest of English poetical history in the first two thirds. A few glaring omissions are almost unforgivable, such as James Merrill and A.R. Ammons. One must remember, however, that Schmidt is a publisher by trade, and not really a literary critic. Even Samuel Johnson wrote about bad poets, though it may have been his advisors who pushed for such a shift of emphasis. In the end, one is often refreshed and enlightened by this book.

A great value, this book contains lots of fax 'n' info about the important and not-so-famous poets. Schmidt combines chronology with history and attempts a kind of psychobiography or mentalistic theory to try to get inside the minds of the poets. This approach, though it strikes me as somewhat culturally German, is I think quite effective. Schmidt is not a scholar but an enthusiast of poetry whose love of the material is overwhelming. And I also think Schmidt is an excellent teacher. He mentions that Spenser was highly influential up through the first half of the twentieth century, and from my recent browsing in the tradition, I could confirm this statement for myself. He also points out that Shelley is a great guide for budding poets, and I think that this is the kind of specific generosity that brings out the best in Shelley. Recently I've been reading Dryden's poetry and prose on the strength of Schmidt's recommendations. As for one reviewer's umbrage at the description of Spenser as small hands, etc., well so what? It's just--gasp--friendly irony at best, Germanic sarcasm at worst. Nobody thinks any less of Samuel Johnson for being ole blood 'n' guts Dr. Johnson with big appetites and, like Schmidt, strong opinions--but unlike Schmidt, smack in the middle of the English tradition, probably never even spent a weekend in Cabo San Lucas. So there!

I can't believe I read the whole thing. You may find yourself saying the same thing too I you should so choose to tackle Schmidt's lengthy analysis on the history of English poetry. With that statement I suppose is the warning. Reading this book from cover to cover is probably not for the average reader. You have to really love poetry and not just the language but what goes into it, what resides behind the words in the fabric of each poet's life. The book is not without merit though for the casual poetry semi-enthusiast. It is also a pretty enjoyable read for quick bite analysis. Pick it up, turn to an era, poet, or genre, and away you go for a quick 10-15 minute before going to sleep read. I was reluctant to give this book 4 stars tending towards a lower rating due to the weightiness, but the fact that I made it through speaks to the entertaining value of Schmidt's writing. To make literary analysis readable is no small feat.

Michael Schmidt is not without opinions. You may find yourself vehemently in disagreeance or enthusiastically joining the choir and singing along. For instance, Schmidt pretty much holds low opinion of the likes of Alan Ginsburg and his use of mind altering drugs to create poetry with little form. "Ginsburg dropped on American poetry like a bomb; his generation outgrew him and American poetry has outgrown him." It's not so much that Schmidt has an opinion. Of literary criticism, that is to be expected. But instead, it is that Schmidt offers up his opinions as imperatives, absolutes not to be countered.

Reading Schmidt's book it's as if all of English poetry revolves around Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He is downright ebullient in his praises of the two. "After Pound we read poetry differently." and "In The Waste Land he demanded to be read differently from other poets. He alters our way of reading for good, if we read him properly." And so it goes in Schmidt's world poetic view of the ushering in of modernism. Elsewhere, Schmidt decries the loss of formal verse or at least verse that respects formalism. It is here that he finds the true poet's art. Again an opinion presented as an imperative.

Schmidt is in need of conciseness. He is self-critical is his choosing of format biting off too much swallowing too little. He spends precious pages to launch campaigns for regional poets, virtual unknowns, and underappreciates. These are pages, he could be spending making a case for his St. Eliot and St. Pound sainthood. If a poet caters to a specific culture with a specific language virtually unintelligible to the rest of the English speaking world, why be inclusive? Toss 'em out and save 'em for the regional anthologies. Sorry about the preceding colloquial language, friends.

With all this criticism, Schmidt's massive book is a treasure for poetry lovers. It is high brow in places, but when you finish reading the whole thing or just bits and pieces you will know more about poetry, appreciate more in depth poetry, and be indebted to the history and love of language that precedes us and will succeed us. Literary infinitum by good friends. Read on.

The book is fairly short, extremely readable, and a good example of how NOT to do this sort of thing. The author wrote up a list of extreme sports events he wanted to experience, despite being a self-described "couch potato". Bane did several items on his "list" without anything like the proper training or preparation.

The short length of the book means that a disappointingly brief chapter covers each item on the list. There's not a lot of technical or "how to do it" information in here, though I doubt many will read this book for that. I admit I'd hoped for some discussion of the boring old administrative stuff involved in setting up adventures like these. There is some discussion of his internal mental experience, and a sort of rough-and-ready sports psychology.

I enjoyed the book, but it scared the bejeezus out of me that anyone would do these things this hastily! An entertaining read for armchair extreme sporters, but not much more than that.

Inspiring reading that makes you take a good hard look at your own list! If you can read this book without telling others about it and wondering exactly how crazy this guy is you should be signing up for your place in the Death valley Marathon!Personally I will stick to the local fun run!

Being your average, near-40, near-couch potato, I loved this book. I didn't know squat about any of the sports, so I enjoyed his descriptions of what they require and some of the main events.

Best of all, his writing style is seriously funny. I laughed out loud so many times that my wife wanted to read a few chapters just to see what was entertaining me so.

Once I was done reading the book I decided that it really was time for me to run that marathon I'd been talking about for the last 25 years. And you know what? I did it. Thanks Michael Bane.

Have you ever felt that there must be more out there than the rut or routine you are in? Ever wonder what it is like to complete something which really looks cool and exciting?

This book is the story of a "middle aged" man who decided to push himself over the edge, and to see what it was like out there. In a pizza den or a bar, Michael Bane scribbled a list of 13 extreme activities that he knew nothing about, but which he was determined to do.

Michael Bane takes the reader through THE LIST, through the emotions and feelings he encountered, through the sweat, the pain and the failure of achievment.

If you need some additional motivation or some get-up-an-go this would be the hassle free way of starting the discovery of what you, normal person, can achieve if you really want to.

On the other hand, for the couch potatoes, this would be a great way to experience a part of the Extreme Lifestyle, which you sometimes hear about, or see on TV!

I started reading "Over the Edge" the Saturday of Labor day weekend thinking that I would read it around the weekend activities and ended up not being able to put it down to the detriment of some activities. Bane draws you in and you become as obsessed with the LIST as he was.

From cave diving to climbing Mt Mckinley Bane weaves an autobiography that only someone that is partly crazy could write. But the more that I read the more I started to reevaluate my life. At 51 I am no longer young enough to punish my body like he did but he has motivated me to make my own list of things that I have wanted to do in the past and always found an excuse not to do.

Banes' book shows you that your only limited by your own limitations and that risk is relative to reward.

"Over the Edge" gives desk jockeys like myself a new insight into the meaning of Risk. After reading Banes' book you will look at risk with a whole new perspective.

A cross between story and philosophy "Over the Edge" should be read by anyone that wants to make a profound change in their life, be it loosing weight or starting the next billion dollar dotcom company.

Not all of the Matthew Scudder crime novels are equal. This is one
is the least of the series.
Matt may attend many AA meetings and have been able to stay sober, but he is basically a dry drunk. He does not work or live a good program. As we move through the pages we lose respect
for our detective friend. Block seems to lose the thread of this
story, as we wander through Scudder's relationships with his
array of offbeat characters. They are interesting in themselves,
but lend little to the storyline. Block decides he must finish this
book somehow and gives us such a lame ending. I wanted to
have a deeper understanding of Holtzmann's nefarious dealings. After trailing
this man for so many pages only to have him shot as a mistaken
identity. Oh please. I have a few more to read in this series, I hope
the last few are better than this, they would almost have to be.

The Devil Knows You're Dead is a very well written book that held my interest throughout -- however, I have been a big fan of this series from the beginning. Mystery fans who are looking for lots of action and suspense may want to skip this book. Relative to several of the other books in this series, there is considerably less physical violence and more --much more-- of a concentration on the emotional havoc and angst that Matthew Scudder is experiencing as he makes his way through his topsy-turvy world. The cases Scudder is working on in The Devil Knows You're Dead are interesting but they are not exciting and action-based. So, if this is what you're looking for in a mystery you probably should choose another book. If you enjoy great character development, interesting and likable secondary characers, vivid and accurate descriptions of the Hell's Kitchen/Clinton section of NYC, then treat yourself to this very good book. Keep in mind it's not the best book in this series but it's one I think you'll enjoy. However, I would strongly recommend that if you haven't read any of the books in this series, you first read at least one or two of the earlier books (e.g., When The Scared Ginmill Closes, A Ticket To The Boneyard, A Dance At The Slaughterhouse, A Walk Among The Tombstones, etc.) before reading The Devil Knows You're Dead. These books will familiarize you what the world of Matthew Scudder has been like. This book serves pretty much as a vehicle to further evolve the main character of Matthew Scudder and to let you know where he's moving to in his life.

I did not chose this book, it was required for a writer's workshop. When I sit down to read a detective novel I expect it to be about detecting. In The Devil Knows Your're Dead I was not the least bit interested in the personal issues / problems of the main character of this novel. The murder happens on page 17 of 316 and there is absolutely zero progress on solving the crime until about 231 pages into it. The intervening pages are mired in musings about alcoholism, transexuals, the morality of suicide, yada, yada, yada. B-o-r-i-n-g. I guess there is a market for this type of mystery (...) but give me Christie, Stout or Sayers and I'm happy. You can keep Block all to yourself.

Let me preface by saying I'm a huge Scudder fan, so the three star rating is compared to the entirety of the Scudder saga. In this entry, the clean and ostensibly happily domesticated Scudder is hired by a vagrant's brother to clear the vagrant of a shooting. The victim happens to be a distant acquaintance of Scudder's, and though Matt didn't like the guy much, he ends up having a desultory kind of affair with his widow. Meanwhile the accused killer is himself killed in prison, leaving a stubborn Scudder to attack the closed case (or as his cop friend puts it, "trying to give a dead horse mouth-to-mouth resuscitation" --- love that noir dialogue). This is only an average Scudder entry, which means that it's a bleak look at a seedy world, rife with witty dialogue and sharp insights into AA philosophy. Probably because the case here is so cold, however, a lot of drama in the sense of personal danger or action is lacking. There's much of the traditional amoral, detatched soul-searching, which is terrific, but none of the rough justice Scudder usually hands out.

As if Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series wasn't already the quirkiest private detective series around, "The Devil Knows You're Dead," is Scudder's most unconventional story yet. Superficially, the novel is about Scudder's attempt to prove that a deranged homeless man did not randomly gun down a successful lawyer. But actually, the novel is a dissertation about death and the choices one makes in life. During his investigation, Scudder's ex-girlfriend Jan Keane discloses to him that she has terminal cancer and asks him to procure a gun so that she can end her life before the pain consumes her. Meanwhile, Scudder and his current love, the former call girl Elaine Mardell, are moving closer together, even as Scudder becomes more restless and Elaine begins to question the direction of her own life. To top it off, Scudder's restlessness causes him to begin an affair with the dead lawyer's wife that he is ashamed of but unable to stop. This causes him to question whether he will be able to continue his sobriety despite over ten successful years in AA.

All of this accompanies a mystery that is interesting in and of itself, but not nearly as menacing as most Scudder mysteries. The recurring charater of the street kid TJ also shows some progression in his life during the story while assisting Scudder's investigation. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this novel as the place to start reading Scudder since to truly enjoy it requires a lot of the previous background of the characters. But for those who already know how good the Scudder novels are it is a must read.

Reid has gone in search of the shaman who helped native Siberians connect with their cold but animist history and backgrounds. Reid ends up finding a hodgepodge assortment of native inhabitants who have survived harsh terrain, gvoernmental indifferance and outright hostility, and forced Russification. The natives have had to deal with the Russians stealing their heritage as well as their best hunting grounds (where the native species have been decimanted to near extinction).

Over a span of two hundred years, but truly accelerated under the Stalinist Soviet regime, the Small-Number Peoples have been subjected to the worst abuses of an abusive system. Under conditions that made life tenuous at best the natives had developed cultures that had survived for over a thousand years. The greedy commissars and native leaders had done their best to take away the ability for survival and replaced it with liquor and syphyllis. Who could ask for more.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the small safety net that existed, fell apart. The natives stayed when most of the 'native' Russians left. Unable to remember how their ancestors survived, they are left with a cash economy that generates no cash jobs. They show all the casualties of the Inuit, Eskimo and Indians of our far north and Canada, with none of the oil money to save and promote their indigenous culture. With the Gulag gone they can't even make money by returning captured prisoners.

A sad state of affairs, since once they were at least 'Soviet Citizens', now they are part of the Russian Federation, but they will never be Russians.

As the author so vividly describes, the natives were extinguished here as well as the American West. Reid takes nine of the native groups and describes their plight under both the Czarist and Soviet regimes. Her travels through these lands in search of the native religion show that most of these native groups have given up a lot in terms of their old lifestyle. Now these groups are a splinter of the Russian nation.

This is a good travel book about the natives that inhabited Siberia. Siberia was only recently colonized by the Russian Czarist state, so the Russian experience is a relatively new one. In fact Tuva was added to the Russian state only in 1944. The lifestyle change on these natives was great.

This is a nice read about an unknown part of the world. Reid tries to be fair to the Russian and native groups. In her writings, she is not condescending to any of these groups. She does question the Russian political order which is still dominant over these natives. I hope Ms. Reid is not a snooty British author.

Only three native populations in the world today have been virtually whipped out, driven from their homelands and yet they remain, remnants and testaments to a different world. These are the American Indian, the Aborigine of Australia and the Natives of Siberia. This essential work tells the stories of the tribes and the peoples of Siberia `from their view'. The Siberian natives, from the Buryat to the Khant are a diverse people from many walks of life and of different races. Many of these people were disastrously affected by the coming of Communism and the upheavals of Stalin and industrialization. Yet they remain in pockets in some of the harshest landscape in the world. This is a wonderful book that sheds light on these fascinating people.

Seth J. Frantzman

Readers who anticipate an account of the shaman's role in the various native Siberian tribal cultures will be sorely disappointed. Despite her title and introductory emphasis on the shaman's central position historically, the author is forced to admit that, by the 1970's, "shamans still existed, just." That being the case, the impetus for her journey to post-Soviet Siberia some thirty years later seems dubious. She alludes to a "native Siberian renaissance," of which shamanism would be one indicator. The substance of her book is almost completely at odds with both a general and particular cultural rebirth. An awkward pastiche of travelogue, historical anecdote and ethnography, it evokes the Siberian scene following the collapse of Communism, dominated by a Russian presence and the virtual destruction of indigenous cultures.
Reid anticipates the refutation of her renaissance notion with her description of a conference on shamanism which she attended in Moscow. Funded and dominated by Californian shamanists (who else?), "at its back, ostentatiously bored, sat a row of real live (sic!) shamans--plump, middle aged Asian women, tricked out in nylon robes, neo-Celtic jewellery and gypsy scarves." (8) Her ambiguous description of these conferees is reinforced by one of the few extended accounts of her actual witness to contemporary "shamanistic" practice. The Tuvan clinic, a "swanky outfit" in Kyzyl, gives her occasion to observe the practice's "senior partner" performing a 30 minute ritual, after which, upon payment of his fee, "he gave me something suspiciously close to a wink." (114)
Although Reid's bibliography includes a number of Western scholars studies, their Russian counterparts' contributions are almost entirely lacking. Nor does she offer much in the way of detail regarding traditional shamanistic belief and practice. No mention is made, for example, of the role played by the fly agaric hallucinogen, which figured prominently in the mystic rituals of many Siberian tribes.
In general, Reid focuses more on the Russian expansionists' attitudes and behavior toward those they conquered than she does on the natives' existing cultures. It is the all-too familiar story of Western civilization's destructive impact on those ill-equpped to deal with it. That however, is a far cry from the book's declared purpose. Her belated attempt to reassert her cultural renaissance theory in the afterward is unpersuasive. Admitting that shamanism has been "reduced from a detailed, consistent way of apprehending the world to a rag-bag of vague disconnected beliefs and rituals" (201) she still insists that it is in "the process of reconstruction." Unfortunately, the details she has provided argue the contrary, revealing the rag-bag rather than the coherent whole. On this count alone, her work must be considered a failure.

I loved this book but felt the writing was choppy. Anna Reid would be explaining something about the particular tribe and the next thing I know she's describing what was happening to her at the moment.
I am an avid reader of Russian history and knew about the places and events she described but I know now after reading the book no more about Shaman than before I read her treatise.
Her travels were so interesting and the places and people she wrote about are so unique that the book is entralling however, she did not focus on Shaman. She did not focus on the culture of the indigenous peoples nor her reaction to them. I felt sad at the end of the book for leaving that part of the world with very little more knowledge than I had before reading about these obscure peoples living in Siberia.