Nicholson Books

This book, if indeed published in 2004, has a very similar plot to the short story "Robbery" by Nathan Oliver, published years before.

To the idiot who panned this book JUST because it was published in 2004: the paperback was published in 2004. That means the original hardcover was originally published YEARS earlier. duh

I read this book before the movie came out, and it's a dark but beautiful story of a murderer who makes his way across the world, finally settling in Portugal. It was a wonderful picture of life in a tiny mountain town; the simplicity, the isolation, the scenery, the people...
and as soon as I saw the first preview for the movie, I knew it was a total departure. I went to see it, and I was right.
If you like edge-of-your-seat suspense, gunplay, car chases, etc, you'll be disappointed with this book. But if you want a clever read, you'll be satisfied. It's slow, but that's kind of the point, and the story is excellent.
The movie was good in its own right, but it had absolutely NOTHING to do with the book. (Except for the first name "Martin", and a passing mention of "Chris Hart".) I recommend reading the book first, and then you'll be happy with both experiences. Reading the book will reveal nothing of the plot of the movie, so you'll still be surprised up to and including the last scene.
By the way - if you're afraid of making a $30.00 investment, you can buy this book CHEAP at www.edwardrhamilton.com. It's certainly worth what you'll pay for it there.

Taking Lives is the first Michael Pye book I've read. Based on an unusual, but plausible premise, it is an engrossing read. Pye writes very well and does a great job of putting you in the scene. The story starts off and finishes off well, but sags a bit in the middle. Despite this, Taking Lives is worth reading if you like this genre.

The movie had bits and pieces of the book in it. Someone read this book and thought it would make a good movie but needed to add other characters to make it more sexy to sell to audiences. IF YOU GO TO THIS MOVIE EXPECTING THE BOOK YOU WILL BE ANGRY BECAUSE IT IS NOT TRUE TO THE BOOK AT ALL. It was a good movie, nice twist ending but shares very little with the book. BE WARNED! :)

While the premise of the story, the death of an older child, is certainly sad and the typical McMurtry style of exploiting people's character flaws could lead to a book of emotional anguish and despair, somehow The Late Child, instead, is light, humorous, and oddly uplifting in its overall presentation. A precocious 5 year old boy continually interjects a positive spin and an indomitable optimism that is contagious to the characters in the story as well as the reader. Like many of McMurtry's stories, The Late Child provides a look at a slice of life through the journey of a family and friends. Using hilarious situations, comical personalities, and human complexity, McMurtry demonstrates the poor judgment of people and the consequences of those decisions. But unlike some of his darker books, The Late Child leaves the reader with a sense of hope and improvement.

I was entranced with the beginning, the development, and the travels through New York City. But I was disappointed with the arrival of the people in Oklahoma and the events of the ending. I felt that the focus moved away from the boy and to the problems of the adults. This caused the story to fizzle and to emphasize the minor characters too much and took away some of the power of journey.

Still, aside from the problems of the ending, a very enjoyable read that ranks among his finer books in my estimation.

The best way to read this sequel is immediately after reading its prequel;"The Desert Rose".The surprising thing is that McMurtry wrote "The Desert Rose" in 1983 and "The Late Child " didn't come out till 1995. That's a long wait!
Again, this story continued along the same path.Even more so, the thought processes of the characters reminded me of the characters in many of Erskine Caldwell's novels;the most well known being "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre".
McMurtry's immagination never seems to slow down and you are presented with one wild thing after another,with each turn of a page. The chapters are very short,many only a couple of pages;but he puts more in one of those short chapters than most writers put in 30 or 40 page chapters.
This book has a plethora of great lines;for example:
"Your standards are the standards of a doormat."
"Dick don't have enough imagination to get lonely."
"Rog don't have a speed-neutral ain't a speed."
"That's how I feel,I just don't know how to live."
"Stuck in the driver's seat and the car was moving,
but she had no map and no idea of where she was supposed
to go."
"The fact is,it's a living death,and I've lived as long as
I can."
"It ain't hard to die when you've already stopped living."
This has been a great read,and I hope Larry is working on a trilogy;Lord knows he has created enough characters who would be fun to follow.However,please don't make us wait another 12 years.

This is a sequel to DESERT ROSE. Harmony's daughter Pepper has just died of AIDS in NYC, and she (Harmony) and her 5-year-old son Eddie drive cross country from Las Vegas to retrieve her. Typically off-the-wall McMurtrian adventures occur - all their belongings go over a cliff at the Grand Canyon, Eddie gets to meet Pres. Clinton and also get on the Letterman show because of his dog, they befriend people who live in a dumpster. But the characters are just strange and out of touch and hard for us to relate to. Children are not usually portrayed very well by McMurtry, and Eddie is no exception: he acts and talks like an old man, which becomes unbelievable and very annoying after a while. There are contrivances in all of McMurtry's books, but they are too heavy-handed here. Not one of his better novels.

McMurtry's sequel to "The Desert Rose", which introduced the romantic, optimistic Harmony, ex Las Vegas showgirl, and her arid, glittering environment, deals with the death of the child she agonized over in "Desert Rose."

In the first book Harmony coped with her difficult daughter, Pepper, and truggled to come to terms with aging. Now Harmony copes with the sudden news that Pepper, who she hasn't seen since Pepper left for New York at 17, six years before, is dead.

In her late 40s, Harmony has settled into a routine. She has a job in a recycling plant and an adored 5-year-old son named Eddie. Her current boyfriend, the latest in a long line of losers, runs off rather than deal with her grief. "She was not the same cheerful woman he had left only eight hours before."

Grief overwhelms Harmony, but Eddie keeps her tethered. "Eddie was the one person left that she absolutely had to think about."

Meeting her Oklahoma sisters at the airport, Harmony finally finishes the letter from Pepper's roomate. They were lovers as well as roomates, it seems, and Pepper died of AIDS.

A few days later Harmony sets off on a cross-country Odyssey with her sisters and Eddie. Harmony is looking for a new life and hungers for family solidarity back in Oklahoma. But even as their trip begins the two older sisters bicker constantly and the details of their lives begin to emerge in patterns of ragged desperation.

Harmony, bouts of disconnection alternating with her responsibility and love for Eddie, decides to go to New York and meet Laurie, the roomate. She must learn about Pepper's life and try and understand her death.

Eddie, a precocious and delightful child, with just enough brattiness to make him human, collects a family along the way - an abandoned dog, a teenage New Jersey prostitute and her sorry husband, three Indian entrepreneurs and Laurie.

While Laurie and Harmony try to join the pieces of the Pepper they knew, Eddie and his dog become celebrities and are invited to the White House. As Washington is on the way to Oklahoma, they get a school bus and the whole enthusiastic clan goes along. But slowly they begin to drop off - they cannot escape their lives by joining Harmony and Eddie's.

And in Oklahoma Harmony realizes that she did the right thing years ago - when she left her dead-end hometown and her negative, impossible-to-please mother.

McMurtry's portrayal of the grief of a mother for her child is clear-eyed and unsentimental. The zany characters and incidents along the way are humorous, jarring, irritating - visiting on the reader the same displacement life is visiting on Harmony.

While the zany happenings and heart-of-gold eccentrics sometime seem too Disneyish, only one aspect of Harmony's grief doesn't ring true. Although Pepper's death was sudden, for AIDS, only eight weeks, Harmony never asks why she wasn't told earlier, when she might still have seen her daughter alive. She doesn't agonize or even reflect over this, although she lingers over regrets about not visiting her daughter when it seemed they had all the time in the world.

As far as McMurtry sequels go, I'd rank this novel beneath "Texasville," "The Evening Star," and "Streets of Laredo," but ahead of most of the others. It exhibits McMurtry's excellent command of the English language; his voice, particularly in writing dialogue, is a compelling one. The reason I don't rate this book a bit higher is that it is almost totally plotless, and by the end seems sort of pointless. The idea is to show Harmony learning to make her own way in life, and more than that, learning that that is the right decision to make. But to me, that theme only becomes evident late in the novel, and the fact that it is Pepper's death that brings this process about for Harmony weakens her as a character, rather than strengthening her. That may only be my resentment of McMurtry's killing off Pepper, who in "The Desert Rose" was a particularly vivid character. He's sort of had the tendency in the later part of his career to kill of characters I like for no particularly good reason -- Newt Dobbs, anyone? -- so I've got to dock him a couple of points for that. Still, if you are a McMurtry fan, I recommend this novel.

I read Saint Therese of Lisieux (A Penguin Lives book) this week. The style and subject are appropriate for the series, and I appreciate the author's presenting a story to a public that may not generally be interested in haggiography and knows little about St. Therese. However, the saint's brief life troubles me, as it calls into question the process of cannonization itself. Ms Harrison repeatedly turns to Therese's abandonment by mother figures as an explanation of decisions that readers of Penguin LIVES books may not understand. In the saint's illness, though, it becomes increasingly evident that the church and religious community fed the young woman's mortifications to the point of cruelty -- from which they soon profited both financially and by reputation as the convent of a saint.

Therese's younger sister Celine's role especially interests me. Her photos documented not only a life, but also a way of living that was of interest, but largely unknown, to those outside. In the nineteenth century, particularly, storytelling through photos must have been a radical form of art. In truth, the photo of St. Therese on the cover of the book is what caught my attention when I was browsing the general section in a bookstore. As I understand it from Harrison's account, Celine's calling to the religious life was not a clear one from God. To be charitable, Therese "mediated" the message; "coercion" is another word that might be used.

Towards the end of the book, Harrison describes the historical context of Therese's writing .. the vocation of "invalid" against a backdrop of changing roles for women. I find this "vocation" sad, today, in light of what I have seen and read. I'd either like to see additional annecdotal and statistical evidence, or I'd like to see a comparison between the process of canonization for St Therese vs. the same process in a Post-Vatican II age.

It surprises me that there was such a huge showing of the faithful during the 1999 showings of St Therese's reliquary. (1.1 million people saw it in 106 cities.) I can understand a contemporary interest in the photographs, but a new justification of the process of canonization is called for, not adoration of the victim. I pity her and have sympathy for her blood sisters and the nuns of her convent who were trapped in the process.

Her life is a sobering lesson.

Shirley McKee +

"Saint Therese of Lisieux" is a short story of a short life. Drawn largely from Therese's own writings and the recollections and testimony of acquaintances, it provides an up close view of a holy life.

Therese is a saint who pursued sanctity by seeking "nothingness" within the Carmel of Lisieux and yet became the patroness of missionaries and one of the most popular saints of the past century.

This book provides an introduction to the spiritual life of late 19th Century France, in which religious life was at its greatest popularity, and the particular environment of her convent. It also gives an insight into the attraction of Therese to the world since her death. I find the popularity of Therese and St. Francis of Assisi to be puzzling. Our world generally esteems those who give their lives in service to others, not in those who seek self mortification as their road to salvation, but in their cases, this is the model which the world embraces. The book alludes to Therese's writings, but really does not, in my estimation, make the case for her immense popularity. This book is a good introduction to her life, but I am left searching for her charism.

Harrison shows us a Therese who often wept but who also had a gift for restraining her emotions; who's self-understanding was influenced by her dreams, even while she discounted the value of dreams; who had an unusual preadolescent disorder involving involuntary muscular movements which sometimes even threw her out of her bed; and who longed for purgation by spiritual fire. And Harrison did it with literary flair. I loved it. Now I'm reading The Kiss.

Kathryn Harrison writes triumphantly about Therese Martin the Saint of Lisieux. Her biography captures the historical character from childhood to her death at age 24 years. Harrison portrays the life of Therese amidst the context of the late 19th Century. The focus of the book is on the family life and the convent life of Therese and her seemingly constant struggle to rest in perfect devotion to God to whom she had sacrificed her life.

Harrison writes exquisitely of Therese, but she writes at times from a freudian, humanistic point of view, somehow missing or misunderstanding the mysticism of Therese's life that is the one characteristic that makes her life remarkable. I think this comes from the writer discounting the reality of Therese's constant communion with God.

I recommend this book because it illustrates the power of a quiet life lived in the love and service of God. Harrison successfully shows the effect of one life lived fully for God unselfishly and sacrificially. The final pages offer a brief glimpse of the enormous impact Therese has had on people since the time immediately following her death.

Craig Stephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays

Unfortunately this was the only biography of Therese in my local public library. All biographies are to some extent seeing the subject thru a lens, but this lens filters out much of what is of the most value in Therese's writings in my opinion. This biographer seems unable to dive into or convey much of Therese's spirituality, due to a lack of understanding or excessive skepticism of spiritual experience. Biographer doesn't seem to be convinced that spiritual experiences are real. She continuously suggests that Therese's spirituality may be just neuroses and offers up superficial pop-psychological comments for every spiritual experience. Its like a biography of a mountaineer but the biographer is not at all sure that mountains really even exist at all, and they may be a figment of the fevered imagination. Biographer thinks this point of view is attuned to what "contemporary readers" expect but it just ends up missing most of whats there spiritually.

If you've chosen Dreamweaver MX 2004 for developing your web sites but need to get across the "great divide" from static to dynamic sites, Sean Nicholson's book will guide you skillfully across in the shortest possible time and distance.

To keep things in perspective, learning how to develop dynamic web sites involves application server (ColdFusion, ASP, etc.) and database technologies (Access, SQL Server, etc.) in addition to your present use of web server technologies (XHTML, CSS, etc.). Learning how to do so quickly while addressing real world issues like database security, application and server choices, and related concerns is no small undertaking. The journey, without the assistance of a skillful guide, can take months or years, mostly because most books on this topic are either too light or heavy on the topic.

As an entrepreneur seeking the fastest and most skillful route across these technologies, I estimate this book will save me several months on the learning curve. Essentially, Sean guides you through increasingly complex exercises that demonstrate and point the way to how you can build your own dynamic sites using the same skills and knowledge.

I give the book high praise for both its business savvy in providing an overview in Part I and the comprehensive, industrial strength exercises in Parts II/III. However, in order to spare you months on the learning curve and to keep you moving forward, the author has had to assume a certain level of skill on your part, including the ability to troubleshoot problems with your code. In the world of dynamic sites, even the smallest piece of wrong code can stop you in your tracks until you resolve the error. And while I have found the exercises to be comprehensive and virtually error free, keep in mind that to show every dialogue box or key stroke would require a volume 3x its present size.

Ready for the adventure of crossing over to dynamic sites? Buy the book, roll up your sleeves, and start the journey!

I bought this book b/c the title exactly matched my intention to develop dynamic websites with DW MX 2004 and MS Access. The first 88 pages are okay. Most of what is described in teh book works on my computer. Some screenshots look different, and I wonder if I have a different version of DW? The author often refers to tabs that I can't find on my screen. But as I have done some simple work in DW before, I have been able to figure things out that are not described very clearly in the book.

On page 89 it breaks down and I can't move on when I'm trying to create a db connection using ColdFusion. Although I'm exactly following the book I am not able to do it. There is no trouble shooting available, and I can't figure out why it doesn't work. I've spent hours searching for help on different websites as well as re-installing DW. I even e-mailed the author for support, but my mail bounced back. (The author is "always glad to help with problems, hear success stories, and see the sites that you have built with assistance of this book".

As I only read 92 pages of this book, I rate it a 2 star instead of 1. It might get better and clearer later on, I don't know. I've stopped reading it though, and that's why I'm looking for another book here on Amazon.com. The Missing Manual looks promising given the reviews it gets. I would not recommend anyone to buy DW MX 2004 and Databases.

There are not enough words to express how dissapointed I am about this book. It doesn't show even basic database features like how to show a one to many relationship in the same web page using list boxes or drop down lists! Many chapters simply repeat the same material: how to run the wizard to create a page that manages a single (underscore single) table record. The author has been ironic enough to show a multiple table database layout (ERD), and then not creating a single page that is able to manage more than one table! The only list boxes used are filled by hand, not dynamically from a database! Was the name of the book Dreamweaver and Databases?

Save your money, go for the online help files in the macromedia web site. I got misled by the high ratings this book got here. Don't make the same mistake. Can I get my money back?

I am a bit undecided about the book.... It does teach you some things, but at the same time you spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether your results are correct or not.

Its like the author wrote some of the book with the idea of a certain exercise resulting in 2 web pages(search page, and then result page), and then later he just shortcuts and has you make 1 web page(search and result on same page). Then he never cleans up the chapter that was talking about there being 2 pages. So you end up completing the exercise and your results do not match up with the out of exercise explanations. So very confusing. Also, references are made that you can contact a internet website to gather snippets/examples, and this information on the website is VERY incomplete... I kinda understand that stuff is offered as a service, but if you are going to offer it, then follow up on the offer... Worst case of this was for a snippets page to cut and paste text into your web pages(some of these are a paragraph in size, not that huge a deal, but still could be considered needless typing). You go to the snippets page and are greeted with a "this is where the snippets will go" greeting.. It reminded me of when I was a kid and had to type in word for word a program from a magazine to see pretty lights and music....

This book does give some decent information, it just takes a good deal of time to figure out if you are doing things correctly... Once you figure out you are doing things correctly you can go back and figure out what is being taught and how it affects the page(s) you created....

Absolutely deplorable... this book will waste your time, money and brainpower. I am currently only about half way through the book and I have decided to abandon it entirely out of frustration.

Not only will you find extremely poor writing, you will be lead through examples that are inconsistent, difficult to understand and ultimately disfunctional. In other words, the examples will fail, and leave you blinking at your screen wondering why. If you have Dreamweaver experience, you will more than likely be able to go back through some of the failed exercises and do some troubleshooting of your own to make the applications work. If you are coming at this topic with little experience (which is what the book advertises to be targeted for) then expect a very bumpy ride.

This author offers no examples of troubleshooting your code, and uses verbage in his writting that seemingly is intended to confuse you and through you off.

I haven't yet found a good reference for this topic because I am just now looking for another after throwing this book in the trash.

Mr. Gill is a Scot, not an Englishman, and he insists on maintaining that distinction even though he has spent most of his life among the English. His observations depend on a sharp eye and a sound historical perspective. His portrayal of the English is full of surprises and his revelations are exhilarating and profoundly funny.

Someone bring a butterfly net or mind-altering chemicals, in that order, and apply them to A.A. Gill. The man is in extremis and needs help. This book is the literary equivalent of projectile vomiting but it comes apparently from having consumed a meal comprised entirely of rich cynicism, relentless prejudice and very bad company. Those ingredients, metaphorically similar to historical assessments of lousy English cooking, may produce severe nausea--as they apparently did in the author's case. Or was there method to his madness? We'll explore that later.

Gill writes well and wittily, as one might expect of a man with an English (not Scottish) education. His language, vocabulary, syntax and grammar are reasonable but occasionally flawed (his sentence on page 3, "Us natives don't come here without expectations," clearly needs help, but maybe he didn't have an editor). The overwriting for effect is embarrassing, too clever by half, typically an outpouring of rancid bile. Why is he so angry? So critical? So venomous? It is relatively easy to see that, as an experienced newspaper writer, he engages in `jugular journalism' in which hyperbole rules. Cheap shots for ever, eh! That's so darned easy. We learned that in kindergarten.

Gill has apparently led a narrow life since being dragged down to England against his will as a child and seemingly has not had the chance to meet some of the nice people or explore some of the better parts of England. This is a pity because, writing as a 50/50 mixture of Scottish (Isle of Arran) and English (Surrey), I find much to admire and enjoy in both countries. Much to loathe and despise, certainly. Gill concentrates on the latter. Plenty of grist for his mill.

Method to his madness? Could be. Consider modern publishing, in which celebrity and notoriety are the staple ingredients of best-sellerdom (Amber Frye, `Divine' Brown, Cato Kaelin and all the other great `writers' we know and love). Before the reader of this review condemns me as unhelpful, pause and go behind the scenes at Simon & Shuster, who published "The Angry Island" in the U.S., or Weidenfeld & Nicholson, who published it first, in England, in 2005. Be a fly on the wall in London or New York and listen to the pitch or the publisher: "Gill's going to rant and rave. He's got a name-writes for the Sunday TIMES. Give it an outrageous title that'll annoy a lot of people. Wall-to-wall invective. It'll sell a bundle." That's publishing's bottom line, and the contents takes care of itself. Never forget, too, that the author has made an excellent living writing in . . . in the England he pretends so much to despise.

It's sad to have to give the book few stars because Gill, who picks a lot of easy targets and confirms many ingrained prejudices, could have done so much better if he hadn't lunged for the cruel, obvious and negative. Each one of us, and each of our countries, might be found worthy of being hanged if examined too closely or viewed through the wrong colored glasses. Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd (see my reviews) have ploughed much of the same ground and have come up with gold and not Gill's dross. So has Bill Bryson, in his own inimitable way.

PS For a `top reviewer' who can't differentiate between British (related to the British Isles), English (from England), Welsh (re Wales) and Scottish (of Scots origin), my commiserations. Let's not even get into the Irish Question.

A book of disjointed observations on the modern condition of our country's parent isle. It would have been better left as a series of magazine essays---with some of its chapters omitted from the series.

A.A. Gill writes in a style used by many of today's edgy (read: quick, terse, ironic, condescending, black-edged humorous) columnists: it is designed to immediately grab one's attention and provoke a quick laugh. But sustained over the length of a book, this style--based on the author's acrobatic use of language-- wears on a reader.

If you have only time this year for one funny, well-written, and off-beat book tied to England, buy and read Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons.

AA Gill is one of the foremost essayists in the English language today and this book proves it - because this is not a collection of essays.

Reading The Angry English, you think of a painter trying sculpture or a boxer moving up two weights in one go. The basic skills are there, the man has a well-earned reputation but.............

The Angry English is a rant and little else. If Gill had condensed this rant into essay length it might have been the funniest and most infuriating piece he'd ever written. Unfortunately, he was persuaded (I cannot believe it was his idea) to go book-length and he simply doesn't have the stamina, variety or content to make it work.

Oh, there are some very quotable Gill-isms in here but you'll have to shovel a lot of dross to get to them. Overall, the author makes much of his Scottish birth as a reason to loathe the English (as if anyone needed to dig so deep for a reason) but it simply doesn't have the legs to carry Gill's rant to the finishing post of a full-length book.

If you're interested in a book about the English, try Paxman's effort - not as acid as Gill but every bit as enlightening and amusing.

The English have always been the targets of humorous criticism and Mr. Gill's book rightly rakes them over the coals. His extremely witty take makes for enjoyable reading even for Anglofiles. That being said,Gill doesn't know when to stop. The first half is funny , and I assume, true, but he keeps on going telling the same joke over and over again. Enough already!

have you ever read a book with facts that you know are not true? well if you havent than this is a book that might change that.

The book is basically just a summary of the exchanges on the Edge mailing list. All the writers have spent some time in their life, thinking about some aspect of humanity in great detail, and all of them have at least published two books.

It made me think a lot about life, and many entries in the book are very unobvious. Of course, the average reader will probably not agree with many of the writers' thoughts or opinions. Nevertheless, I would recommend anyone to quickly browse the book to see what are the ideas that have influenced humanity so immensely in the last 2k years.

The problem with this book is that it isn't a book at all. It is a vanity publication of The Edge Foundation. Actually, it is a series of emails that the Foundation's members sent in response to one of their "great questions" series. These examples were chosen by John Brockman, a literary agent who coincidentally represents many of these same people.

...

A quick sampling: Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and corporate strategist; John Maddox, physicist and editor emeritus of Nature magazine; Marvin Minsky, mathematician and founder of MIT's AI Lab; John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American; Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate and director emeritus of Fermi Nation Accelerator Laboratory; and Michael Nesmith, business person.

This impressive list is weighted toward the scientific and medical arts with a goodly sampling of science journalists. Bet you didn't know that Michael Nesmith, past member of the Monkeys singing group, was a high status "intellect", did you? He's a member. There's also some guy named Jeff Bezos in it.....

In the year 2000, there was an over abundant inventory of TV shows, magazine articles and coffee shop conversations devoted to nominating the greatest events and innovations of the last century. For the bold, the debate was expanded to the last two thousand years. Suggestions varied since what constitutes greatness depends on view point. Many took up the challenge which generated this volume. It demonstrates once again that there's nothing like a good argument with famous names to sell books.

The book is divided into comments (and BIOS) on "How We Live . . . ", observations on the nominated innovation's impact on the physical world, the printing press, classical music and "How We Think . . .", innovations that changed our perception of the universe, self government, calculus. While all your favorites are there, the printing press, the contraceptive pill, the atomic bomb, other more esoteric and conceptual are also included. For example "free will" is listed as a profound conceptual innovation. However, the recommender closes his nomination by saying that it is actually a "glorious, absolutely necessary illusion."

Arguments on why the nominations are so important are brief and facile in most cases and without much richness of description. One Princeton professor of physics did nominate hay (as in, "bales of...") and connected it, via the horse, to the rise of urban civilization and the great cities. An interesting concept if quite a historical leap. Remember, these were emails to the editors, not thoughtful discussions.

There is an afterword is by the Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond. It is the only section of the book that appears truly thoughtful. Which, of course, is classic Diamond. Unless you need a tiny coffee table book to impress your friends or your guest bathroom needs its magazines replaced, look elsewhere your millennium insight...

I think that some have been a little harsh as to the merits of this book -- there are those scientists that dashed off hurried responses to the question, but there are just as many others who took the time to write thoughtful essays. Just having the chance to see how scientists and other creative people put their thoughts together makes the book worthwhile reading -- think of it as brain food for your mind. The responses ranged from the more obvious answers like the birth control pill, to more out there ones like the eraser and free will. If nothing else, these essays are written in digestible pieces and provide a good overview of major discoveries since man has inhabited the earth. Most will find it provoking. I'm fairly certain the thermos quote was tongue in cheek.

This is a genuinely great book because it makes readers think;we are so used to the world around us, that it is almost impossible tothink of what our life would be like without such everyday items as sliced bread.

No, somehow "sliced bread" didn't make it into this list. Instead, the first half of the book talks about material inventions such as the printing press, electric motors, telecommunications, the plow, the static electricity machine, the caravel, hay, clocks, the atomic bomb and the Internet. The second half deals with ideas such as marketing, calculus, the scientific method, secularism, the scientific method, the clock, economic man and other ideas that change the way we think.

It's done with humor on occasion, as in the nomination of the thermos bottle which ". . . keeps cold things cold and hot things hot. But, how does it know?" In each case, the relevant invention is briefly described and its material and intellectual impact is explained. One of the greatest American inventions of all times is overlooked, the invention of "the list" -- such as the book itself. Americans love to make lists such as "the greatest inventions of the past 2,000 years" and the "best 100 books of the century" and the "best home run hitter in baseball." You name it, there's an American list for it.

That's part of the fun of the book. Other readers will undoubtedly come up with their own omissions -- this book was compiled by nonimations from about 100 prominent scientists and thinkers. In itself, that suggests another distinctly American invention -- the one-upmanship of the expert by the average person. It's part of the social fabric of the United States; when Jeff Bezos came up with a list of 20 possible business ventures using the Internet, his employer at the time ranked selling books at the bottom of the list. So, Bezos went out and invented Amazon dot com -- a typical American approach to the experts who says something is impossible, impractical or irrelevant.

One of the fun things to consider is that this book had its origins on the Internet, at Edge.org, and a discussion among scientists and thinkers. Yet, here it is in the form of movable type used to place ink on paper -- which, one of the contributors, is a technology that dates at least to the Minorans of 1,700 BC. That's the nature of ideas; you spend all of your time inventing something, then people use it for some entirely different purpose.

Think of poor old Thomas Edison, who invented a practical means of recording sound and then expected it would be used to record the last words of dying people, or to enable clocks to announce the time, or to teach spelling to children. Instead, to Edison's disgust, it was used to record music! Can you imagine? With a band on every corner, musicians in every bar and theatre, someone came up with the idea of using the phonograph to record music.

That's what makes this book fun, enlightening, well worth reading and quite relevant to own. It will do two things for every reader: first, it will show how our world came to be, and second, it will prompt many readers to ask, "Why didn't they include . . . ?" Brockman compiled a wonderful list, and he also left out a wonderful list. That's the beauty of America (which he overlooks), no matter how good your product, someone is always able to come up with a new and unexpected way of using it. END

Not so bad for a first book, at least it is readable even when a little confusing. The author isn't really interested in his characters, picks them up and drops them without much explanation. The books doesn't come to a conclusion, it just ends. It is hard to understand the characters, they are stick figures and need more flesh. Of course, when I read the senior Theroux's books, I never really understand why he does anything, either. They seem to want to share their views of the world, but nothing of themselves. This is true of all of Paul Theroux's book, including my favorite, his trip through China in the Iron Rooster. Seems to be true of the son, also. If the main character reflects the author, I get the feeling he feels out of step with the world, but doesn't much give a damn about it, preferring to wait until the rest of the world gets in line with him.

Marcel Theroux's debut novel, A Stranger In The Earth, attempts a humorous portrayal of contemporary London and its society, and on some pages it succeeds. Unfortunately, the novel also contains stick-figured characters, wooden dialogue, and stilted sentence structure.

Theroux's main character, Horace Littlefair, and his support cast: the landlord, Mr. Narayan, the uncle, Derwent Boothby, all come across as hollow puppets, but the narrator pulling the strings has not the power to pull off a good story. There is no lyrical prose here, no memorable passages, just page after page of Britpop slang without substance.

One of Theroux's contemporaries, Will Self, uses artfully mannered prose and dialogue to touch on similar subject manner, such as animal rights. But Theroux's Littlefair is no Simon Dykes (the simian fine artist of Self's Great Apes). Indeed, Littlefair is a less-talented but well-connected member of a successful family; his uncle provides him with a career, in this case, newspaper journalism. Based on this book's frequent allusion to family connections, one has to ask if the elder Paul influenced the arrival of his son's novel on the bookstore shelves. In some ways, A Stranger In The Earth reads as a confession, one that says: "Yes."

Unlike the reader from Philly I found Marcel Theroux to be a gifted young writer with a flair for comic setups, perfect descriptions and an ear for dialogue. This book, be warned, has quite a lot going on in it and to Theroux's credit (not his uncle) he manages to wrap things up--or attempt to wrap things up--while keeping the other balls in the air. Therein was my problem with the book: It was too short, abbreviated. A better book could be had if a few of the plot threads were dismissed. Of course, half the fun was watching the author spin the threads out. And like one of the other reviewers said, you never know what's going to come next. It's a close stab at "Lucky Jim" in my opinion, but ultimately not The Greatest Book of All Time because of the inability of the author to successfully finish the book. Would I buy another of his books? Maybe. Would I give a new book of his consideration? Definitely.

I just finished this book and I have no idea what it was about. I didn't care about any of the characters, and it seems, neither did the author. Also, a bit more than I cared to know about foxes.

One night, bored, I went to see Marcel Theroux read from his debut novel at a local bookstore. I enjoyed the old-fashioned wit of his excerpts so much I ended up buying a copy--something I am not prone to do. It took half a year, but when I finally got around to reading it, it was exactly what I expected: a gentle, witty tale of a country bumpkin's move to London to work for his great-uncle's newspaper. There are a boatload of supporting characters who are all utterly believable, with their own quirks and entertaining agendas. One small criticism is the silliness of character names, which slightly detracts from the overall assuredness of the writing. There is a lot going on, but it all resolves more or less satisfactorily, as is the norm in fish-out-of-water stories of this ilk. The one area that could have used a bit more attention was the history of the hero's grandfather. A promising debut.

I was excited to read a book that was a historical-modern-Italian-art book, but it took me a while to get through the book. There seemed to be many unnecessary characters and a lot of vamped up importance of things that you never really find out much about. I thought that it could have been much better, but I gave it 3 stars because it is a story that had a lot of potential.

in fact, it was pretty boring. Sure, there were metaphors, but the characters were boring, and it was hard to care about what happened to them. And what was up with the wolf??? And why did Fabio and Paolo create the "miracles"? What happened to the mute woman after she left the courthouse?? If you really want to read this, get it at the library....don't waste your money.

This book got such high reviews from everyone else, that I was really excited to read it. Was I ever disappointed. The book moves so slowly, I was forced to go to the end to find out what was happening before I was bored to death. If you don't want a quickly moving story with interesting characters, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, I would pass it up. Dull! Dull! Dull!

I'm a lifeguard so all I do is read for nine hours. The nine other books I've read so far have taken me less then a day and a half to read. This one took me 3 days to finish. It was boring. I never really cared about any of the characters or what happened to them. The only reason I kept reading it was the fact that I had nothing else to do or read.

An interesting plot combining bits of WWII outrages with what is happening in nineties' Urbino. The tale twists and weaves a lot due to a mulitude of characters introduced. Many of the characters are implausible and the book has to contrive various unconvincing vignettes around them to knit them into the story. My general reaction was that the reader was introduced to too many points of view which weren't prioritised and as the book draws to a conclusion I began asking myself who cares? Also there is an annoying habit throughout of introducing the criminals in short conversatiosn without their identifying names. They usually hint at violence to come, but at the end of the book I wondered why they were there at all, since their roles are both thin and thinly described. I agree entirely with the reviewers who wrote that the book took too long to read. It is not a page turner.

Freeman wraps up a long history (30 years, I believe) as a neurophysiologist with a good general overview of some interesting information and philosophy. The book starts with a general overview of the brain, using a salamander's brain structure as the building block from which to start the discussion.

Freeman's main area of study revolves around the olfactory sense which is not a very common area within the "mainstream" of currently in-vogue neural work. This might explain why his views are rather different from many of his colleagues as well as those who stand on the "edge" of the whole mind-brain debate such as the Churchlands and Dennett.

Freeman details how we usually represent problems in a linear fashion and how this type of philosophy is not at all appropriate for the study of the nervous system. Freeman does a great job of delving into circular causality (feedback systems) and why this naturally leads to some interesting conclusions about the interrelationship of the brain and mind.

Freeman refers to himself as a "pragmatist" in the book although I found this to be a bit confusing based on some of his views. He is clear that he is not a materialist (like the Churchlands and Searle) but also not a dualist (such as Penrose and Chalmers) but I think he should have gone a further step and really stepped outside of the constraint of calling himself a "pragmatist".

He has some good and easy-to-digest information about chaotic systems and how they tend to seek islands of stability (that is, there is emergent order in a sea of unpredictability) but he never really gets down to the nitty and gritty of tackling how the physical realm ultimately manages to link causally to the mental. Tallis' book has some better leads on this "problem" and it would be interesting if these two and Austin ("Zen and the Brain") could get together to discuss some ideas.

All in all a pretty good read that won't hurt anyone who doesn't have a background in science. But we have a long way to go understanding the "hard problem" still...

In this book, Prof. Freeman is trying to resolve a very difficult problem : if my brain operates as mechanically as a car, then how can I be free to make choices and be responsible for my decisions ? He makes a detail ( lengthy ) presentation on his proposed solution. Unfortunately, after reading the whole book, I think he fails to provide a clear answer to the question.

His main idea is that there is an important difference between human brain and other substances in the universe such as a car. The brain is a complicated nonlinear system and capable of self-organization. It does not respond directly to incoming stimuli like a reflex action, but it is continuously changing and constructing its own neural activity patterns in order to adapt to and synchronize with the external stimuli. The active involvement of the brain can be seen from the fact that we won't interpret the world as moving backward when we know we are walking on a street. This self-awareness and the real-time interactions between the brain and the environment form what he called the circular causality. He concludes that a behaviour comes from the final decision of the brain itself who therefore bears the responsibility.

However, I find that what he is talking about is how the brain works ( yes, the title of the book is correct ), but it doesn't follow that the nature+nurture determinism is wrong. Of course our decision depends on our history ( memory and experience ), but we should ask what then the history depends on ? Genetic makeup and continuous stimuli from environment are the only factors or sources that cause people different from each other, while chaos and self-organization are just the mechanism within ( the laws of nonlinear dynamics are universal ). As a result I consider his circular causality as a misleading myth, at least he has ignored the initial condition : genes.

Although I disagree with Prof. Freeman's idea, I respect him as the greatest neuroscientist in our times. Readers can find more of his information from his website at U C Berkeley...

This is one of several books in the last couple of years written by leading neuroscientists attempting to explain consciousness. Outstanding examples are Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens" and Edelman and Tononi's "A Universe of Consciousness," which are both very worthwhile reading. Freeman takes a different tack, based on his years of research into the olfactory system. Though this short book appears to be aimed at the educated layman, many will be stopped short in their tracks by his "ten building blocks" of "how neural populations sustain the chaotic dynamics of intentionality," such as the ever-popular #8, "Attenuation of microscopic sensory-driven activity and enhancement of mesoscopic amplitude modulation patterns by divergent-convergent cortical projections underlying solipsm." These ten statements form the core of the book, and although they are ultimately explained with some degree of clarity, I found myself wishing for more specific examples from the neuroscientific literature beyond the very limited samples provided, which tended to be either very basic circuit diagram type drawings, or taken from his work in the olfactory system. I did find the application of chaos theory to brain dynamics fascinating, though for a critique of Freeman's approach and an alternative view see the article by Laurent et al in the 2001 Annual Review of Neuroscience. Overall, though, I found the book a stimulating and interesting read.

This book, although clearly on a very interesting subject, is extremely difficult to read. It is not organized in clear chapters, the writing more like streams of consciousness than organized thought. Very disappointed.

I found this short little book to be wordy, murky and unclear. No one knows how thought/meaning is conveyed in the brain. Freeman suggests that chaos, transistions, and repeating patterns have something to do with memory, learning and meaning, and that context is important, but so what. Those ideas have been suggested before, and I didn't find any highly compelling new arguments, either theoretical or experimental, in support for how or why these particular ideas should be correct. There are some interesting tidbits here and there when he explains some experiments in the field.

I was at the Architectural Association with Nicholson in the early 70s. He was a privileged child then and judging from his absurd book is still a child now. We studied with Sue Rogers (wife of Richard Rogers) who fawned over Nicholson and organized all sorts of fancy introductions for him. In the UK privilege begets privilege. It was rumoured that he was the grandson of the famous British painter, Ben Nicholson.

What struck one about Nicholson was how amazingly stupid he was: entry into the AA was pretty competitive so Ben stuck out like a sore thumb as someone with limited intellectual abilities (though a very plummy pompous accent). As I said the British are suckers for prestigious connections and Ben had them via the purported grandfather. So he sailed into the AA and was lauded for his designs - I mean the grandson of "Ben Nicholson" must have talent so the buzz went.

So armed with these memories I approached his book thinking "here was a man well into middle age. Let's see how he has intellectually evolved and matured".

Sad to say not at all. He follows the corny extreme left wing position of blaming the US for the world's ills. Though I am not an American I am astonished at how insulting the book is to America and Americans complete with the naive believe that all people (except Americans) are good people only wanting to get a share of the cake.

Clearly he hates America and clearly the cutesy solution he proposed in not viable. For example, extreme kindness in Arabic society is taken as fear and weakness. Just the message to send after 9/11, hey Ben

The book fails to notice the delicious irony that only in the US (and a few other Western countries) would he be allowed to spout the insulting drivel while living in the country being insulted.

No doubt Mr Nicholson has tenure at the IIT and for all his spite towards the US will certainly not follow his convictions by leaving the cozy teaching establishment and the US.

I guess Ben and his silly book demonstrates the old adage, "those who can do, those who can't teach". My condolences to his students.

This book is really a work of speculative fiction which depicts a close parallel universe, branching off from 9/11, where the Bush administration really actively begins the business of world-building in the most conscious, constructive and peaceable way imaginable. While this is of course a fantasy it is certainly explored with such good intentions that we are drawn in from the start. Some of the chapters are a little disconnected and the overall writing is kind of dry but the author's breezily optimistic approach to global re-engineering pretty much wins you over.

This incredibly interesting man, who owns the single largest collection of bread clips in the world, was my professor. Please I hope you recognized my sarcasm for such outrageous excuse for an educator. I remember Nicholson's lecture on Ash Wednesday of 2003, where he showed an image of a sculptor creating a statue of Jesus and happened to be "working on" our Lord's genitals. If you want to read a book by this atheistic ignoramus, then be my guest. As for me, I would sleep better if he was fired from his over-paying job at The Illinois Institute of Technology, knowing he no longer has the power to warp the minds of young architects. And Benny, if you hate this country so much, then take your cardigans and stained teeth back to Britain.

The 9/11 commission blamed the terrorist attacks on our "Failure of Imagination." The kind of imagination that they were referring to was one which could anticipate horrific acts against Americans.

The dismal results of our recent election indicate that we have successfully learned to imagine the worst, and expect leaders who will exploit that fear in the most cynical possible ways.

Ben Nicholson has no failure of imagination. But his imagination is positive, constructive and frequently brilliant. His training as an architect allows him to evaluate a broad array of International issues, and to generate creative and usually unexpected insights into ways of re-imagining solutions.

If you despair over America's response to the world since 9/11, this book will serve as a useful antidote, showing what is possible with a healthy imagination.

This book takes a fresh and zany look at the world's all-to-familiar, intractable problems. The author goes after these problems by proposing detailed solutions that range from the clever to the bizarre. Though none of these solutions is practical, many are insightful and thought provoking, while others are just deliciously sarcastic. The author leads the reader down a serpentine, quasilogical path, that is a delight to follow. I thought the book was thoroughly enjoyable.