Travis Books

Cow pastures are worth $10 million dollars. At least they are in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Neighboring Atlanta is outgrowing her boundaries and developers are offering top dollar for the farm lands and forests of what was once considered podunk backwater. At 97 years old, Grandma Sims, the humble-living grand matriarch of the Sims clan finds herself sitting on the most valuable piece of real estate in the county. But Grandma Sims doesn't want to sell.

A kitchen fire forces amateur detective, Sheila Travis, to impose on the Sims family hospitality. When the big news is announced during a family gathering another conflagration is ignited. Hopes alight and differences of opinion blaze. Some envision a windfall that will bail them out of private financial troubles. Others have big plans for the farm itself, if only Grandma Sims would let them work the land.

By everyone's reckoning, whether dreams of wealth, or ambitions of rebuilding the family farm to its former glory and more, only one person stands in your way;Grandma Sims. Yet, one by one, members of the Sims family are murdered, and not a hair is harmed on the old lady's head. Follow the money they always say, but is the glitter of all that gold blinding us to the killer's true motive? Go along with Travis as she reluctantly investigates, tearing her way through a briarpatch of complex family alliances and animosities in this enjoyable, perfect for bedtime reading, murder mystery.

Sheila Travis is an amateur detective who has to rank as one of the most reluctant sleuths in fictional history. Already well-known in Peachtree Corners near Atlanta because of her exploits in a previous case, Sheila gets involved in another caper in Snellville. Sheila is not a strong protagonist. She is just one of the crowd spending a lot of time talking with suspects and witnesses. Sheila is Miss Marple without the same energy and sparkle. The plot is difficult to follow. The dialogue is often boring and trivial but the ending proves to be a mild surprise.

Not so long ago, the thought of running a corporate PBX on a client/server network was unthinkable, almost ludicrous. Now many companies have a VoIP (Voice Over IP) PBX via their Cisco routers. Some organizations have separate VON (Voice Over Network) systems. While the benefits of convergence are many, their security implications are often ignored or, when they are considered, are addressed too far along into the development process.

That convergence is the focus of Voice and Data Security. About a third of the book addresses the fundamentals of voice and data security, covering topics such as cryptography, sniffing, and spoofing. The rest of the book deals with securing digital and voice assets.

As an example, PBX and mail fraud are huge problems facing corporate America. Yet while most companies are aware of the situation, many organizations don't do all they can to secure their voice systems. This book contains an excellent policy and audit checklist on how to set up a corporate PBX policy. Items such as protection management, standards and procedures, technical safeguards, and incident response are discussed in the checklist, which alone is worth the cost of the book.

A single unauthorized modem in a corporate network will undermine firewalls, cryptography, and all other protection mechanisms. Thus, the authors cover how war dialers and telephone line scanners can be used to ensure that the back doors that unauthorized corporate modems create are closed.

Voice and Data Security is valuable to those needing a good introduction to the core ideas and security repercussions involved with the convergence of voice and data systems. It speaks volumes.

I am a senior engineer for network security operations. I read "Voice and Data Security" (VaDS) to learn more about vulnerabilities in the voice world. A search for "voice security" here yields four results, of which VaDS is the only in-print title. Although I would have preferred VaDS to focus solely on voice security issues, I still recommend it as the only modern published reference for this critical topic.

When reading VaDS, it's important to remember that all of the authors have some sort of relationship with San Antonio-based voice security company SecureLogix. That's ok, as Foundstone is the powerhouse behind the successful "Hacking Exposed" book series. Some parts of the book read like commercials for SecureLogix products like TeleSweep and TeleWall, but the authors largely focus on non-proprietary solutions to voice security.

VaDS is strongest when it speaks solely to voice security issues, and, to a lesser degree, network infrastructure. I learned quite a bit about tapping phones (ch. 11), voice mail abuse (ch. 14), and voice-data convergence (ch. 5). Chapters on broadband infrastructure and exploitation were helpful. Even though the final chapter seemed out of place, its intriguing coverage of cyber law kept my attention.

Less helpful were the chapters covering general security issues, such as cryptography (ch. 18), malware (ch. 19), sniffing (ch. 20), scanning (ch. 21), passwords (ch. 22), firewalls (ch. 23), IDS (ch. 24), and denial of service (ch. 26). This material is so well-covered elsewhere that its appearance did little to help VaDS distinguish itself. Chapter 27 was an exception, with its succinct discussions of popular Microsoft IIS web server vulnerabilities.

Aside from including well-worn material, VaDS suffered slightly from a few technical mistakes. Explanations of buffer overflows in chapter 4 needlessly associated them with TCP-based sessions. UDP-based buffer overflows are exploited regularly. The author of this chapter also seems to believe that buffer overflows are a problem because they overwrite "user ID and privilege information" on the stack. That's rarely the case; subverting return pointers is the problem. Chapters 8 and 15, describing voice protocols like H.323, were difficult to understand, and ch. 18 (p. 283) makes an unsubstantiated claim that "a well-known Mid-East terrorist was discovered to be using steganography." Typos on pp. 155-156 appeared, and port 443 was replaced by 444 on p. 69.

Overall, VaDS marks a welcome contribution to the information security community. I plan to include it in my tier two security analyst reading list, with recommendations to concentrate on its voice-related content. Hopefully the second edition will strip out the unnecessary network security coverage found elsewhere, and include more excellent explanations of voice security issues.

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

I had to purchase this for a class in my rn to bsn program. The book did succeed in helping me to think about my health and wellness in a more holistic fashion, but a lot of the questions/statements were a bit odd and overly reflective of the authors' personal opinions. the booklet gives the impression that it was authored by a flower child.

Dr. Travis gave us the term wellness and this new book challenges us to re-look at our wellness journey. As a wellness coach at a large hospital system I am always looking for new ways to challenge individuals to get involved or to re-involve individuals with what's really important in life.

Travis and his wellness wheel concept has been challenging us for years and this book again delivers on that promise. Many of my clients have stopped really living and are going through each day and the routines that now define their path. Travis has helped me pull clients from the daily "rat wheel" through use os his wellness wheel and back on the wellness journey we call life.

William B. Baun, EPD, FAWHP

The story was decent but I couldn't get through it. It seems every time the author got a chance he would put in a completely unnecessary sex scene. Now I'm no prude, but zombies and porn don't mix. I love BBQ sauce and chocolate ice cream but I don't ever mix the two. A better title for this book might be, "Dawn of the Head", or "69 Days Later". RIDICULOUS.

I don't personally know Mr. Ibarra, but I think after reading this book, one gets a pretty good idea of what he's like.

1) He HATES America...well, the government anyway. Apparently, he thinks this great country is run by people and institutions whose sanities are literally hanging by a thread, just waiting for an excuse to come completely unhinged and go around imprisoning its citizens, while murdering and raping at any opportunity. The Zombie Apocalypse provides that very opportunity here.

2) As a teacher, it is his biggest fantasy to have sex multiple times with one or more of his colleagues.

3) He dreams of being a super-hero in the apocalypse, a man of few words, willing to fight or kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.

There's more, but you get the idea. George, the protagonist of the story, is the author.
So, we get an inside look into the mind of Mr. Ibarra.

Honestly, some of the story is good...but I actually find it easier to find things I don't like.
I mean, come on...if there was a plague of any kind here in America, the author believes that our military and government would literally become a Nazi regime. FEMA camps are nothing more than recreations of Nazi internment camps, where peoples' wills are beaten down, soldiers kill indiscriminately, and choose women to rape...even young girls.
The author literally beats the reader about the brain with very clear, anti-government conspiracy theories. The book is filled with them...not just from the FEMA camp situation, but even minor characters' conversations.
It's a bit too much.
And George...he can do anything. He can have sex multiple times with gorgeous women. Even with chaos and death all around him, he knows how to please a woman.
He can fight, he can murder police officers at the very beginning of the outbreak just to get to a memento of his lost love!
That's right...didn't I mention through most of the book, he is mourning the loss of a woman he loves, all while bedding as many women as he can, because he LOVED HER.
Wow...what a noble guy!

The only part of the entire story that I actually thought was clever, was the ending. After everything George goes through, it is an interesting way to wrap up the tale.

The author clearly has issues with the government...possibly reinforced by the situation with Hurricane Katrina, or Waco, TX.
Unfortunately, the book almost seems like an excuse to lure people to his deranged beliefs.
As another person said in their review on this site, I would NOT want this man teaching my children.

If I could give this book less than 1 star, I would. Not good zombie fiction, or any fiction for that matter. I would not recommend wasting your time with this title.

The book started off well, but quickly went downhill. While the writing itself isn't bad, the behavior of the people in the book is simply too unbelievable. Certain parts reminded me of the plot a a cheap porno. Example: while hordes of zombies are literally on the other side of the wall, and could break in at any time, the main character has sex multiple times with a colleague (who was grading papers in the middle of the apocalypse) in various different rooms of a school. Perhaps a bit unrealistic? The ruthlessness of the common American soldier is also unrealistic. They are portrayed as mindless killers who blindly follow the orders of the government to kill all people who refuse to go to a FEMA camp. Members of the military are our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends and relatives. Do you really think they would go around killing helpless Americans simply because they were told to? The ATF would (and has), but as a member of the US military, I can tell you that most of us are normal people who would never obey an order to fire on unarmed Americans. Basically, the characters in this book are just too two dimensional and ruin what could be a good story.

Didn't really care for this book, felt short and low class. This book will sell at any trailer park gift shop.

The cover art of a Shuttle blowing up is emblematic of this self-destroying novel, which fails miserably. Science fiction, unlike fantasy, is supposed to show the real world plus some hypothetical technology. It's not the real world if centuries of futuristic technology are developed and fielded in weeks, with no hitches, no glitches, no setbacks, everything utterly easy. Warp drive at any speed, superbombs, and antigravity are all discovered by a few flashes of our hero's genius. This is childish wish-fulfillment, not a story. It's fundamental problem is its premise of extracting energy from vacuum fluctuations, which is impossible by the very nature of said fluctuations, otherwise there'd be no conservation of energy and our universe would burst, just as this silly novel does. How did I ever make myself read the entire cringe-inducing mess?

Worse yet is the pointless and silly war with China, with megadeath explosions that in the real world would end civilization through massive impact-winter famines. In the story the aftermath a mere stage prop, a trivial background scenario while our heroes build a moon base. The least the protagonists could do is discover yet another Cosmic Free Lunch, to feed the world they helped ravage. While you're at it don't forget to have them cure all disease, including old age. That should only take ten more pages, along with AI nanotech that rebuilds the world and returns all the dead to life.

My greatest pity is for all the poor trees cut down to print this dreck.

Here is the story in short...a brilliant scientist ,in the face of eminent danger,creates technology that saves the world. The Doctor is Anson Clemons. The world is Earth. The rest is pure ego.

The main character in this book would give Dr. Wayne Dyer an inferiority complex. Not only is he a maritial arts expert, chick magnet,the next Einstein...but he has the ability to let you know he is smarter than you.

NOw I know this is a fictional character. I know the author is a nice guy but what gives him the right to call Dr. Carl Sagan an "idiot" and a "junk scientist?" Thank goodness for the leadership Sagan showed in the scientific community and the great gift of communication he had with the public. He also was modest.

The characters in this book are supposed to resemble Robert Heinleins characters but it just get unbelievable when "Superman" Clemons,who distains the medical profession,fabricates a nano tech "cure" for a co- worker with no prior knowledge of medicine. This reminded me of the Superman comic book where Superman was called upon to operate on Lois Lane to save her but had to take a one day crash course in Medicine and Pass the medical board and get his MD so he could legally operate on her in a hospital. This guy can do anything.

Now i know I have not written a sci-fi novel or anything else,but i have read a lot of them. What i enjoy in a novel is new ideas and situations but the characters bringing this forth on the page have to be less self centered than these characters for me to care what they are doing. The scientific theory and reference to actual research being done is interesting. But the ongoing assumption of Dr Taylors work is that any alien contact will be hostile, any technolgy developed will be used for war by the communists or terrorists or anyone else that is not an
American. Basically ,just kill everyone but the true americans and let God sort it out.

Maybe if your world view is as paranoid as this book, you would enjoy it...mine is not.

Have to disagree on several points. I think it's very entertaining, and well written. The science is much more probable than most science fiction. He does get a bit preachy, but does a much better job (IMHO) than Heinlein at justifying his opinions (and as an engineer regarding doctors, I agreed with him nearly 100%). Regarding the south (insert tongue firmly in cheek): You know Florida is not really part of the South *grin*. But seriously, gun ownership is much higher, the accents tend to be much more prevalent and much more colorful than in the rest of the nation, and ... where gun ownership is higher, violent crime is lower, especially in most parts of Florida (not counting little Cuba) where the rate of concealed carry is high enough to act as a real deterrent.

I agree about the hero, but again, I see it differently. I see him as confident (to the point of arrogance) but the story provides more than entertainment, it provides hope. Most science fiction that even pretends to be talking about the near future is VERY pessimistic. This is VERY optimistic, and delightfully so, despite the authors near militant anti-faith diatribes. He uplifts through his writing, and I found it VERY entertaining and educational.

This book starts out engagingly enough. We have a very opinionated first person narrator who is appealing even when I disagreed with his opinions. I have no problem with the initial hand-wavy science, but some of the basic plot elements don't work for me. First, there is no clear motive, or even a real guess at one by the characters as to why China took the actions it did. Second, the female lead is put in charge of funneling funds to the man who has become her lover, and this is before any emergency: talk about conflict of interest and questionable use of tax dollars. Third the narrator, the President, and apparently everyone else who counts approves the decision that WWIII will forever be kept secret from the American public. Excuse me? WWWIII will be kept secret? There's a good idea! No way that could ever leak! The actual fighting of the war wanders everywhere too. While the cast should be focused like a laser beam on the war, we get long tech-babble filled digressions about colonizing the moon. Finally, the story ended about 20 pages after the climax. After the war is won, we get more tecno-babble pages about exploring the moon and the solar system (while the characters are apparently given free rein to do anything they please with technology so dangerous that the American public must never know about it..) I get the homage to Doc Smith, but Smith plots never wandered, and he generally knew when to end a book.

By the time I finished reading Warp Speed and its sequel, The Quantum connection, plus Von Neumann's War (with John Ringo), Into The Looking Glass and The Vorpal Blade (with John Ringo), I had experienced the most enjoyable and exciting science fiction binge in many years. I have read a great deal of science fiction over the last fifty some odd years, as well as having written a fair number of science fiction novels myself. I simply do not understand anyone giving Travis S. Taylor's books, either his single author titles or his collaborations, less than four stars at the very least and all except possibly The Vorpal Blade (four stars) should have five stars. Shucks, even my wife, who normally prefers British murder mysteries loved all these books. I would absolutely love to see more science fiction novels as good as these. Warp Speed actually should rate six stars if I was allowed to rate it that high. Darrell Bain.

I could not find useful information in this book. It is not good neither for beginners nor for advanced users.

If you want to learn about Biztalk or XML or SOAP buy another book.

Being new to XML, I learned quite a bit about xml and xsl from this book. Biztalk is basically an xml/xsl processing rule engine, so this background information was useful and appropriate. Once I finished the XML background chapters, the book rapidly spiralled downward. Most of the examples are actually web programming examples using this unpopular scripting language called 'Omnimark'. The section on Biztalk had very very little information in it. 'Professional Biztalk', though a little deep, is a much better book. This book should have been titled 'XML and Omnimark Programming with almost NO Biztalk'.

I bought this book with high hopes (The author makes references to Ayn Rand after all) The book is very limited in its discussion of BizTalk and it is a very cursory verbose overview with very little substance. The author continually makes extranious references and fails on numerous occasions to define his terms. Someone needs to write a decent book.

I've had this book for a while and I can say that MS changed a lot of staff in their latest release. If you get this book you won't find many things the book talks about. My recommendation is to get Professional BizTalk by WROX(10 stars out of 5) and BizTalk Documented by Microsoft Press(8 stars out of 5)

My expectations weren't high and it still didn't meet them. This is such a bad book on so many levels.

Will I ever finnish this tedious tome? An excess of ego and pointless information. Ruth Reichel's exsquiste "Comfort Me with Apples" benefitted from a genius of editing, I longed for more. With Insatiable I want less. Ms. Greene sometimes writes about food as if it were ad copy.

I had to laugh when she wonders after her second one night stand with Clint Eastwood "I wondered if there could have been something more beyond the hotel room that night"....

I would urge anyone interested in food writing and personalities worth spending time with to read all three of Ruth Reichel's memiors, any of MFK Fisher, and Amanda Hesser's "Cooking for Mr. Latte". A rewarding read awaits you.

Whoa, this badly written, unsexy epic could have used some serious editing. I'm surprised, since I've enjoyed GG's witty reviews, but there's hardly an amusing line in this tome, which mostly chronicles Greene's narcissistic pursuit of celebs to wine, dine, and bed her. Talk about TMI! You'll come away from these pages feeling like you've eaten mediocre swill at an overrated restaurant; Greene evidently had all the depth of a finger bowl. I agree with others that Reichl's memoirs -- not to mention Fisher's and Child's -- are far, far better reads.

I was so looking forward to another food critic's life story like Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphire - one of the best books I have ever read.

I was seriously dissappointed. I realize that at the time Greene became a food critic, critics were well known by the restauranteurs and treated like Queens with special menus the rest of the people dining did not ever see, but I had no idea how bad it was. To think everyones opinion was determined by a few egotistical food critics in New York who never ate the way the rest of the people did is disgusting. Couple this with her flamboyant use of her magazines money to pay for all her meals (and her lovers meals) and you can't find a reason to enjoy the true life of Gael Greene.

Frankly, for me, her little splurge with a porn star was the most interesting part of the book, but then she would move on to sleep with the very chefs she was reviewing.

Halfway through the book it became a real snore with very little mention of food - which is why a foodie would buy such a book. Instead it was one celebrity name after another, one bit of gossip after another and list after list of names of chefs and all their restaurants and if they made it or not. It was more one long dull gossip column than a book.

THERE IS GOOD SCHMUTZ AND BAD SCHMUTZ. THIS BOOK IS EITHER FICTIONAL, OR BAD SCHMUTZ. THERE ARE GLARING ERRORS TO BOOT. CONTRARY TO THE AUTHOR'S HUGE MISTAKE, THE WIDOW OF THE FAMOUS RESTAURATEUR HENRI SOULE WAS UNSUCCESSFUL IN ALL OF HER LAWSUITS TO GET PART OF HIS ESTATE. AND WHY WOULD THE AUTHOR INCESSANTLY REFER TO SOULE'S LIFE PARTNER, MRS SPALTER, AS HIS "MISTRESS", OVER AND OVER? THIS ELDERLY COUPLE SHARED THEIR LIFE AND WORK 24 HOURS A DAY EVERY YEAR. ONE REFERENCE WAS BAD ENOUGH, WHY HAMMER IT OVER AND OVER?

AND THE WORD IS NOT "MATERIZED", IT IS "MADERIZED", THAT IS, WINE THAT IS OXIDIZED DUE HEAT AND TURNED CARMEL COLORED. EVERYONE WHO DRINKS OR READS ABOUT WINES KNOWS THAT.

THE CONCENSUS OF ALL REVIEWS TO DATE ALL ECHO THE SAME BASIC SUMMARY, THIS IS SCHMUTZY WITHOUT BEING FUN.

Liked the first one a lot, because it was a romp. This one was just a ramble. Reminded me of the drunken-walk approach to writing - you get to the end but it did not matter how you got there [what plot events happened on the way].

Travis S. Taylor's QUANTUM CONNECTION provides a sequel to WARP SPEED and is a recommended pick for prior fans. Steven is a computer whiz in college when a swarm of huge meteors falls across the world, killing his friends and family. A new world is created - and Steven becomes privy to the information that this new order also includes a new war.

Doc Taylor's second novel, "The Quantum Connection" follows on in the same world created by Taylor in "Warp Speed". This time however, the novel doesn't center around Dr. Clemons and his associates, instead Taylor introduces the reader to Steven Montana, a character who's life was profoundly changed by the events in the first book although we never new he existed in the first story.

Taylor shows Steven as a very human character. He's a computer geek who finds that his whole family and all his friends have died as a result of a rain of meteors that killed millions around the world (readers of "Warp Speed" know the real story there). The first third of the book follows Steven's ups and downs as he deals with this, with life and finally with a great opportunity to work for a government think tank reverse engineering foreign and sometimes possibly alien technologies.

The relationship between Steven and his dog, Lazarus, is one of the most interesting and touching parts of this novel. There are two kinds of dog owners in the world, ones for whom the dog becomes one of the family, and those for whom the dog is just another possession. Lazarus becomes Steven's only family, and a stabilizing force for him as he deals with erratic mood swings that the doctors tell him are part of dealing with his tremendous loss. Taylor's story uses the relationship between Steven and Lazarus as an underlying influence that helps guide Steven's actions and it allows the reader to understand his actions when tragedy does strike.

Of course at this point the novel sounds more like "Old Yeller" than a sci-fi action story, but the build up of Steven's relationship with Lazarus is important to this story. Taylor blends this element neatly into the plot right along with the aliens, super-technology, action and adventure that the book's cover art suggests. The move into the "meat" of the story is actually quite sudden as the book shifts gears radically with the introduction of the before mentioned aliens and more advanced technology. This also leads to Steven's introduction to Tatiana, a young daughter of a Russian diplomat to the U.N. who is in almost the same situation. Their relationship provides the impetus for emotional growth that all the high-tech cannot.

As has become a trademark with Taylor's work, the technology becomes a driving force in the story. Unlike "Warp Speed" which focused on the possibilities of faster than light travel, the technical focus in "The Quantum Connection" is nano-technology and the theory of the quantum connection (hence the title of the book) between all things. Taylor brings the reader into these concepts through Steven's own process of discovery and as the human's understanding of the alien technology expands, so does the reader's understanding of the underlying concepts behind it.

I'm not big on giving away a lot of the story, you should read the book for that! But I will say that some of the most interesting scenes in the book involve the interaction between Steven and Tatiana and the principle characters from "Warp Speed" as the desire to protect Earth from an alien threat brings them together. The initial meeting is fraught with misunderstanding since Steven and Tatiana are using alien technology and another high speed battle ensues that lays waste to a good portion of Earth's moon base before it is all resolved.

Taylor's blend of imaginative characters, technology, and an optimistic view of humanity's potential make for a very good read. There is plenty of action and suspense to keep you turning the pages, but in the end the thing that makes "The Quantum Connection" stand out is not the science (and oddly enough, I do feel smarter for having read the book), it's not the action and adventure; it's the story of Steven and his dog Lazarus. Many times it is the simplest things that have the most profound affects on a person and in this case one could say that it was a man's love for his dog that saved the world. I recommend you check out "The Quantum Connection" for yourself and see what I mean.

Of course it is just comic-book mind candy. But it does so very well.
Hope there is no sequel? Then why is super-bad-guy Lex Luther (excuse me, Opolawn) not destroyed, but only isolated for a while?

I read this one without reading Warp Speed. I was about 100 pages into it and suddenly laughed out loud. This IS a great revival of the EE Smith genre. I say that as one who started reading SF when the mag covers were always a scanty clad human female in the grip of a BEM. I have not actually read Doc Smith in at least 40 years.

Lots of psudo-science lectures interspersed with comic-book super-hero action. Of course the superhero begins as a fat, depressed nerd stranded in delayed adolesence. Once he learns how to say SHAZAM! (communicate with the alien computer) all with be made right, including a set of six-pack abs. This too is a part of the proto-story.

While from a certain perspective this novel makes for good brains-on-vacation reading, I have to express disappointment that Taylor doesn't explain how the super-technologically advanced aliens he imagined never understood the full potentials of the stuff they invented, apparently centuries or millennia ago, whereas his slacker human hero, the smart but not genius-level Steven Montana, could grasp them in short order. I would have found it helpful if a character conjectured something along the lines that technological species don't necessarily develop universally competent intelligence, but instead display differing abilities based on the problems they had to solve in their respective evolutionary histories. They can seem really smart in some areas and dumb in other areas, in other words. Otherwise how do you account for the fact that the Grey aliens didn't have firewalls against hackers and don't go around with AI-augmented and nanotech-hardened bodies?

The leader of the other advanced alien species could at least put up a real fight in bodily combat against enhanced humans, but Montana admits that the rumble resembled the comic-book battle between Superman and Doomsday. It just solves way too many problems for humanity when the upgraded Montana and his Russian girlfriend show up on the moon base and turn some of the characters from Taylor's previous novel, "Warp Speed," into Green Lantern-like superheroes, with the added bonus that they no longer experience aging.

I would also add that I didn't care for the vengeance fantasies in both novels. Taylor apparently suffers from the white Southerner's irrational touchiness about "honor," and he feels the need to have his characters take out his anger on both evil foreigners and meddling aliens.

This was about my 13th McGee novel and it was a disappointment. I'm hip to the Trav legacy, and aware that the author's condescension toward women, rock music and men with long hair was part of the McDonald DNA (sign of the times, probably). But this book just has too much of that. The villain's level of sadism is over the top and we are treated to a particularly vicious drowning murder of a woman. The land development scheme is baffling Trav accomplishes a physical feat in the ocean that is flat impossible and his rescue is an outrageous coincidence. Finally, the villain's comeuppance is out of a James Bond novel. Be warned.

Still, I'll probably get around to more McGee adventures. BTW, ever notice these common traits shared by McGee women: They're in glowing health, when they sit on a couch they tuck their legs under, when they concentrate they put the tip of their tongue in the corner of their mouth, when they eat they lick their fingers, when they sleep they snore softly and they yawn a lot. Man, do they yawn.

As to men, if they're fat and pale -- can't be trusted. If they're fat and hairy (like Meyer) -- salt of the earth.

A Tan and Sandy Silence is certainly not the best book John D. MacDonald ever authored. In fact, some may find it way too dark and unsettingly disturbing. Others may object to it for a host of very legitimate reasons. But I daresay that even those readers who find themselves hating this Travis McGee novel still will have to admit it is a substantive, unforgettable read.
The unevenly paced narrative revolves around McGee's efforts to locate Mary Broll, a former lover whom no one seems to have seen in over three months. His search takes him to the tropical island of Grenada where the case takes on an entirely different trajectory. As others have already accurately pointed out, the novel starts off slow, climaxes with some very macabre events and has somewhat of a rushed ending. Along the way, the reader is treated to large helpings of Travis McGee's introspection on a wide range of topics having to do with modern life. After a while, this inner monologue, though at times clever, becomes tiresome and gives the impression of too much self-indulgence on author MacDonald's part.
Other objectionable aspects of this book include its incorporation of an excessive amount of amateur psychology into the plot and the fact that McGee never, ever fails to completely captivate members of the opposite sex.
The positive attributes of this book would have to include MacDonald's very evocative and original brand of prose and the presence of a number of characters who come off as quite believable.
John D. MacDonald was unquestionably a great writer, but A Tan and Sandy Silence is one of his lesser works. He was capable of much better.

I do not wish to write a review that says too much, spoiling it for a future reader. I just wanted to say that this one was a disappointment for me. This one was predictable, had Travis doing things that unpleasantly surprised me, and the ending was something cheap and quick. I never felt like I was "there" with him as I have in other books.

As far as being a tired effort from the end of MacDonald's career, "The Lonely Silver Rain" was written in 1985 and was much better in my mind. I would just save "A Tan and Sandy Silence" for later or last. Go through the ones that are just gold first.

A colleague of mine left this book on my desk one day. Reading it made me wish he had left the hardbound version, since that way it would have hurt more when I threw it back at him!

It's a detective story, you see, featuring the inimitable Travis McGee, the beach bum cum gumshoe who appears in over a dozen MacDonald outings.

What can I say about this book? In one stroke, MacDonald has managed to outstrip Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Joyce, making them all look like mewling infants.

Here's just a sample of MacDonald's deathless prose:

"And I suppose you had an affair with her."
"Gee, honey. I'd have to look it up."
I caught her fist about five inches from my eye. "You bahstid," she said. [p. 32]

Of course, MacDonald cannot be accused of being a superficial writer! Consider these penetrating philosophical musings:

"I own some Sears electric clippers with plastic gadgets of various shapes which fit on the clippers to keep you from accidentally peeling your hair off down to the sukull. I find that long hair is a damned nuisance on boats, on the beach, and in the water. So when it gets long enough to start to make me aware of it, I clipper it off, doing the sides in the mirror and the back by feel. The sun bleaches my hair and burns it and dries it out. And the salt water makes it feel stiff and look like some kind of Dynel. Were I going to keep it long, I would have to take care of it. That would mean tonics and lotions and special shampoos. That would mean brushing it and combing it a lot more than I do and somehow fastening it out of the way in a stiff breeze." [pp. 123-124]

But perhaps Travis, our hero, is at his most debonair when he's beating the snot out of recalicrant women:

"I smiled at her, pulling her a half-step closer and said, 'If you get loud and say nasty things, dear, if you get on my nerves, I can hold you like this, and I can take this free hand and make a big fist like this, and I can give you one little pop right here that will give you a nose three inches wide and a quarter inch high.'
'Please,' she said in a rusty little voice.
'You can get a job as a clown. Or you can see if you can find a surgeon willing to try to rebuild it.'" [p. 136]

In sum, if you're in the mood for sappy, incoherent, misogynistic, and, well, all-around cruddy fiction, you can't go wrong with the peerless Travis McGee!

(The author, John MacDonald, died in 1986, and therefore -- it tickles me to announce -- will not be inflicting any more of these books on us! God be praised!)

Another Travis McGee book. This one seemed to take forever to get going, to set up the problem, and then as soon as you understood the problem, MacDonald popped you a good one, and the rest of the book was a catch-up from that moment. But that's the simple "mystery" of this McGee novel, and as such is never that special. The attraction of McGee, at least in these later books, are MacDonald's comments within them on the human condition, both specifically with regard to the Quixotish nature of McGee, as well as a general feeling of malaise which centers around money and violence. The McGee novels are as much about philosophy--ethics, particularly--as they are about mystery. Or maybe the point is that the philosophy is the mystery, and as we get to know McGee better, we understand more about his philosophy. I seem to remember the Spenser novels of Robert Parker to be similar to this as well. Are there other mystery series in which the character growth is as important, if not more so, than the particular story of the time?

I have completed beginning and advanced Inventor classes using this book. I have held an A average with very little confusion of how to use the knowledge from this book. It covers all the most necessary topics, detailed enough for me and all of my classmates to master.

The title of the book is misleading and the book is disappointing. It it the other way round. If you want to find out the tricks of using Inventor or to discover the "tops" of Inventor, don't buy this book. It is simply of replica of the help menu found from the application

In my 10+ years as a Certified Autodesk Instructor, I have found that there are two approaches to writing a tutorial manual. First, there's the "just shut up and do it" approach, where you follow instructions, but a lack of reference information to explain what you just did causes you to wonder "O.K., I did it, but what did I do?". Then there's the "Russian novel" approach, where the theory is that if you read a three inch thick book about how to play a Mozart piano concerto, that you will be able to sit down at a piano and play a Mozart piano concerto. To master piano, the golf swing, or a complex software program, you have to use it, not read about it.

"Autodesk Inventor From The Top" strikes an excellent blend of reference information with hands-on practice to provide the reader with a thorough grasp of this powerful design tool. The authors provide an "every item of every menu and dialog box" explanation of the guts of the program. They cover many key topics that are missing from the "official" Autodesk Essentials Courseware, most notably a jaw-droppingly powerful feature called Iparts. In fact, it's surprising how much information they crammed into a book of less than 400 pages. The tutorial exercises are, for the most part, accurate and clearly presented. Particularly useful are the practice exercises at the end of each chapter, which challenge you to use the skills learned in the chapter without detailed instructions. This is where you really learn the program (you have to think!).

A few minor boo-boo's pop up occasionally. For instance, the explanation of the "Defer Update" setting in the Assemblies chapter says the opposite of what it should, the "Shaft" drawing in Tutorial 4.2 is missing from the book's CD, and the drawing for Tutorial 6.4 is already completed (the CD problems may have already been cleared up at the publisher). Also, on a grammatical note, (and I'm nit-picking here) the writing has a lot of passive voice, which tends to detract from the precision and efficiency of the instruction. But these problems are minor compared to the grasp that you will gain of a very powerful and feature-packed design tool from a relatively small investment of time and money.

I regret wasting money on this book. It is even worst than the online help menu

I have worked my way through about 75 percent of this book. I find it to be very helpful for learning to use Inventor from scratch. I was having no luck at all with the tutorial that came on the software CD. This book has taken me to the intermediate level.

I wish there were fewer typos. I wish there were fewer instances of pick sequences being out of order, (work plane referenced to a surface and an axis). I wish the index did not expect the reader to know the Autodesk vernacular. All the above make using the book dificult, but they do not make it useless. I am able to use the software now as a result of studying this book.

It is not a reference, it is a tutorial, and should be studied in sequence. Each chapter expects the student to know and be able to use the information in the previous chapters.