Open Books

This is a small gem for our time. I don't often buy books for my adult kids, but this one is an exception. In more than 30 years of preaching to them, I've never communicated the heart of Christianity so simply, clearly and effectively as Del Brown does here in just a few pages. It belongs with Marcus Borg's "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time" for its path-breaking significance for people seeking a fresh, credible approach to Christian belief and the life-transforming way of Jesus.

As a former fundamentalist Christian I wish that this book had been available to me years ago. Clear and concise as well as informative and thought-provoking, Del Brown's latest book is a must-read for those seeking to understand just what progressive Christianity is all about.

Delving into the historic roots of the Christian tradition he embraces our past and provides compelling reasons as to why the future of the faith needs to be grounded in what came before. We are formed by this tradition that, he says, "can provide insight, hope, and transformation today to the entire human family."

Chapters that talk about "the Bible as our foundational resource" and "the incarnation of God in the entire creation" will transform your perspective of progressive Christianity and give you a new hope for humanity.

"What Does a Progressive Christian Believe" is life-affirming faith-empowering, and truly educational. At the end of each chapter, Brown provides "Points for Reflection," which highlight the main points of the chapter and serve as a launching pad for further study. Adult religious education study groups would benefit greatly from their use.

Indeed, anyone who is interested in learning more about progressive Christianity, it's roots and it's future, should read this book. I highly recommend it.

What Does a Progressive Christian Believe?: A Guide for the Searching, the Open, and the Curious

I can't count the number of meetings I've attended in which people struggle to make sense of the current broadening of the Christian climate. Liberal, conservative, moderate, fundamentalist -- many Christians know more about what they don't believe than what they do.

This book leaps right into the fray and provides some very simple reasons for a Christianity that eschews the worst of the Christian Right, while articulating some problematic assumptions of classic liberal theology.

And while labels often form the least comfort for the perplexed, Del Brown does a masterful job in getting to the heart of a serious and compassionate faith.

I don't doubt that the balanced theology in this book represents the future of major sections of evangelical and mainline Christianity. For example, when dealing with the old theodicy question, Del Brown weaves Process and Open theologies in with the traditional view of God, and uses the concept of incarnation to make a winsome case for an active faith even in the face of terrible human suffering.

If you're "not that kind of Christian," but dubious about "progressive" being anything really new, I recommend this book. It has helped me to grow in my personal faith and grounded me deeper in my Christian ideals.

Dr. Delwin Brown's latest effort, What Does a Progressive Christian Believe? is nothing short of brilliant. Brown offers Christians a third option - one that does not fall into the trappings of religious fundamentalism or religious humanism. This is an excellent introduction for anyone desiring to learn about Progressive Christianity as well as those seeking a better way to follow Jesus of Nazareth in this new post-modern era.

We need this book! It's a terrific corrective to the kind of Christianity that's dominated the airwaves in recent years.

In a brief systematic theology, Brown offers a Christianity that "charts a different course" than liberal or conservative Christianity, a course that embraces the rich diversity of the biblical narrative and the public witness of the church.
In seven points, he retrieves the value of the bible, affirms the presence of God entwined in all of creation, and breathes life into the creeds (imagine that!) He grounds a view of humanity in the Genesis story of co-creation and the twin commandments to love God and others as ourselves.
Love is the key to his treatment of sin, and he give us a refreshing correctives on centuries of bad preaching. Sin he rightly portrays as a failure to love "loving too much or too little any part of the interconnected web of life"; and sin's clever strategy of deception, subtle self-deception gives rise to the structures that plague our world: racism, consumerism, militarism, etc. But there is good news: salvation. And salvation, of course, is not located on the other side of pearly gates, but available here and now in our world where God is "working through all the processes of the creation to bring it to the fullness and health made possible by love." And we are part of the process, as the church, "the community of those who seek to serve God's healing work in the world."
One succinct way to express the value of this book is to point to a phrase that prefaces several positions descriptive of progressive Christianity: "There is a Christian reason for..." What follows is just that, the explicit Christian reason for, say, respecting diversity or working for economic justice or caring for the planet or making peace valuing the common good or or being open to other faith traditions. Brown gives us reasons by taking us into the biblical record and the early church's rendering of that narrative to offer compelling reasons that comprise a sound theology. This is what takes this book beyond one more expression of liberal ideals or a philosophical theology that would ignore the particularity of Christianity's biblical heritage.

This is great! I never tought I'd read a novel with so many references to computer games, and to think that I even have played ALL of them is insane! (Yes even the most obscure game, I've played it!) The story is also a great read if you don't know about games (I asked my wife what she thought) even tough you might miss out...

Gaming rules, and C. Brookmyre, if you're ever on Rubi-Ka, come see me as Agna, Biola or Thesau ;)

I raced through the 500 pages of this book. It was really funny, witty, and quite a good look into current pop-culture in the UK. Brookmyre the author is able to make you laugh out loud. If you are looking for something that will tell you about life in the UK in an interesting and funny manner this is your book. Read it -- it's just good!

CB has produced another fantastic read. Maybe the references are a little parochial, but so what - use your imagination. IMO dry humour works anywhere - if you've travelled beyond your state/country who can't relate to PJ O'Rourke's rantings. CB manages this with a little more subtlety which makes his reading well worth it. His books capture the reader from start to end - which is quite annoying, I've read the fecker dry and wait for his next.

'Big Boy' is fantastic - the losing virginity chapter is laugh out loud funny. Of course I relate to the Glasgow setting (being a glaswegian and ex-QM member), but the characters translate country/cultural divides. Read it for feck sake and kick yourself out of the 'King of The Hill' mentality.

DB

Christopher Brookmyre has taken a topic that has become present in the forefront of everyone's consciousness, presented a story in which he has managed to inject numerous humorous anecdotes and still been able to end up with a relevant reminder of how easily our lives may be touched by terrorism.

The title A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY is reference to the way terrorists operate with the suggestion being that their acts of terror are nothing more than cowardly attacks by bullies who haven't got the guts to meet their enemies face to face.

The book starts out with a series of terrorist attacks that take place in various parts of the world and can all be attributed to a single man who is only known as the Black Spirit. Each of the attacks was simple yet untraceable and devastatingly effective resulting in the loss of many lives. The disturbing fact for the British Police Force is that the intelligence gathered by MI5 indicates that the Black Spirit's next attack is likely to occur somewhere on British soil.

Raymond Ash is a bored English teacher suffering the sleep deprivation that comes with living with a 3 month old baby with colic. One day while sitting in Aberdeen airport imagining what it might be like to just chuck it all in and jump on a plane out of there, he is startled to see his room-mate from his college days walking through the terminal. The reason for his surprise is that the guy had died in a plane crash 3 years ago. From this innocuous sighting, Raymond is about to have a very bad couple of days and a whole new appreciation of how fortunate he was to have led such a boring life.

The main storyline is set in Scotland with much of the dialogue spoken in Scottish slang for an authentic (although at times hard to understand) feel. We are slowly led towards the terrorist's target and the "against all odds" attempts by an unlikely bunch of "heroes" to avert a full on disaster. Along the way, Christopher Brookmyre has a habit of punctuating his story with a constant stream of asides, anecdotes, character introductions and histories. These interjections are both amusing and entertaining but they tended to break the flow of the story and occasionally made it a little hard to follow at times.

This minor inconvenience is offset by the enormous wealth of background information we get about each of the central characters. Whether it's an explanation on how a low-level marketing guy with a failed attempt at a rock career could become a deadly international terrorist or an interlude to reminisce about Raymond Ash's school days, Brookmyre has a flair for executing with an entertaining delivery. One thing's for sure, thanks to the plentiful supply of anecdotes throughout, we know all of the central characters inside and out. We care about them, we can identify with them and we can understand how they're feeling during the more stressful scenes. And believe me, towards the end of the book there are plenty of stressful moments.

When the finale takes place, it's inside a large complex and was rather reminiscent of some of the Matthew Reilly books that rely on action at all costs and a suspension of disbelief to ensure that a wild ride is had by all. It's a complete change to the way the first three quarters of the book was written, but it certainly entertained. One problem I had was in the convoluted description of the layout of the complex and where all the characters were in relation to one another. This part was crying out for an illustrated layout to be included a la Reilly or Clive Cussler.

For anyone who enjoys a humorous mystery that makes light of the more serious global concerns we face today, Christopher Brookmyre's A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY is extremely satisfying. I have heard him compared to Carl Hiaasen both for his humour and his more serious underlying themes and I would have to agree with the comparison. A small warning about the extreme profane language used that may offend some readers.

The definitely guide to Derby. This offers much more explanation and information than the online documentation provided by Apache. But what do you expect... it comes from the minds at IBM themselves.

However, unlike most of IBM's publications and documentation, this is actually readable and informative. You don't have to wade through a series of unknowns and missing pieces of the puzzle in order to figure out what IBM was trying to actually get at.

This will not only help you define and work with Apache Derby, but also make your applications lighter, faster and easier to deploy.

Apache Derby is the only open source, pure Java RDBMS database and APACHE DERBY-OFF TO THE RACES comes from IBM's own database experts and tells how to make the most of Derby and its commercial counterpart IBM Cloudscape. Learn how to support development efforts, install Derby on both Windows and Linux systems, how to understand how programming languages interact with them, and build sample applications step-by-step: everything is here to learn the fundamentals and troubleshoot virtually any problem.

If you've ever been curious about using or integrating Apache Derby (or IBM Cloudscape) into your project, here's the book you'll need... Apache Derby - Off to the Races by Paul C. Zikopoulos, Dan Scott, and George Baklarz. Very well done...

Contents: On Your Marks... Get Set... Go!!! - An Introduction to the Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape Community; Deployment Options for Apache Derby Databases; Apache Derby Databases; Installing Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape on Windows; Installing Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape on Linux; Managing an Apache Derby Database; Security; SQL; Developing Apache Derby Applications with JDBC; Developing Apache Derby Applications with Perl, PHP, Python, and ODBC; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in JDBC; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in Windows; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in PHP; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in Perl; "Your Momma Loves Drama" In Python; Web Site Contents; Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape Resources; Troubleshooting Hints and Tips; Index

Derby is one of those technologies that has remained "under the radar" for awhile. The Cloudscape database from IBM was released to the open source community under the name Derby, and basically those two packages are the same core code. Cloudscape has a few more add-ons and support from IBM, but if you learn one you learn them both. The authors do a very good job here in helping the reader to understand the architecture and benefits of having a small-footprint embedded relational database system in your application. The start of the book lays the groundwork very well, and establishes the "why" of Derby. But rather than remaining a high-level overview, they dive into the core of the software, showing how to install it, work with it, and how to secure your data. The real value comes when they take a sample ticket application ("Your Momma Loves Drama") and shows how Derby can be integrated the application in a number of different languages. Even if you don't necessarily know Perl, PHP, or Python, you should be able to follow along enough to extrapolate how the concepts can be applied to your platform of choice. After reviewing this book, I've got some ideas on how I'd like to play around with this...

A very solid addition to your programming bookshelf. Between this book and the online resources, you should have everything you need to master the Derby/Cloudscape software.

Apache Derby is a very promising package that is being freely offered, as both source code and binaries. This book is an aggressive promotion of its virtues. The authors stress many things about Derby, or its IBM sidekick, Cloudscape.

Derby addresses a persistent need amongst many Java programmers for an easy to use SQL database. Often, a Java programmer has only cursory expertise in coding for a full database like IBM's DB2 or Oracle. Best usage of these often requires you to be a DBA.

By contrast, Derby comes as a Java JAR file, and can be plonked into your programming environment just as any other JAR file. The book explains in depth how to then interact with Derby, at the level of your Java source code. You can see that you get a pretty powerful engine. Including features like stored procedures and user defined functions, that let you optimise for speed.

Speaking of speed, that is perhaps the biggest possible drawback of Derby. It is run as Java bytecode in a jvm, which is not quite as fast as a package compiled into native binaries. The book seems to deprecate this aspect, but you should be aware of it.

You might find Derby useful enough that you don't have to migrate to a full database like DB2. The book stresses that the code you write to interface with Derby will also do for DB2. There is a potential problem here for IBM, if it loses DB2 business to Derby. But maybe it feels that if it never promoted Derby, then sooner or later, an equivalent product would come along.

Obviously, to use Derby, you still need to know basic SQL statements. And some understanding of how to develop related tables to hold your data. The text is not meant to teach you these skills.

The first chapter also makes various cogent points about the advantages of using Derby. With sometimes unintentional hilarity. A passage says the intent is not to besmirch Microsoft. But despite this pious protestation, it proceeds immediately to do just that. By opining that Microsoft's SQL Server has a 5 year lag between upgrades - Server 2000 and Server 2005. While Derby has source code available, and a much faster cycle for introducing new capabilities.

I graduated from high school and in my IB Psychology class we used this book. It is the best psychology book out there. It's easy to use for advances and beginning psychology students. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone.

As the Californian listed before me on this page, I have used this text as part of a College course (IB/AP) while in my Senior year of High School. The writing style makes reading quite fast, but Glassman ensures the reader a true grasp of both the overriding essence and various nuances of each perspective. An excellent resource!

William E. Glassman's textbook "Approaches to Psychology" (3rd edition) is an invaluable book for anyone hoping to learn about psychology. I am a year 11 IB student currently studying Psychology and I have found that although this textbook tends to lack when it comes to pictures and diagrams, the content is not only detailed but direct. Other textbooks devoted to Psychology have been more difficult to read, as the majority of information is provided in a roundabout manner.

One of the outstanding aspects of this book is the layout. The IB student is expected to be competent at explaining the historical and cultural aspects, methodologies, theorists etc. for each of the perspectives. This book makes this much easier to accomplish and studying is much more productive!

I highly recommend Glassman's book to anyone with a genuine interest in Psychology.

I'm in high school but enrolled in a college level Psychology course. So far, we've used about 5 different text books and I think this has been the best. It's easy to understand, brief, and to the point. This book has a overview of the five perspectives, which is vital to understanding psychology. I would recommend it to anyone who needs to know the basics but not too terribly much detail. It's been a real help preparing for the IB and AP exams I'm taking this spring!

Professor Edward Edinger, Psychiatrist, Jungian scholar, and Jehovah Witness, uses the book of Revelations to draw us into a web that intersects at the vertex of all of his many professional realms of interests and understandings. Once he has captured us there, in his own intellectual corner, he then "uses the theme of cultural transition" disguised as, and implicit in, the deeply symbolic scriptures taken from the book of Revelations, to advance an unlikely version of a very "familiar" theory of archetypes: One that turns out to be as much existentialist philosophy and depth psychology as hardcore religiosity.

And what a rich "mother lode" Edinger's mind turns out to be: Erudite and persuasive; inventive and logical, scary and seductive, intense and carefully thought out, meticulous in its details, but all done without a hint of the taint of anti-intellectual religiosity or fanaticism. The author commands his complex ship well through some of the roughest cultural, psychological and existential waters known to modern man, and skillfully brings it safely home to a believable harbor.

His theory is: that a psychological analysis of the book of Revelations reveals that the world as we know it will inexorably come to an end. But that the particular book of the bible that foretells the end, is not just literal religious prophesy, or an exercise in allegorical pre-Christian symbolic poetic license, nor even just the scattered images of a schizophrenic mind or worldview, but the rumblings of "yet-to-be-deciphered" meanings from deep within our collective and historical consciousness: The book of Revelations is "content," "symbolism," and "agency;" a living psychic organism, as it were, of rumblings that inhabit and serve the needs of the individual as well as the collective psyche.

It is in the analysis of the meaning of these rumblings that underlie the predictions that foreshadow a fundamental shift if not a breakup in the global paradigm of cultural and psychological understanding itself. As a paradigm of deep "personal" as well as "transpersonal" or collective psychology, Edinger reveals in these lectures that it is as much the change in the fundamental religious paradigm and the resistance to this change as anything else that represents the "moving psychological parts" of the archetype of the Apocalypse. For the change will be accompanied by a corresponding collective primal fear and resistance, emanating from a fundamentally "religious libido" -- a fear and resistance that will trigger a global psychosis and chaos that will cause a breakup in man's current cosmic worldview. It will be a kind of cultural and psychological upheaval that man has not known since the breakup of the Roman Empire and the cosmic worldview that held the Roman world together. We can already begin to see cracks in the paradigm with both domestic and international but always religiously motivated terrorism. The result of this psychological "showdown," "collective man" versus "the religious libido of individual man," and "individual man's" resistance to the change he has invested in the archetypical paradigm will be as real in its consequences as any of the images portrayed of Armageddon.

Using psychological evidence from his practice in psychiatry, drawing heavily on his religious background, and his readings of world history and culture, Edinger, convincingly "deconstructs" and then "re-synthesizes" the meanings of the scriptures -- verse-by-verse - according to his own archetypical typology, leaving us with the suggestion that it will be the consequences of these meanings functioning out of a deeply religious agency -- rather than out of the economic, social and technical vulnerabilities that continue to grow without bounds - that in the final analysis will represent the "showdown" at the end of individual man's psychological patience and existence.

Edinger proves here that Jungian analysis remains heady intellectual stuff despite its heavy dependence on religious interpretations. It is thus theoretical content, with which any serious intellectual must reckon.

Five stars

Edinger interprets the apocalypse myth as an expression of the experience of the conscious becoming aware the unconscious - a loss of innocence. Disillusion is never a pleasant experience. I expect that much of the interpretation of the images is known in theological circles, it was an awakening for me. An excellent book, although, Jungian writing tends to be heavy reading. Edinger is a highly respect author of a number of influential books about Jungian psychology.

I grew up pentacostal and the Apocalypse (as described in Revelations) was a very real event, about to happen at any moment. As a child I never really expected to see my adulthood, "knowing" that the world would end. Now of course, I see things slightly differently. This book by Edinger is why I really enjoy Jungian psychology. Edinger puts into perspective the beliefs of millions of conservative Christian Americans and helps you see it through psychological eyes. I can now breathe a sigh of relief knowing a bit more about the apocalypse but still a little aprehensive knowing that many unconscious "believers" may create a self fulfilling prophesy by their own projections!

While Jung's model of the mind is both elegant and apt, the master in his own words I find a hard slog. My puny brain can read a paragraph over and over with no more comprehension on the fifth read than on the first. Chalk it up to public education.
It is with Jung's disciples that the seeds of his wisdom take root and blossom. Edinger, one of that first (and best) generation, brings a fierce intellect to his task, but keeps it accessible. In today's climate of fear, this psychological analysis of the book of Revelations strikes mighty sparks of relevancy, even for the casually Christian. Most chilling is the belief by this scientist of the subconscious that we Moderns are manifesting the Apocalypse, not perhaps as a fifty-seven headed beast - but as very real collapse and universal agony. How can we avoid it? Probably not possible. But one might survive it by following the Master's advice; become your authentic self. This book provides ample evidence to encourage one along that way.

This is NOT an etymological reference work (for which I recommend Ayto), but rather a mentally stimulating 300 pages for browsing.

Don't expect to find a particular word and don't try to read it all at once. Instead, keep it by the bedside or in the car and read a page or two when you have a spare minute.

It's a bit dated, and some entries are obscure or unfamiliar, but Harry Potter fans will delight to find such words as basilisk and mandrake.

There are many such non-academic books on the stories of word origins, but this one among many has somehow captured my preference. The balance of etymology and history provides many delightful little ah-hah! moments of new insights and connections.

This is best illustrated by example:

I just now randomly opened the book to page 58, where we learn that the bird 'canary' is indeed from the Canary Islands, which are so named in Pliny the Elder's account of the journey, in 40 B.C., of Juba, the Mauritanian chief, through the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar Strait) to an island overrun with dogs which he named Canaria, Latin for 'Island of Dogs' (canine).

In the next 3 pages one learns (in much greater detail):

The Latin 'cancelli', for lattice, gave us the word 'cancel' from the appearance of hash marks in the days before erasers (whose usage gave us the noun 'rubber').

Roman candidates for public office wore white as a sign of purity (like brides today), so 'candidatus' (clothed in white) gave us candidate, candor, and candid.

When Christopher Columbus landed in Cuba, the people explained they were Canibales, a dialectal pronunciation of Caribes, from which we get cannibal and Caribbean.

'Canopy' comes from the Greek konops, mosquito, for the purpose of the net it held.

One 'canters' on a horse when riding leisurely toward CANTERbury Cathedral for a picnic at the grave of Thomas a Becket, who was murdered in 1170 by his pal, King Henry II.

'Canvas' comes from the Latin for hemp, cannabis.

'Caper' and 'caprice' describe the antics of goats, the Latin for which is 'capra' (Capricorn). Elsewhere he explains how the leap of a goat, cabriolet in Latin, gave us 'cab', with taxi (like tax) indicating the necessity of paying a toll.

That's a summary of just three pages. A different sort of example from page 203 describes the amphibian once called an efeta and still today called an 'eft' in some regions. By tonal similarity, this became eveta. Since v and u were written the same, it became eueta. Just as 'due' sounds like 'dew', it became ewta, then ewte. Finally, the 'n' migrated, so that 'an ewte' became 'a newt'.

If you've read this far and enjoyed it, you'll like this book. Otherwise, forget it.

It's uncanny how often these factoids subsequently turn up in conversation or on Jeopardy the very same week you read it.

I reviewed this book a few years ago but now that I have lived with it I think it is interesting and fun to read. The origin of many idioms and phrases is entertaining.

Today I again wished I still had access to THEREBY HANGS A TALE. I had read most of it years ago while staying with a friend and have missed its delightful insights into how our language grows and changes. Each word's origin is explained with great humor and insight. This time, however, instead of just feeling blue for not having it, I searched Amazon.com [bless them and their search engine] and by golly, Ollie, I found it. I can't wait to lay eyes and mind again on its wondrous pages. If you don't already love words and their deeper meanings, this may stimulate you into a grand new experience with one of life's simple pleasures.

I have always loved to explore word origins, which is why I love this book. While many of the origins are what you would expect, there are a few gems whose origin is most unusual. The word origins also show what a mongrel the English language is, with words developed using input from every corner of Europe, the Islamic areas of North Africa and Asia and even as far away as British India. It was fascinating to learn how so many of our words had a different form in one language and was altered two or three times before reaching the final form that we know today. I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in word origins or who just wants to learn something while doing some recreational reading.

Written by relationship coach Susanne M. Alexander, Can We Dance: Learning The Steps for a Fulfilling Relationship is an in-depth, self-help guide to the skills and communication abilities needed for a lasting, healthy relationship. Covering both romantic (including sexual) relationships and meaningful platonic friendships at length, Can We Dance? explores positive qualities to cultivate in oneself, how to prevent missteps in communication, how to earn confidence, how to keep expectations realistic and discuss them when needed, and much more. A solidly grounded, honest, and practical guide to better understanding and connecting with fellow human beings.

Can We Dance? Learning the Steps for a Fulfilling Relationship is the best resource I have seen for assisting youth and singles of all ages to achieve success in finding a partner that will be the right one for them! It combines theory, insights, advice, exercises and a lot of know-how gained from experience. I am a member of a Board of Directors that has responsibility for the education and well-being of youth and singles, as well as counseling in relationships, and this is the best guidance that we have found that will take them to a higher level of investigation and potential success. It will be very helpful to high school teachers and counselors, for community college courses, for university level curriculum and libraries. I urge you to check out this excellent resource.

Whereas many books in the flooded pantheon of relationship literature focus on the relationship that has already gone awry, produced children, been entrenched in a dysfunctional marriage, or become entirely irreparable, this smart, playful, insightful gem leads with a beacon of guidance around the issue of romance. This book does not condescend to its audience. Rather, it helps single individuals know what to look for in a mate, how to know when someone's character is honorable or not, and how to proceed slowly, without impulsiveness and hollywood blinders landing them in an unsavory position. Kudos to the authors!

I found the book the very useful and very insightful in preparing people to know themselves and know what kind of a relationship partner they are looking for. I found their focus on personal development of one's character (honesty, acceptance, flexibility, etc..)and the character of one's partner as the core of a happy relationship a new and yet common sense take on relationships! I'm already married so this book wasn't as personally useful but I've definitly recommended it to alot of my friends who are still single!!

I originally became familiar with the writing of Matt Shepherd and with the illustrations of Roy Boney Jr. on an intriguing web comic titled "The License." I was instantly hooked with the story and art. That project, unfortunately, ended prematurely, but I became aware of "Dead Eyes Open" as a result. I feel quite fortunate that I learned of the series.

I meant to purchase the comic when it was originally published but procrastination got the better of me. When the series was offered in this book, I immediately jumped at the chance to purchase and read it.

To simply place "Dead Eyes Open" in the "zombie" genre is unfair. These living dead are not the mindless drones you are familiar with; rather they are simply people who have returned from death and are trying to piece together a life in a world that would rather the dead remain so.

The series deals with many of the repurcussions - societal, governmental, and familial - of a having newly re-animated population introduced into a frightened and suspicious world and it does so in an eloquent fashion. Roy's art is the perfect compliment to Matt's writing and the theme, rendering characters that become instantly familiar and, in many cases, very sympathetic.

The pacing can feel a bit rushed at times and there are a couple of jumps that might leave one feeling a little confused. These were minor issues, however, and are quickly forgotten as one reads through the engrossing story.

"Dead Eyes Open" is all at once humorous, sophisticated, and touching. Taken as a whole, the story is excellent, the art immensly enjoyable. Those who might enjoy a fresh take on the undead should not hesitate to pick this book up.

...when we die? That's where this wonderful story starts. What if the body is a rotting shell we cannot escape from even in death? (It kind of is anyway.) This is a terrific story about an ordinary man who wakes up after an ordinary night's sleep to find out that his body no longer lives--in the same way that it used to.

This story is part horror genre, part spiritual journey, part romantic novel, and so on. It even has parallels to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in parts. This book is a fantastic look at human nature through the "safe" lens of the undead.

The art is very good, and the storytelling is excellent. I really got "drawn-in" to this story. I have had it about three weeks at the time of this review, and I have read it through at least twice but have looked at it and thought about it many more times than that. This book is well worth the time spent.

This book is intensely well done, both in the writing and in the art, the latter of which is almost impressionistic in its ability to suggest so much more than is actually shown. Just a brilliant job by artist and writer.

There was a French movie that came out a few years back called "Les Revenants (They Came Back)," which promised to show what life would be like if people just started coming back from the dead, not as brain-munchers, but just as people who had been through and trauma and were now back among the living, even though they were technically zombies. The movie started off great, but never followed through on the idea.

That said, Dead Eyes Open DOES follow through on the premise, and does it in a way that's both entirely plausible and also exciting. I have assigned this book for the students in my University of Alabama class on "Zombies in Literature, Film, and Culture," and I highly recommend it to any thinking fan of the zombie genre.

Zombie comics seem to be in a bit of a glut these days. They're pretty much everywhere. You even see zombies in spandex, of all things. And y'know what? It's all pretty much the same. They lumber, they rot, they fall apart, they eat flesh. Boring, formulaic tripe, for the most part.

Dead Eyes Open is not about that. What it is about are the repercussions of people returning from the dead, both on the macro scale (political, religious) and on the micro (Dr. Requin's relationship with his family, for example). It's massively refreshing to see something truly different in the field of the living dead for once.

The writing is solid, the characters ring true, the dialogue is interesting to read, the art is fantastic (and meshes with the writing spectacularly).

It's a story nobody else is telling, and it's quite well-told. Read this comic.

Much of the debate about climate change (global warming) has focused on short-term details about the structure of any international treaty and the near-term rate of change in emissions. Athanasiou and Baer perform a great service by bringing the larger questions of the long-term severity of the climate problem and the potential massively unequal consequences of climate change for people of different wealth levels.

Grounding their argument in the well-accepted science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authors describe in clear language the imperative to dramatically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions over the next 50 years. Importantly, they endorse the current ideas about international emissions trading as a low-cost way to achieve these cuts, but they then lay out an ethically grounded argument for ensuring that this trading is structured in a fair and equitable way--both for people in poorer countries and for people in future generations. Moreover, they are careful to defend the political viability of their proposed solutions.

Written in direct and comprehensible language, Dead Heat is a forceful call for more serious action to address the social and environmental consequences of climate change and climate change policy.

For individuals wanting to learn more about the extremely important and dire problem of global warming but intimidated by books with lots of difficult scientific language, this short, comprehensible book is the perfect introduction for the lay person. Not only does it detail the frightening consequences of climate chaos like hurricanes, drought, and outbreaks of diseases like malaria, it more importantly outlines individual and institutional strategies for stabilizing the planet's temperature. And it does so in a global justice context. If you care about polar bears, coral reefs, poor folks in Bangledesh, Central America, and the Gulf Coast, then read this book. If you care about your future, the future of your children, and the future of this planet, then read this book (and then ride your bike, plant a tree, join a collective household, go solar, and eat organic, locally grown slow cuisine).

...but for those who already know some of the details on global warming and the Kyoto Protocol. I picked up this book for a term paper, hoping this would have all the information I needed. I was thoroughly confused with all the specific terms that were used but not explained. After I read through other resources which started from the beginning, I was able to enjoy this book more.

It's really a great book to read, and I enjoyed it.

This book explains both the science of global warming and the political reasons why governments have not acted to reverse it.

This book is designed and written for higher education institutions which are considering or are engaged in distance education as a new education communications channel. The book's greatest strength is that it contains perspectives from many different individuals who are actively involved in distance education. The topics cover many different areas such as: defining distance education, implications for higher education, attraction of online distance education, future of distance education, faculty perceptions of distance education, teaching effectiveness, strategies for success, service providers for distance education, quality assurance issues, success factors, and many others.

Those in higher education will often adopt a new technology without fully investigating the potential and cost of the technology. This book has an excellent section on the benefits and disadvantages of using distance education. It is noted that distance education is not a panacea but it is another useful technology that can be used to enhance learning and meet needs of students who are not able to attend a traditional class-learning environment.

The reader was very impressed by the excellent end of chapter references. This will allow anyone who desires to investigate more fully the issues raised in the book to do so. The chapters dealing with various distance education delivery models and implementation will be useful to those who wish to move forward with this technology in their organization.

The reader highly recommends that those interested in distant education take the time to read this book before they embark on distance education. The book will help to minimize "re-inventing the wheel" and thus save time, money and effort.

This book provides an outstanding range of ideas, research, and insights into distance learning programs. The book is enlightening about how to improve distance teaching and learning, the design of these programs, their successes and failures, and how they are impacting institutions of higher education,

This is a great book for anyone considering setting up a distance learning program. The authors are even-handed in their treatment of issues that must be dealt with and provide practical advice for implementing a distance learning program.

The eyes of University Presidents and Vice-Chancellors all around the world light up as they think of those hundreds of millions of potential students out there, just waiting to pay money to study at their Universities - "If just 1% of them came here.... $$$$!!! Information Technology via the Internet and on-line delivery of our courses - will that provide the answer?" As Universities (and other educational institutions) rush to establish a presence in the "virtual" education market, often building Internet classrooms that in many cases resemble the "Field of Dreams" model - "build it and they will come" (they don't, and won't, of course) this book is a welcome steadying contribution.

Let me declare an interest before going any further - I am the author of a chapter in this book. That said, the book provides a serious collection of research articles aimed at making some early sense out of this fast-growing area. It is important to remember it is early days yet and much of the research conducted to date, and the practice, is preliminary - a problem compounded by the rapidly changing technology.

While most of the chapters in the book paint a generally optimistic picture, there are many problems, pitfalls and dilemmas identified. These range from restrictions and difficulties involved in state financing of education, through the difficulty of authenticating student work and testing of students, technological limitations, special dedication and skill attributes required in students, the suitability of some courses to remote delivery, to library strategies. This suggests that at least in the eyes of these practitioners (and most of them are) it will be far from plain sailing. Somebody needs to tell those Presidents!

There are several chapters that provide guidance in (very early) "best practice" and these present a useful if somewhat disjointed guide for those considering running such courses. Perhaps a future work could attempt to establish a "best practice" manual, although as the courses come to conform to a standard blueprint the competitive edge will blur.

For academics the book identifies many areas for additional research. These include further work in the potential take up of on-line education by both students and Universities, the influence of the isolation effect, measurement of learning achievements, and interaction of students with the technology.

Overall the book offers a very good collection of experience and research. There is much more work to be done and many more experiences to be had. Uninversity management (and many academics ) will push to move ahead - there could be a lot of fallout, but in the end is it just possible this could be the University of the future? For a small percentage of students - maybe.