Of all the fictional naval captains, Captain Lord Ramage is the most adored by his men. He is the alter ego of the real Admiral Lord Nelson, victor of Trafalgar and hero of the British Navy and of the English people. With his many victories and prizes, Ramage by now should be too rich to sail, but here he is in his 15th book and still only a Post Captain. But we'll allow that because frigate captains have all the fun, and admirals of advancing age equally late in their series, like Kent's Bolitho or O'Brian's Aubrey, have too many remote worries.

The main story line is a convoy back to England and its plodding operations overseen by Ramage, torn by a bizarre meet with another British frigate. Although newly married, Ramage struggles with an infatuation with a lady of the convoy. There's also the strangest case of mutiny I've ever read. Haled into court, Ramage is court martialled for his life, with an infuriatingly biased judge guiding his fate. Throughout there overhangs the disturbing worry that Ramage's bride (of the previous novel Ramage's Devil) has been lost at sea. Paul Wright's cover painting is the weakest in his series, a lethargic stern chase.

What is most remarkable in this collection, is the widespread respect for Pope John Paul II, his intellectualism, and basic agreements with many of his ideas. This collection, continues his effort at ecumenism by bringing together 15 Protestant and 1 Jewish writer, and each sheds new light on the Papal volume. Perhaps due to the ecumenical goal, there is less discussion of differences of faith, which also would have proved useful, such as Phyllis Tickles discussion of Catholic beliefs of purgatory. Particularly moving for me was Rabbi's Eckstein's, Jewish response, first about the history of Church-afflicted spirit, and more recently, the positive changes led by John XXIII and this Pope. Flora Wuellners commentary of prayer, proved enlightening to me in terms of the transformative power of prayer, not as a means of begging for something, but as a means of avoiding fleeing from God. Both this book and the book by John Paul II, discuss fundamental questions of faith, evil and suffering, and may help to deepen your own understanding of Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant.

Mr. Herman documents a case of western disinformation surrounding the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. He provides a service by documenting the participation of a diverse set of players including Fascists, the CIA and Italian Freemasonry, which has been implicated implicated in the Vatican Bank scandal and the assassination of Pope John Paul I in the book "In God's Name" by David Yallop. Mr Herman drops the ball and, perhaps intentionally, masks larger issues when he tries to promote the notion that the P2 Masonic Lodge's actions were "against the longstanding tradition of Italian Masonry that excluded political discussions." In her book "In Banks We Trust" Penny Lernoux touches on the broad role of Italian Freemasonry as a network used after WWII by Americans, who promoted Fascists to fight Communists. She notes, "Membership in a lodge was reliable evidence of the anticommunism required for a successful career in a NATO military force." The P2 Masonic lodge wasn't an anomaly. It reveals the essential character of organizations like the Masons.

I bought this book for my son, and we read it together. It relates the beautiful story of the future saint as a boy and as a man. All catholic children will benefit from this book. I highly recommend it.

How do people decipher old scripts? As a person with very badly legible handwriting I have always been interested in how scripts are deciphered. For the case of my handwriting I learned about how it is done from people who told me. Assume a letter has to be deciphered. First of all, the language I use is known to people who try to read the letter. I was told people usually start with words they can read or words which are obvious. From those, they seem to get an understanding of how characters are written. The knowledge of these characters then helps them to decipher other words and to learn more and more characters. Quite obviously, deciphering Egyptian or Maya script is somewhat different from this. Apart from the fact, that my hand writing is not nearly as beautiful as, say, old Maya script, there seems to be the language problem: The person who tries to decipher Maya script does not speak the language of the Mayas.

Or so I thought. However, after reading this book I was amazed about how similar the decipherment of my handwriting and of, say, Maya script is. As it turns out, the language of the script has to be known! That came as a surprise to me when I started to read the book. How would anybody know the language of ancient Egypt? As it turns out, in many cases, old languages survived or are the progenitors of languages known today. In the case of Egyptian, there is a language called Coptic which is still spoken today and which is very close to ancient Egyptian. In addition, the decipherment is very often made much easier by documents which contain the same text in more than one language. Pope's book explains in very nice details how the knowledge of Coptic and the existence of the so-called Rosetta Stone made the decipherement of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. In a similar fashion, he talks about many other old scripts like Linear B, Cuneiform etc.

In my opinion, the book has a few small flaws, though. First of all, the first chapter which deals with older ideas of what Egyptian hieroglyphs might mean is incredibly boring because it is so repetitive. In addition, Pope mentions many and in fact too many contributors of the decipherement of any of the language so that the reader (or at least me) is left somewhat confused about who did what etc. But these flaws are really only minor and if I could I'd give this book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

With all the furor concerning "Hitler's Pope" by Cornwell, I wondered how he had obtained access to the expurgated-by-Jebbie files on Pius XII? With some difficulty, Amazon located an out-of-print copy of Cornwell's earlier debunking of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Year of Three Popes, when Papa Luciani, John Paul I, died after a pontificate of only thirty-three days. When I received my virgin copy of "Thief" still sealed in clear plastic, I knew I was in for a treat: The front and back cover blurbs waxed enthusiastic with atta-boys from Graham Greene "The Power and the Glory," Andrew Greeley "The Tablet," and Malachi Martin "The Jesuits." I was not disappointed: Cornwell weaves a tale worthy of G.K. Chesterton "Father Brown." Cornwell's forensic investigation is more compelling than that of Tad Szulc's work of fiction which is also "based on real events, facts, and persons: the attempt to assassinate John Paul II on May 13, 1981, its aftermath, and the secret investigation conducted subsequently at the behest of the Holy See." ["To Kill the Pope" was released in 2000, "Thief in the Night" in 1989.]

This is truly "an exhaustive and impressive study" as Cornwell narrows in on what really happened to the author of "Letters to Pinnochio," which I found most revealing of the Patriarch of Milan. Cornwell gives a most telling picture of Archbishop Paul Casmir "Chink" Marcinkus, the Walter Jenkins/Bebe Rebozo "bagman" of the Vatican Bank, who was able to provide $250 million from the Vatican pension funds to reimburse the machinations of the Calvi/Banco Ambrosiano debacle. Cornwell's in depth portrayals of Papa Luciani's two secretaries, Bishop John Magee and Don Diego Lorenzi and what they did when they found Luciani dead and unattended validates Garry Wills' "Papal Lies" thesis: functionaries in the Vatican lie from force of habit, rather than from malice or personal gain.

Yet there is malice afoot: "[Cardinal/secretary of state Jean] Villot's miscalculation of [Luciani]'s administrative capacities, his poor state of health, was disasterous and surely culpable." Luciani insisted that "he had usurped the papal chair he sat in. 'The Foreign Pope [John Paul II] is coming to take my place.' " And Karol Wojtyla sat opposite Luciani in the Conclave that selected Luciani to follow Montini.

To tell more, would destroy the suspence of Cornwell's story, yet one can say that Luciani was not poisoned, despite centuries of papal murders, that Luciani did not committ suicide, although he certainly lost his will to live, and welcomed death. Whether Luciani abandoned the medicines that would have prolonged his life seems still open.

Based on this "marvelous and compelling investigation" one understands why John Paul II has nothing to fear from the publication of "Hitler's Pope." John Paul II personally made "Thief in the Night" possible, and opened up for Cornwell, the Pandora's box of Pacelli's racism and probable anti-Semitism. John Paul II is to be commended in following John XXIII's dictat: to "open the windows of the Vatican" and let sunlight cleanse Rome of its "Papal Lies" by the Curia-crats who know better how to be a Pope than Pacelli, Roncalli, Montini, Luciani, or Wojtyla, e.g. Tisserant, Ottavani, Villot and Ratzinger.

This has to be one of the more eclectic assemblages of essays out there. The first couple essays didn't really grab me, too much overview of clinical studies, but the scope of the rest kept me going. Topics range from infertility to Snow White to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Authors show up occasionally to add their two cents which keeps things casual, between friends.

well, Professor Pope is the best professor so far on pdf modeling of turbulent. Before the book was printed, he use it as a textbook on MAE732, Turbulent analysis, in Cornell univeristy. we are really impressed by pdf.

In the Christian Bible, Parables are used to to portray theological truths in a fictional melieu. This roman a' clef, serves a valuable purpose in making Opus Dei finances available for easy comprehension. It is a worthy companion to Hutchison's monumental reference opus (pun intended): "Their Kingdom Come," and is even more timely. E.g. The NY Times on August 3,1999, reported that grains found imbedded on the Shroud of Turin indicate that the Shroud is much older than its carbon dating suggested. This 1997 book gave the same imbedded grains hypothesis, and provides an interesting alternative theory: The Shroud of Turin was an exact copy of the authentic Shroud, which has subsequently disappeared. Using this book as a guide, one could hypothesize that the alleged homosexual murder suicide of a Vatican guard and his commander, might be a double murder to forestall publicity about the relationship of the two men. An Italian journalist was preparing a detailed expose at the time of the two men's death. The Calvi, Sidonna, and Calvi's secretary's "suicides" make this "fiction" a most interesting tour de force. Recent events in the Diocese of Santa Rosa, Calif., make this "novel" even more compelling.

Eugene Skibbe's translation of Edmund Schlink's "Vision of the Pope" is a warm readable work that introduces the reader to a Pope as a thoughtful person of deep faith in God's will. Though complex as a German translation can be, Skibbe has created a flowing narrative that is a pleasure to follow. Through divine insight, an unnamed Pope sees a future in which all of Christendom is one body which encompasses the unique features of each individual denomination. The reader follows the Papal thought and action as he seeks to make this vision a reality. One would hope that a real Papal figure pursues his vision for the church on earth with such open-minded clarity and faith in God's will as does Schlink's Pope. A good read!