In The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag writes beautifully about people she eventually condemns. Not that they have done anything wrong, they are the privileged aristrocracy of the late 18th century. They are absorbed by love, art and by their professional duties. They live beautiful, active, somewhat intelligent lives. Page after page, we live and grow with them. But then there's the world around them. It appears in the form of the distant and then not so distant French Revolution, which swells in the background trying to break into a story that is fundamentally intimate and personal. Or is it really? As our heroes leisurly love, celebrate and keep busy, drawing us into their own self absorbtion, thousands get killed and butchered because they dreamt a better world. A real nuisance if you ask our characters. One of them is in love with a volcano but completely bypasses,as we do, the much more relevant, violent and deadly force of the political upheaval. The Volcano Lover is ultimately a beautiful story of people who don't care. How normal they are. How they fool us into thinking them deep and interesting. So much that by the end of the book, the realization comes as a shock. They were vain, stupid, at best irrelevant. They missed the point. A wonderful tour de force.

I read this book three times and each time it seemed like a new novel. After my first read, I thought I'd read a love story, after the other two, I was captivated by history and technique. We learn at the beginning of the novel that the Queen of Naples is none other than the sister of the recently guillotined, Marie Antoinette. Both Austrian women were sent to foreign lands to reign as queens. The contempt of the people, actually displaced subversion toward their inept spouses, was mismanaged by both sisters. Both, failed to transcend the 'foreign' cloak. They had none of the scheming, political savy of their mother, Maria Theresa. The Royal Court of Napels is impossibly crude. We are introduced to the maloderous, strainings and grunts of the sovereign's daily bowel movements, to which Ambassador, Lord Hamilton, bestower of the title of the book, is honored by a position closest to the specially constructed raised,'throne.' The dull-witted, physicaly repulsive monarch, besides keeping his wife chronically pregnant, with offspring numbering in the teens, has one other passion, which he indulges with equal lust. That is his daily 'hunting' of hundreds of animals, which are dragged and thrown in the streets and there left to rot. A self-indulgent glutton; those many hungry subjects receive nothing from the daily slaughter.
Lord and Lady Hamilton are the sole intimates of the monarchs, despite her Ladyship's low origins, evening performances and love for spirits. In the glorious Naples, these two British subjects live in marked splendor surrounded by Hamilton's obsession with 'treasures' he unearths from his obsession with Vesuvious.
The love affair that is ignited when Nelson's fleet comes to rest in the bay is one of the great passions of history and the details are satisfying to romantic readers. The years pass and Emma grows fat and more frequently drunk. Nelson loses his sight in one eye and an arm, but continues to be victorious on the sea. Love is blind, the two are consumed with the perfection of the other. Lady Hamilton continues to sing and 'pose' but she is fat and bloated, her voice lost. The British hero does not follow orders, stays too long, and returns to transport his friends and the royal family when outbreaks of violence threaten their lives.
Human and volcanic, the lava flow of war and destruction, the end of a kind of civilization flows into the equally bloody sea. Vesuvious is the only lord, he issues warnings and humanity at play must reckon with their ultimate mortality. Love and civilizations die, and who among us are equally dormant, in our fear, in our passions? The Volcano Lover is an intensely vital and artistically flawless work. It is a cautionary and thereby completely modern tale of the fate of nations and individuals who fail to honor the Gods.

Susan Sontag's THE VOLCANO LOVER (1992) is about Sir William Hamiliton, for decades British Embassador to the Court of Naples, his young wife Emma (who clearly was not of our class) and her lover, the Great Hero, Horatio Nelson. The three of them were bound together in a very odd relationship. The kind, elderly Hamilton had a brilliant aesthetic eye and was a connoisseur of beautiful antiquities. He assembled a great collection, much of which is now in the British Museum, including the sublime 1st century Roman cameo glass vessel, the PORTLAND VASE. THE VOLCANO LOVER is also about Vesuvius, a still active volcano which periodically puts on a show, and about passion, acquisitiveness, beauty, romance, corruption and lots more. The first three-quarters of this dense novel is rendered mostly in the present tense: the style is quite formal and slightly archaic: the voice is cool, uninflected, detached - but not unfeeling. For the attentive reader, the effect is hypnotic. Sontag is an admirably careful, spare writer. Her distinctive, emphatic rhythms are always evident, but never obtrusive.

I am an experienced Java programmer who bought this book in the middle of implementing a JDBC based application. After staring at the opaque JDBC documentation from Sun, I hoped to find in this book an in depth examination of design and performance issues. The examples here do not go very far. My feeling is that this book covers the subject adequately, but in the end it is not a very complex subject. The hard issues are often implementation specific, and I suppose an in depth look at the details of conformance and performance is not really possible in a book format (e.g. which databases require that resultsets read every column and only once). Now I wish I had purchased a more general book with one good chapter on JDBC, though I do appreciate the reference section in the back and still refer to it.

sas

This book is well-written and has examples on using the SQL select, insert, delete and update commands. In addition, the topics on metadata is thorough. This is the best of the bunch, you won't be disappointed. It covers everything about database transactions - stored procedures, rollbacks and more.

Book 3 of this series, and I'm still reading. But, even if there were more, I'm fairly certain I would have stopped here.
The Nano Flower had great promise. Interesting, if somewhat far-fetched, plot, and several threads running through to hold it all together.
But by the end, I was shaking my head. What happened?
The end was disappointing, and not really worth waiting for. All the suspense about the alien, and when it finally arrived.... Well, it was just sad. So much could have been done with all of the different parts of the end of this book.... But nothing was, really.
As it went along, the story got thinner and thinner. The characters weren't bad, but more could have been done with them.
And the 14, 15 year gap between this one and the last... My question is, why? To show that the characters have grown, and evolved? What's the point if you don't have any idea what happened to them during that time?
And judging by what I read, a few important things happened then that I would have liked explained. I'll give one example. Royan. Last we saw of him, well, he was in bad shape. Suddenly in this book, he's married to Julia, and has children, and has been missing for 8 months. Granted, it's almost explained later, but not well. I don't know about most people, but I was very curious as to how exactly Royan ended up where he is now.
Basically, it was just disappointing to me all the way around.
It could have been great.....But it wasn't.

I am new to Peter Hamilton's writing and The Nano Flower is the first of his novels that I have read. I used to be an avid SF reader in the 60s and 70s but found progressively fewer new writers appealed to me. I guess that I make a rather demanding audience but, I am happy to report, Peter Hamilton may well make the grade with me.

Other reviewers make a number of valid points about the book and I don't intend to repeat them save to say that I agree it is let down by a rather limp ending. Hamilton doesn't always play to his strengths or, indeed, recognise a strong character when he creates one. Although I am new to the series I can already see that Hamilton's chief protagonists are often his most wooden creations - I found Greg Mandel and Julia Evans unsatisfying as characters. Perhaps I have done Mr Hamilton a disservice and they were better developed in early books.

On the other hand there are a number of characters who fleetingly come to life - even though they are later discarded by the author. Baronsky is sufficiently fleshed out to be intriguing and, until her liberation from the airship, Charlotte Fielder is also very promising.

The real pleasure of the book is the imaginative development of technology and predictions of future business and political structures. Hamilton has a good mix of familiar global names diversifying into new, but convincing, business lines and minor brands of today emerging as global players. There are also a number of sly and knowing political and regional developments that will amuse British readers but may go unnoticed by others.

All in all I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading other by the author.

In this book, the last in the trilogy, we find Greg Mandell retired from being a private detective for a number of years; but being called back to 'duty' by Julia Evans, to find her missing husband. I could sympathise with Greg, and his feeling that he was getting too old for this type of work, especially when things starts getting quite physical.

Greg's psychic talent doesn't play quite as much part in this book, and I think we get to see a bit more of his human side (that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean).

There are a lot of strands to the story, which are brought together well - a good testing ground for the methods he used in writing 'The Reality Dysfunction'.

I have to say that, while I really enjoyed the book, I found the ending to be almost unfinished; as if, once he had all the strands in one hand, neatly coming together after encirling the package - and most of them tied off - he didn't quite know how to finish the knot, and ended up with a slightly ungainly 'granny' knot.

I'd be interested to know if this was caused by space constraints; or had he something else in mind, that didn't work out the way he wanted.

Anyone who thought that the character of Hal Jordan was gettingstale need look no further than this book to find out that there areindeed worse things. Hal Jordan's character maintained a loyal fan base for thirty years, but Kyle Rayner's character gets old, stale, and boring after the first panel. Who cares about this Gen X slacker who had a power ring dropped into his lap without doing anything to earn it? I certainly don't.

For me Hal Jordan will always be the ultimate Green Lantern, but Rayner fills his shoes nicely. Ron Marz follows his brilliant Emerald Twilight story with some surprisingly strong plots. This collection introduces us to Raynor's world. He is a struggling artist with a wild imagination, which is perfect for the character of Green Lanter. Marz also gives artist Daryl Bank some difficult pieces to draw. Instead of using simple baseball bats like Jordan was prone to doing, Raynor conjures up gladiators, robots nad other more imaginative creations through his power ring.

While many people still dwell over the fact that Hal Jordan is no longer with us as the GREEN LANTERN (going nuts and killing all other GL's around then adopting a GOD-like attitude will do that to you), it seems that an equal amount if not more have accepted and ended up loving KYLE RAYNER as the newly appointed GL. This story will take you back to the early days of KYLE, coming to grips with his new destiny. See what made him the hero he is today - recommended reading!!

I found this to be an enthralling page-turner, and I had to restrain myself from reading ahead, but after only a couple of chapters I had a strong sense of deja vu (deja lu?). That the book draws significantly from "Brideshead Revisited" is noted early and often by the author herself, in a disappointingly obvious manner. But "Other People's Rules" also seems to worship at a less-exalted altar, Dominick Dunne's semi-trashy "A Season in Purgatory," a roman a clef loosely based on the Martha Moxley murder and its Kennedy connection. As in "Brideshead" and "Purgatory," the first-person narrator in "Rules" is a middle-class but comparatively impoverished young person drawn in by the privilege and eccentricities of a wealthy family; however, "Rules" resembles "Purgatory" not merely in theme but in plot points as well. While the similarities may be entirely coincidental, they diminished my enjoyment of the book.

This book's grammar and sentence construction is absolutely excrutiating! What was the author/editor thinking? By way of example, check out p.53-54 (of the Harper Collins paperback) where 27 lines are divided into a mere three sentences. The sentence, "It was 1958 and he was hanging out in Soho and lodging with Lady Sadie McGowan, a bohemian grandee who had a large house in Tite Street, where, as Sissy confided to the bridge table, he was paying his way by playing his music at parties and meeting all the wrong kinds of people." is a particular favourite of mine.

That said, if you can grit your teeth through the grammar, the book's plot is gripping and keeps the reader's interest throughout. The last few chapters were a little odd - was there an editorial edit over the ultimate fate of Katie Grisham? It just seemed to me that rather a lot was left to the imagination. Perhaps that was the idea?

Overall comment - worth a read.

15 year old Lucy Diamond finds herself invited by her new friend, Sarah to be a guest in her home, one of the wealthiest and influential families of England. This family has rubbed shoulder with royalty! She is a little overawed by their elegance, extravagence, but is thrilled to be part of it all.

The family seems a little eccentric, with frequent trips away for the mother to 'dry out' and the father, Ivar seems to have a 'thing' for adolescent girls. Lucy finds herself being caught in his web. When the beautiful young heiress, Katie disappears one night from the Gatehouse family grounds, Lucy is shocked to realise that she may hold the key to the mystery. She, perhaps is the last person who saw Katie alive.

Despite her knowledge that the Gatehouse family have enough money and influence to have friends in all the high places, Lucy is brought forward to speak at the muder trial, when Katie's body is found. Will the truth win? Does justice apply to all? An engrossing read.

One of the best Pharmacology book, it does not get into the chemistry of the drugs etc but a very extensive source to read for first time pharmacology exposure. A lot of things that is normally covered in Physiology books are recalled here. Author also provides extensive links between different applications and explanations. Certainly book is written mainly for Nurses but from simple reading and explanations point of view it is very useful for everybody as a reference book.
I enjoyed reading every line of it. authors do not spare on any information to make it clear.

While the material is highly technical, it is presented in a clear, concise manner with excellent end of chapter summaries.
Substantial amounts of background information are presented to ensure a thorough understanding of the physiology of some body systems in order to permit a better understanding of how some medications work. Minimal molecular biology is included. Personally, I liked this text and will be keeping my copy for years to come.

I have to say that this is one of the best text books I've ever had to buy! It's well written, well organized, and thoughtfully prepared. The author presents what might otherwise be very confusing and complicated ideas, and makes them straightforward and easy to understand. Best of all, I actually ENJOY reading this text. Yes, that's right, I enjoy reading about pharmacology! By making the concepts understandable, he makes the whole topic of drugs and their affects on the body interesting. What could be better than that?

The author says the present generation church can be like the first generation church, but how can that be? The first church had 'the same' gospel, there was only 'one denomination' at that time and they were simply called Christians. There was no need for denominations in the early church because disciples all believed 'exactly the same things'. To say the present church can be like the first is to not understand the first.

The teachings in this book merely show how to run a successful corporation for that is was this present generation of many churches has become.

In a time of "Church Growth" gurus, books, and workshops - it is very refreshing to have a book that doesn't focus on bells and whistles and technological ways to manipulate, but calls the church back to the mission given by Christ - to go into the world with the transformative Christian faith. If only those of us in mainline denominations would be willing to lift our eyes off of agendas, useless meetings and other distactions and consider "Reclaiming the Great Commission." Mission, not maintenance, is the call of this book, bringing the focus of the church on God, people, and relationships. Shared vision founded in Biblical faith is the key for the local congregation and the larger church. I recommend this to pastors, priests, lay leaders, bishops, and all who are interested in sharing the Gospel.

Our church is using this book as a model for its vision for the year 2001. Our Daughters of the King prayer group is using this book as its study for the coming year.

I have been using this book for years to help with designing costumes for various Community Theatres and Madrigal Groups. Though the costumes themselves are English, they give you a wonderful idea of what was popular for the elite from every western country during a wide range of periods. The best part of this book is the fact that you can tell they did their research. From the way people changed their movement, to the undergarments that were needed to support the clothing, to how they were decorated, I could go on for another page. It is the perfect resource for anyone who designs for a living or just for fun.

In the words of the authors, "Fashion is the translation of the wearer's personality into the language of clothes," and this volume is a comprehensive overview of the changes in the ideal personality as reflected in the dress of English court dressers, interpreted through secondary sources (paintings, prints, carvings, sculptures and manuscript drawings) during the reign of 31 English monarchs. For each of 56 eras in fashion, clear and detailed B/W drawings (by Hill) of male and female adult dress are presented with a thorough overview (by Bucknell) of general characteristics of the fashion including headware, shoes, and undergarments and a summary of trends in decoration, accessories, movement for both genders, padding and restriction, and typical fabrics and colors. For all illustrated outerwear garments, 1/8" scale pattern shapes (by Bucknell) are provided as a base for adaptation for those interested in re=creation, and are simplified and presented without seam allowances or construction notes. No information is given on construction of foundation garments (corsets, hoops, panniers, padding) which are necessary for many of the garments shown. The book is intended to assist theater designers, cutters, illustrators, costume history drudents, and actors in achieving an accurate silhouette for a given period, and I would say it amply fulfills this goal. Some construction suggestions for theater use are included but nothing on the level of a mainstream fashion pattern, so this book should not be a sole resource for an average home sewer contemplating a period halloween costume. Minimal illustration of placement of details such as pleats, pockets, buttonholes or casings. Patterns have no notches or facing pieces, merely reference letters to mark attachment points on complex constructions. No garments beyond English court dress are covered, so don't look here for Chinese Imperial fashion or Eastern European peasant garb. I found "the big pink book" at a Ren Faire vendors' row and have enjoyed the thoughtful consideration of fashions from the past on many occasions, including construction of a 1550's/1560's era court gown for my wedding. It was particularly helpful to examine the outline of pattern shapes for sleeves and skirts that have not been in fashion for centuries, particularly for the very complex shapes such as bustles, layered flounces, intricate pleating, and extensive boning or wiring. As a professional costumer, I would love to see an index added that might allow readers to review what eras were associated with a particular element of fashion (for example: velvety fabrics, circular hoops, false buttonholes, use of bows as decoration, pastel colors, or very restrictive skirts) but this is minor and the book is quite functional sans index. All in all, a fine and indispensable reference in my library.

This book was the primary text in a costume history course I took in college, and it still stands out among the many costume books I've since accumulated as one of the most helpful. For those concentrating on a particular period who want to see lots of variations within that period--for example, those who are concerned with the difference between an 1853 sleeve and an 1854 sleeve--this is not for them: it depicts the basic style of each period and in written text describes the popular fabrics, trends, and design variations. As an overview that shows what people were wearing during the reign of every English monarch from 1066 to 1930, it is unsurpassed. Where other costume books tend to be vague and skimpy on pre-16th-century styles, this text clearly indicates what year a style belongs to and does not lump together a few drawings as examples of "medieval dress." The book includes patterns for every major garment pictured, but these, as other reviewers have noted, are not for novices. All in all, this is a wonderful book for a variety of purposes.

The back cover of this book states that it covers advanced information on Cisco router configuration. I guess advanced is a relative term for the authors. Unless you are a complete newcomer to the networking field, skip this one... One more thing. I wish publishers would stop using "padding" and "fillers" to fool the reader that the book is more valuable than it really is... I find it to be quite insulting.

I don't like to leave negative reviews, but I think that this is needed to balance out some of the comments left in others. This is a good book for an intro to Cisco routers. If you've never/rarely dealt with routers, than this is a great book. My problem is with people stating this is a good book as a CCNP supplement, it is not. I have my CCNP, and work in a large network that spans the US, Asia, and Europe. To troubleshoot routing issues in an environment this large you need a good understanding of VLSMs, route summarization, and in-depth classless routing protocol knowledge; none of which this book provides. If you are looking for a basic or intro book, than this is great, but if you are looking for in-depth details of routing issues in a large scale network (which most BSCN books provide), then this is not the book for you. I am giving it 2 stars because it is not what it builds itself up to be, this is an intro book. THIS IS NOT A BOOK FOR A COMPETENT CCNP CANDIDATE WORKING IN A LARGE SCALE NETWORK.

This is a good book to use because it explains certain things in a clear fashion without being inaccurate and too basic. The things to be had in this book that you cannot easily find elsewhere are: 1. section on the high end routers 2. IGRP for IPX and IGRP for appletalk 3. Good summary information for routing protocol configuration: rip (v1 and v2), ospf, igrp, and even IS-IS and eigrp for more than just ip (only advanced BGP is covered in the last chapter). 4. Bridging with a router. 5. Dialer Maps AND Dialer Profiles. 6. VPNs with Crypto-maps 7. HSRP. This book is a good supplement for the CCNA and CCNP course materials and helps to "round-out" the CCNA and CCNP materials. Reading over certain parts helps to refresh your understanding of the CCNP materials and impart subtleties such as: IPX RIP and IPX EIGRP destribute routes between each other by default.

Well, here we have the sequel to Mindstar Rising. It has many of the same characters, bringing some old favorites back for a second book.
Overall, this book is 3 stars. Some elements were better than others, obviously. The characters were good, though Eleanor still seems to have no personallity whatsoever. The plot was inplausible, at best, and hard to believe. The writing style was still very interesting, and is, in fact, the only reason that I finished this book at all.
A murder mystery set in future England, with not one but several odd twists. Not good twists really, nor believable, but not too farfetched, if you have a very, very open mind. (I think I'll leave it at that.)
One of the best things about this book though was the fact that the author obviously took some pains to follow semi-known physics, and tried not to bend the laws of the universe too far. Also, even though these things play a major part in the story, the aren't the dominating feature. So, for those of you not interested in theoretical quantum physics, or cosmology, this book won't bore you to tears.
All in all, it flowed (to me at least) better than Mindstar Rising, even if the storyline was a little thin in several places.
I also found the discription of the inside of an insane seriel killer's mind quite interesting; it really makes you wonder.
So, if you liked the first book, chances are that this one will appeal to you as well.

This author writes a well paced book. If you like the idea of
Gland Psychics, Hardliners (body guards) and Cyber
technology, this one is fun.
Good characterisation and a story wonderful!! More speculative SciFi please.

Some years after the events portrayed in Mindstar Rising, Greg Mandell finds himself being called in to help Julia Evans solve the mystery of the murder of a scientist who was doing some work for her company - Things start to get 'interesting' very quickly - in the sense of the Chinese Curse, that is.

Again set in the Rutland area of England, Greg has now married the girl he met in the first book & that adds its own complications (read the book to find out more on that); with psychic abilities also playing a large part in this book, including a very nice twist to 'solving' the murder.

These books always get me thinking, the events are set in the near future, with environmental & political upheavals which are all too possible. A very good read.

If you haven't read 'Mindstar Rising'(the first book), don't worry - this book stands on its own, but you will benefit if you read 'Mindstar' first.

Better still, read the trilogy, you won't regret it.