I just wrote a review of Australia Handbook and decided to have a look at the reviews for Lonely Planet's Australia guide. I bought both books as well as Frommer's and Fodor's guides for my trip to Australia. I have used many Lonely Planet guides through the years, but must agree with the comments of other posted reviews--it is oriented almostly solely to young people out looking for a a job picking fruit and wanting to know the latest nightclub hotspot. I did find the first sections of this book to be thorough on the country's history and what to expect, but as for myself and my wife (40 year olds staying in motels and with a rental car) it was useless once we got there. Lonely Planet is also way behind when it comes to listing websites.

These books may serve budget travelers well, but for my money, it's the Frommer's or Moon book.

Australia is such a vast and diverse nation that it is impossible to cover the entire country in one book.

Lonely Planet was a great starting ground. It gave excellent overviews of all of the major cities, the best of the outback, and the superb national parks. Lonely Planet also publishes guides for every Australian state, a few areas, and many smaller guides to dining, and the cities.

My advice to any traveler to Australia is to read LP Australia before departing. Then, once you have a clear idea of what you want to see, read the LP guides specific to that area. Lonely Planet is by far the best for Australia that I have seen out there.

The new 11th edition (May 2002)of this Lonely Planet Guide is excellent. I grew up in Australia and travel back frequently. The publisher is based in Melbourne, so this book has unique "at the source" information and tips. This updated edition solves most of the problems of previous editions. Yes, things change -- so always refer to the most recent edition available. Australia is a fascinating island continent.

Mary McNamara's life in rural western Ireland is that of a typical young teenager until one day while she is on a walk on their land, her father violates the most sacred bond between parent and child and rapes her. Unable to tell anyone, she keeps the secret, except for her diary entries. When the abuse results in an unwanted pregnancy, it precipitates a national crises when she is taken to England for an abortion.
Based on real events, this novel accurately portrays how a Catholic nation can be inflamed over a cause such at this even while the morality of the citizens is in decline as evidenced by premarital sex, living in sin, affairs, and out of wedlock births.
While I enjoyed the story of Mary's plight, the novel itself was often times confusing with so many characters and shifts in focus so that after awhile you sort of lost track of who was who. By the end I was thinking it could have been told in a much more straightforward manner in less pages.
Mary's father, James, the obvious villan in this book, is a tragic figure. He seems a contradictory character, gentle with his livestock, proud of his daughter's accomplishments at school, and missing her presence, even while he violates her. Without a wife to serve his needs, it seems Mary is to fulfill that role on all counts. In the end it is hard to feel much more than pity for this pathetic nature.
Mary, for being all of fourteen, seems stronger than either of her parents in enduring the many hardhsips and allowing herself to be used by different fractions for their own purposes. It is hard to imagine what her life would be like afterwards, though the last pages try to give us a glimpse of her new life.

They say the curse of the Irish is the drink. But to understand your own brutal, beautiful country as well as Edna O'Brien understands hers must be a bigger curse by far. There's no way a blessed person could have written a novel as shimmering, as ruthless and as devastating as "Down by the River": it's evidence of something more than mere talent, or even genius, at work. O'Brien's gifts are magnificent and terrifying, along the lines of stigmata and clairvoyance -- the kind of gifts that mark you.

Inspired by a case in Ireland, in which a 14-year-old rape victim was forbidden by the courts to leave the country to obtain an abortion, "Down by the River" is the story of Mary MacNamara. After being raped by her father, Mary conceives his child. A sympathetic neighbor brings her to England for an abortion, but the authorities haul them back, cowing them with their ugly threats. Mary refuses to name the baby's father, and her case becomes a cause that turns her own friends and neighbors against her. She's seen as both a villain and an object of sanctimonious condescension in the Catholic community.

That community's cruelty is the bitter, driving force of the book -- but it's Mary's suffering and loneliness that are at the heart of it. After a street musician befriends her (he lets her stay at his flat for a few days and buys her a cheap sweater), she writes him a letter: "I nearly died when you gave me that jumper. You shouldn't have. Turquoise is my favorite color. There are two kinds of alone, there's the kind which you are and the kind which I am. Your alone is beautiful, it's rich." It's a passage that takes you apart, the way a teenager's breathless enthusiasm is crushed by the young woman's overwhelming sense of fear and isolation.

O'Brien never takes the easy way out: not even Mary's father is painted as a monster. She describes how he helps birth a colt -- reaching into the mare's womb and coaxing it out by both brute strength and force of will, saving the mother's life in the process -- with such grace and tenderness that even against your will, you feel yourself almost, almost, growing to understand him.

But O'Brien doesn't hold back when it comes to her wrath at the Catholic Church, and at the small-minded Irish who slavishly follow it at the expense of their own humanity. O'Brien has lived in London for more than 20 years -- she isn't welcome in her own country, for obvious reasons -- and yet Ireland will never leave her. Her stories work on us exactly the way her homeland has worked on her. They can stare you down and tear you apart like a wolf -- and then, miraculously and tenderly, bring you back to life again, stronger and better than before. With "Down by the River," O'Brien marks us as well: it's the kind of book that takes days, maybe weeks, to shake.

Edna O"Brien's story of a young girl who becomes pregnant by a relative is based on a true story.Her version successfully captures the horror and shame thrust( by supposed christians and do gooders) upon the victim of incest and rape who is too young and naive to really understand why she can't have an abortion,or why she has become of such interest to so many people.A thought provoking and sad novel which calls in to question any one who believes that all abortion or a woman's right to choose should be illegal.

I disliked this book, not because of the lack of sex and alcohol (as did another reviewer), but because the characters seemed so woodenly constructed and the environment unrealistic. I don't know how much research the author did for this book, but I certainly didn't feel like he's ever had a meaningful conversation with a stripper in his life. I was expecting something out of the ordinary, but basically "Stevie" was the same typical stripper archetype that appears in tv movies. I could relate to the character of Carroll to a degree, but he lacked any fire. The unfoldment of the plot, with each chapter being a day/night seemed to work, but unfortunately it was a spark in a mostly unimpressive book. Carroll's struggles at work were boring and lifeless. I know that it was meant to portray the ennui of his life, but it shouldn't bore the reader. Overall, the book was disappointing because of a lack of surprises and a lack of humor.

I need to collaborate on a biography of this O'Brien fellow...any takers?

A perfect rendition of the life everyone lives . . . lonely, secluded, and surreal. The novel screams of O'Brien's talent to connect with the seedy and realistic side of our world. First class entertainment. Maybe it should be retitled "Life Lessons." A must read for everyone, especially O'Brien fans.

I just passed the CVoice exam and this was one of the (few available) books that I used. I also used the Cisco Interactive Mentor for VOIP and found it to be FAR superior to this book, both in terms of general technical info and test preparation. I also recently picked up Integrating Voice and Data Networks (Cisco Press) and what I've read so far has convinced me that there is no reason on earth to buy this book anymore -- the long awaited "good Cisco VOIP book(s)" are here, and this is definitely not one of them.

Aside from the IPv6 padding (which I also objected to), I also had a real problem with the author's writing style -- it was almost like someone just typed up some random notes. I can't understand what the 5 star reviewers are talking about ... this book is definitely NOT going to be a classic. My only hope is that there isn't a second edition.

Save your money and buy the CIM or Cisco Press book.

This book provides excellent technical examples on how to configure Cisco VoIP products.

The last chapter also includes information on the new AVVID IP phones. Information that I have been looking for.

Also, valuable information that I haven't been able to find elsewhere such as how WFQ is not optimal for VoIP QOS and how CBWFQ and IP RTP Priority solve this problem.

Good coverage of QOS concepts.

While this isn't the end and be all book on VoIP it provides a good foundation for getting starting on the voice features in Cisco routers. For those of you that have to justify integrating VoIP into your network the first chapter covers some of the business reasons for doing so.

The coverage on the different QOS methods I found helpful. Understanding the difference between WFQ and CBWFQ and why one should use the latter helped. The configuration examples were great, I just wish that there were more included.

An apt W.B. Yeats couplet introduces Tim O'Brien's new novel: "We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare."

When he issued his best work, In the Lake of the Woods (1994) O'Brien gave assurances that he had got the Vietnam War out of his system.

On the strength of July, July (a) that is not quite true and (b) it doesn't matter all that much. The author is cruel, serious and funny; in great form here. This is only his second novel in eight years, a point in favour of writers holding their fire until they have more to say.

It is a stiflingly hot Minnesota weekend in 2000. A college group stages a delayed 30-year reunion, recalling the vicious years when even "the most ordinary human snapshots would be fixed in memory by the acidic wash of war".

A corny premise, you might think. Do we really need one more American book or film reuniting the golden children of the '60s carved up by drugs, phoney idealism and the Vietnam War?

But the cast of characters that flows off the pen is outstanding. A bruised, brittle group of flower-power veterans maintains a deeply human and alarmingly persistent thirst for love and vengeance.

David, the war amputee, hears voices so nagging and accurate that ultimately they can only be his own. The beauty of the class, another one troubled by dead people whispering in her ear, manages two husbands concurrently, until her "unblemished sovereignty" over men is brought undone by a third affair.

Two other women have had too little sex for years, but surprisingly different romantic fates befall them. The Governor of Minnesota, mysteriously unnamed, parades his trophy fiancee. The years have levelled "the bumpy playing field" between the aspiring male scientist and the fading female librarian.

Meanwhile, Marv, the rich mop-factory man, muses over his short-lived episode of thinness and sexual desirability. When his delectable girlfriend finds out that he is not a famous writer after all, Marv retorts nonchalantly, "No, but I'm skinny."

David was meant to marry Marla, and unfortunately did. Dorothy never married Billy, who is still paying out on her for not following him to Canada when he fled the draft.

"It's such a Karen sort of thing, getting killed like that," frowns ferocious Amy on the first page, damning a perennially awkward classmate murdered the year before the reunion - the same Amy who continually reminds her old friend Jan that she is still a frump, and cheerfully advises a young fellow to "go kill himself" when he objects to her old-fashioned jukebox choices.

Notable qualities of writing that lifted In the Lake of the Woods do the same for July, July.

It is almost obligatory for the American literary novel to flash forwards and backwards throughout. O'Brien's nice variation is that longer narratives of the past alternate with rapid fire segments from the present, as the diminishing celebration party lurches from reunion dance to buffet breakfast to memorial service to banquet dinner.

If the '60s have been a blitzkrieg for the group, the new millennium is still a battle. Subtly, O'Brien stages the reunion proceedings almost as a form of guerrilla warfare, streaked with sudden firefights and dangerously shifting alliances. The past dominates, new wounds are sustained in the skirmishes, but a bleak promise is also sustained.

The author retains a keen sense of what to close off and what to leave open in his fiction. The novel concludes with a hint of fresh tragedy. Defying the chequered history of her generation, Jan is left to take the last word. "We're golden," she brightly tells Amy.

This reads less as cynicism on O'Brien's part, more as an admission that only the gravest ironies will keep us sane in the face of the harshness to which Yeats alludes.

(From the Canberra Times, 9 November 1992)

Well, I know the NYT reviewed panned it and nobody is going to go around saying it's Tim O'Brien's best novel. I mean, after he wrote The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods, it must be tough for the poor guy to compete with himself.
But if he hadn't written those books, if this was the first thing he'd written, I'd have given it 5 stars.
July, July has a big cast of characters, a group of college graduates returning for their 30th reunion, and the characters intermix and mingle as people will during a reunion weekend, making it sometimes difficult to keep track of who's who.
Inserting pivotal tales from Julys past, O'Brien give us wonderful explorations of universal themes in this daring novel: hope, love, disappointment, despair, and of course the Vietnam War.
A couple of chapters from July, July appeared as separate short stories in The New Yorker, and they work well in that way, especially the bittersweet and tragically funny story of Dorothy confronting her husband's discomfort regarding her mastectomy by getting plastered and walking topless toward him down the driveway. The reaction of her elderly next-door neighbor is masterful. Utterly priceless.
The book is a testament to the entire generation of us who grew up in the long shadow of Vietnam.

I loved the review from dannyj999, the 18-year-old, who suggested that 50-somethings might like this book more than he did. As an exact cohort of Tim O'Brien, I wondered myself as I read July, July, understanding every aspect of O'Brien's frame of reference, whether readers outside the Vietnam generation would find much of interest here. In the early going, the book filled me with desperation. Our generation suddenly seemed so old and irrelevant. Then again, what do you expect from a college reunion? But by the end O'Brien rescued several characters from the scrapheap, and left the reader -- this reader anyway -- with a needed sense of redemption. He's a master weaver by now, a terrific story-teller, full of dark humor.

I'm always curious about the place of the Vietnam War in O'Brien's novels. This one doesn't disappoint. As we stand on the brink of more warfare, July, July did give me a momentary chill as I pondered whether today's Cheneys and Powells were the McNamaras and Bundys of 1962.

Two thumbs up.

Save your money and purchase the REAL stories 'outlined' in this cheap book put together to ride the wave of The Perfect Storm. The collection of stories is nothing more than a collection of extended abstracts of the real stories. Many of the 'abstracts' are taken out of context and the reader does not get an accurate picture of what and why the nautical situation developed or how it concluded. Pass on this one.

This book is in a series put out by Adrenaline books and each book contains certain selections chosen by the editor. The selections are either excerpts from books, excerpts from diaries and journals, short stories, or an occasional essay. I look at how good the writing is, and how good the stories are.

There are 16 selections in this book. Half of them range from good to great, and the other eight are fairly poor. The writing is okay throughout, with some being more exceptional than others, but it's the stories that differ the most in quality. Six of them, whether written well or not, have virtually no story whatsoever or are very poor. As it turns out, the best stories in this book are also some of the better written. This is where the book's strength shows up. The selections introduce you to stories and books you may have never read and after reading some of the good selections, it makes you want to go read the books they were taken from. So I would mostly recommend this book to people who have not read much or any sea stories. It introduces you to a wide variety of sea literature. But otherwise I would only lightly recommend it by saying that everyone would find some selections that they really like.

Clint Willis has created a fascinating series of books with Epic, Climb, High, Wild, Ice, Rough Water, and The War. Each of these volumes presents the best literature about their respective subjects in a powerful cohesive manner. These books are a quick read, but intricate and spellbinding. I have given many of them to friends and family as gifts.

I don't generally read Romance novels. If I accidentally read one, then I generally dislike it. The genre and I are simply not made for each other. Legend of the Seventh Virgin is different, in that it and I have a history together. Between the ages of 8-11 I must have read this book 60,000,000 times, and when I saw it in the store I had to buy it to see if it was as I remember.

It may be that Victoria Holt is a formulaic writer. I've never read any of her other books, so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that the same impressions I had as a child came back to me very strongly. I loved Kerensa and I hated Mellyora. I totally supported Kerensa's decision about Nellyphant and would have done exactly the same. The one signal difference, I suppose, is that I felt much less dissatisfied about the ending than I did as a child (her fate no longer seeming so awful to me).

I kind of figure that anything that vivid can't be all bad.

As I read this book, at first I was becoming a little frustrated. When is our lady Ms. Carlee/St. Larnston going to attain to that mountain top and stay there. Then I began to become aware that each time she began to elevate, some flaw of character or motive (greed, pride, whatever) began to become evident and she would be brought low. This is a story about real life, which is not a "live happily ever after" situation by any means. The story leaves her after a series of a strong introspection following a couple of near brushes with death and a deep emotional disappointment, at a good starting point, low again, but poised for a good revival this time. I guess the author left the sequel of the story up to the reader.

I like the story because it speaks of my own personal experiences with life and what resolves I have come to at each rise and fall .

Could the author have been familiar with the following passage from Jeremiah 18:

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: "Go down to the potter's house, and there I will give you my message." So I went down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

I had perceived a striking resemblance to these principals in the story.

Legend of the Seventh Virgin is an interesting book in the Victoria Holt canon. I am going to name another book and author: "Cotillion", a Regency romance by Georgette Heyer, who invented that particular genre. Holt, too, invented a particular kind of modern Gothic with a strong romantic element, which was an instant success in the same way as the Regency. Anyway, "Cotillion" is a novel in which Heyer subtly subverts the traditions and mores of the Regency genre - rules she herself established! - and "Seventh Virgin" is a novel in which Victoria Holt explores the themes of the particular genre that she created. (She was influenced by Charlotte Bronte, but made the modern first-person narrative Gothic historical romance her own). I think this is what makes it so particularly interesting - Holt experiments with heroines and lead characters, playing around with their roles and our expectations, manipulating the rules she herself established (and unfortunately later depended too much upon) for this genre. Snare of Serpents, one of the better of her later books shows similar experimentation with the roles of hero and heroine and subversion of our expectations.

The book is, as we expect from Holt, interesting with the customary mysterious buildings and ruins, the intriguing characters with the dark pasts, the sense of fear and dread and the eventual, startling, unexpected conclusion. However, I did not particuarly like the last chapter, which appeared to be an after-thought, a whole other separate study, as if it belonged to a collection of short stories or in a folder of experimental jottings. Having said that, Legend of the Seventh Virgin is still a great Holt, a mysterious, slightly subversive Gothic which courageously plays a game with the author's own rules and ways. If you are studying the development of the Gothic romance through the ages, you should try to refer to this book as well as to Holt's "Mistress of Mellyn" to sufficently represent her work in this genre. It is dissatisfactory in some ways, but as a friend said:

"I thought it was an interesting twist upon the Gothic plot. The characters didn't deserve the fates that would normally befall them. So they didn't"

I think this sums it up pretty well, really. A brave and relatively successful experiment on Holt's part.

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (Dell, 1897)

The Spoils of Ponyton is the first novel James wrote in his "later style," in other words, drawing-room satire that isn't really about much of anything at all. For some odd reason, later-era James is what's universally praised in lit classes around the globe, while the early stuff, which is actually worth reading, is largely ignored.

To be fair, James did get better at satire as time went on, but The Spoils of Ponyton has all the hallmarks of being a first attempt at a stylistic change. The novel centers on two characters who are utterly incapable of action, which wouldn't be so bad if the characters who were doing the acting were more involved. Such is, sadly, not the case. Owen and Fleda just sort of drift and react; as the book is told from Fleda's point of view, we end up with page after page of something that, in the hands of a better author (even a later James, had he re-written it) would have come off as uber-Tevye; weighing the various merits of various courses of action, not being able to decide on a course, and letting fate take her where it will. In Fiddler on the Roof, it works (largely because Tevye's monologues are brief and to the point); in Poynton, it blithers on endlessly, with all the fascination for the reader of watching cheese spoil.

If you're new to James, by all means do yourself a favor and start with something he wrote earlier in his career. Leave Poynton until after you've developed enough of a taste for James to pick up later-era works, and then read the major ones before diving into this. *

I give this three stars in an internal world where 5 is James at his best. In comparison to most fiction the rating would be higher, but as a DEVOUT fan, I live in my own internal world. In that world, James who was more critical than any of us, would understand that in comparison to other later era work and even middle period work, Spoils does not live up to his best. It is fun and light, another reviewer mentioned obvious signs of a stylistic shift perhaps being too obvious here. That feels on the money to me. That said, if you've read almost everything, it is a light turn with the Master and that has something delicious in it no matter what.

I read this one a few years ago, and I have to rank it at the bottom of the list (along with "The Europeans").

Though Fleda Vetch can be fascinating in a Hamlet-esque way (through her infuriating inability to act), this novel is far from a must-read as far as James goes.

I can't begin to describe my disappointment in this book. Perhaps it was simply Hilary Mantel's writing style but I found it annoying to try to follow her train of thought. Often I wasn't sure of the narration perspective; was it O'Brien's narration at times and then at others the author's? I'm frankly amazed at the books apparent popularity.

I was completely entranced and delighted by this book, and disappointed by the reader reviews of it. Hilary Mantel's style is spare - nothing more than the strange essence of her story. There is no spoon-feeding here, and thus, is probably not for mainstream tastes. But it's great, quirky transportation to a truly other time and place. Oh yes, and fine good humor with the pathos! Was really sorry it ended so quickly.

Hilary Mantel often includes the theme of exploitation in her novels, but nowhere is it as prominent as it is in The Giant, O'Brien. Set in the 18th century, it is the story of the naïve Irish giant Charles O'Brien, who, poverty-stricken, allows himself to be taken to London where he will be a "freak" for the amusement of the public. Everyone wants to profit from him, from his Irish friends who accompany him, to the agent who contracts with him and the people who house him. Amiably, he tells tales on his travels to amuse his companions, all paralleling in some way the freakishness of his own life and all ending badly: a proud woman's beautiful child is taken and a "yellow child, its skin flapping, its eyes running and its nose snuffling" is substituted; the seven dwarves are beaten to death, "each dwarf watching the pulping of his brother" while "Snow White" is punched in the face, spat at, and driven from the cottage by fire; a pig-faced girl, instead of being rescued by the love of a prince, lives a long life of loneliness. Sensitive and creative, the Giant is a marked contrast to Dr. John Hunter, a "scientist" who collects bones, does research on diseases, and even accidentally inoculates himself with syphilis, allowing him to study it more closely. Hunter's goal is to acquire the bones of the Giant. As both the Giant and Hunter become more ill with the progress of their diseases, the book reaches its climax, leaving the reader to ponder many of the conflicts Mantel has illustrated-creativity vs. scientific research, naivete vs. knowledge, hope vs. despair, charity vs. exploitation-and ultimately, the big question: in what ways, if any, have humans risen above the level of animals.

I thought the excesses of the 1980's had long since passed but then comes along this massive (and expensive) volume on Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the Kings of the 80's art scene two decades ago. Sadly, like much art from that period, Basquiat's faux-primitve paintings come across more like deliberate attempts at critical and commercial success than intuitive genius from a true visionary painter. The art world and its consumers were desperate and happy in the 80's to champion "street art" and graffiti with the growing popularity of folk art in the 1970's. The professional art world latched on to it's own, professional artists working in a vernacular style (Haring, Scharf, Basquiat) in order to appear open to less progromatic art. With folk art, critics and museums of modern art were caught looking backward and left behind. Urban street art, positioned as being more sophisticated and hip, was marketed to an eager consumer market. Is this truly great art? Is Basquiat worthy of a ...book signed by a gallery owner (seller)? Is this the best modern art has to offer? Looking at page after page in this retrospective book becomes a tedious task. The words don't add up to the great poetry of Dickens or Whitman. The artwork can be found in its purer form on the streets of any urban city. Try taking a walk through New York city and leave this book behind. ...

I still dind't get this book..but I think it is very nice.My major is visual communication art,so I'm always read books about art.I know many American artist,especially I'm mad about him.If you look his works,you can feel "nature".Maybe It will be a good guide to beginners.

this is the fifth book i have on basquiat and i am very happy to say that most of the works reproduced in this gorgeous book do not appear in any of the other books i have on him. the quality of the work is splendid and the reproductions are gorgeous! and the book is thick and a treat to look at! i would recommend it to anyone who loves basquiat's brillant works. the guy was a genius and he shines in this book!