This book is very well researched, but William O'Brien is a bit boring. Ireland's land wars are difficult to tackle in a rational way, however Sally Warwick-Haller has done a good job, and has tried to make O'Brien interesting. If one is looking for a text for Uni this is a good book for reference. It is a pity that O'Brien did not have as colourful a life as Parnell or Butt

I'll make this review brief:

Cather didn't know how to write very well when she put this novel together. I have read iher style here as being comparable to Henry James... no way. This novel is too short, too abrupt, and too lacking in the details needed to pull off decent character motivation, somethng I find vital to novels dealing with infidelity and love.

The scenes read as disjuncted and they do not develop very well. If you want a short Cather novel that is better and want to avoid the commonplace Death Comes for the Archbishop, then try "My Mortal Enemy" This shows Cather off at the better end of her career.

Light on plot, heavy on symbolism, and a little predictable, Cather's first novel (a novella, actually) still contains moments of brilliance, especially in its strong characterizations and occasional flashes of wit. The story concerns a Boston architect who is contendedly married but suddenly embarks on an affair in London with an old flame from his youth. He soon becomes tormented over his double life but finds himself unable to resolve his conflicted feelings. Heavily indebted to the Gilded Age novelists, "Alexander's Bridge" reads like a typical first novel from a writer who shows a lot of promise.

Later in life, Cather wrote an essay entitled "My First Novels (There Were Two)," as close to an apology for a first novel as most writers ever make. She admitted that most of the "younger writers" in her peer group followed the manner of Henry James and Edith Wharton, "without having their qualifications"; she "thought a book should be made out of 'interesting material.'" Only while writing her next novel, "O Pioneers!," did she realize that "taking a ride through a familiar country"--the rural Nebraska of her youth--was "a much more absorbing process." Nevertheless, "Alexander's Bridge" hints at the virtuoso novelist she was later to become, and it's certainly better than many writers achieve in an entire lifetime.

This was Willa Cather's first novel, and, while showing glimpses of her later talent, is mostly disappointing. The metaphor of the bridge--the conduit to both the past and the future--figures prominently in this story of a Boston architect torn between his ongoing "mid-life" crisis and his energetic, passion-filled past.

The story contains some heavy-handed symbolism (e.g., the bridge), melodramatic action ("With one [hand] he threw down the window and with the other--still standing behind her--he drew her back against him), and awkward phrasing: "'He was simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I have ever known.'"

Still, the story moves along well, and there is an interesting Henry James-like contrast of Europe and America. The beginning nicely portrays the Boston upper class, and the dramatic conclusion includes passages of great strength and imagination. It is in this last chapter, especially, that her skills are most evident. Willa Cather is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "O Pioneers!" "My Antonia," and other great works. Definitely recommended for those with an interest in her work.

O'Brien, the self-proclaimed "renowned ufologist", was incomprehensibly given a second book contract from the geniuses at St. Martins Press after his first tour-de-force, Mysterious Valley.

Apparently having run out of UFO and cattle mutilation stories, O'Brien's second book is a rambling, poorly written discourse on such inane topics as devil sightings, teleporting nuns, self-flagellating religious zealots, cannibalism, hollow-earth stories and appearances of leprechauns.

Don't even think about descending to his level in regard to this book.

Chris O'Brien is intensely intuitive, believably skeptical, and genuinely honest in his new book. But has he been abducted, or brainwashed, or threatened by the govornment? Only you can decide when you read this convoluted, disjointed, and baffling narrative of experiences in the San Luis Valley.

The subject is well researched and presented in a format that draws the reader in. We are presented with reports which are reviewed in an open ended style. The author says something "wonderfull and mysterious is happening" in the region. I'm not sure if I agree that cattle and possible human mutilations are "wonderful" events, but the subject matter cannot be ignored. Compelling enugh to have persuaded a trio of us to plan a trip and "Enter The Valley" this summer for ourselves. Dan

This book did not live up to a previous read "The House of Splendid Isolation", which was mysterious and adventurous. Although I like the fact that O'Brien challenges her readers and makes one search out and think about the mysteries at hand, I found O'Brien's writing style to be too confusing and ambiguous this time. She used pronouns indiscrimately without making a reference to the subject even in the previous paragraph. The writing style was so mixed. After Nell began using drugs the writing became "stream of consciousness" quite a bit; one para of a chapter was even written in the second person while the rest of the book was in 3rd person except for "soc" mentioned above. Motivations were lacking, thus some of the characters were archetyal and cliched such as Nell's husband, Rita the young housemaid, and even Nell's mother to some extent. Part iV where Paddy drowns, was too tragic, grief-stricken, and morose to even read it all. I skimmed as if "peeking through my hands" at a scary or chilling movie. I thought the descriptions and characterizations of the sons was well done and I could empathize with the vacillations of feelings between sons and mother. Nell was a real character who had lots of flaws, whom you could love yet criticize for her poor choices motivated by heart rather than head.

Edna O'Brien has written a novel so bleak and despairing I'd call it a book to cut your wrists by. Is the experience of womanhood all about pain, deprivation and loss ? Is there no joy in the bargain ? You wouldn't think so, judging by the experience of Nell. The cruelty of her husband drives her to seek emotional refuge in her two sons but when they leave the nest, she turns in desperation to a series of unreliable lovers who bring her more misery. The relentless feeling of despair beating upon Nell reaches its climax when she loses Paddy, but by then, the reader is too numb to care. It doesn't help that O'Brien's prose is often dense and turgid. Some critics call it poetic or lyrical, which may be so, but the jerkiness of some of the episodes (eg, in the middle section, with her lovers) makes the narrative difficult to follow. It is sometimes even hard to tell who she's writing about. Her characterisation is also weak, though this may be deliberate. O'Brien isn't interested in anybody other than Nell. The supporting cast of characters are only there to help create the soundtrack playing through Nell's mind. The message that O'Brien delivers on motherhood isn't redemptive either. Paddy's and Tristan's alienation from Nell is, not surprisingly, reminiscent of Nell's estrangement from her own mother. The horror of Nell's emotional existence reaches a crescendo when she stares at a half crazed baglady one day on the streets and sees the ravaged face of her once young housemaid, Rita. There is no more powerful image depicting the madness and despair that will take hold of Nell. "Time and Tide" is emotionally exhausting to read. It isn't quite the artistic failure it is made out to be, but O'Brien could have lightened her touch a tad ! This is not a book for everyone.

"Time and Tide" is an excellent literary novel, very emotional in style and essence. I was deeply touched by this book, and I am very grateful to one of my friends for recommending me Edna O'Brien as an author. Snip: (...)

Here's a little excerpt from the book talking about communion:
"When the priest announces the tremendous words of consecration, he reaches up into the heavens, brings Christ down from His throne, and places Him upon our altar to be offered up again as the Victim for the sins of man. It is a power greater than that of Seraphim and Cherubim. The priest brings Christ down from heaven, and renders Him presenton our altar as the eternal Victim for the sins of man, not once but a thousand times! The priest speaks and lo! Christ, the eternal and omnipotent God, bows His head in humble obedience to the priest's command."
I ask you, "Who is more powerful, a priest or God?" Don't buy this book. Instead go here: ... and buy Preparing Catholics for Eternity. This book will change your life.

This book is an easy to understand explanation of the Roman Catholic Faith. Active Catholics as well as those looking to learn about the faith will find this book helpful and informative.

Nothing is more interesting to me than first hand historical accounts. The book description certainly leads one to believe that this is what this book has to offer. It is, however, 82 pages of grandiose fluff with only occassional quotes from actual diaries. The book is classified as "Women's Studies"; it is, at best, only for children young enough to know nothing of American History.

Good book for an over view of women's lives on the journey West. I would have liked more details.

This is just about the worst piece of crap I've ever read. Sometimes I really wondered how anyone can lable Edna O'Brien a writer. Nothing interesting happens, the charachters are the most non-colourful (can you use that word?) I've ever read about and the circumstances are just unbelievable. A 21 year old girl who knows nothing about nothing. Just cries all the time, thinks she is fat, and dreams about the perfect man (who she by the way thinks only exists in movies and such). On top of all this it's just so badly written. It's like " on the evening we talked about going to a party. Then we went to bed and slept. When we woke up we put on make-up and went to that party..." I mean... it's not like very good reading. I don't recommend it.

If you're looking for a pulp fiction romance don't read this book. On the other hand, if you are open to a subtle, thoughtful book more akin to good literature than dime store characterizations then consider reading The Lonely Girl, a "slice of life" fiction that gives us a peek into the life of a very young, very immature, Dublin girl who has an affair with a much older man. At first blush I was fustrated with the girl thinking she didn't have much of a backbone. But when I started to think more about her age (21) and her utter lack of worldly experience I thought the author did an excellent job depicting the emotional gulf that permanently separates the two: the girl has not had a chance to mature and become her own person, how can she ever maintain a relationship with the older, more worldly man? I think many women (if they are being honest) will also see a bit of their young selves in the Lonely Girl.

This was a terrible book. Multiple authors were not able to successfully make the book flow from chapter to chapter. Character development was disjointed to say the least. Way tooooo much celebrity name dropping...it almost read like People Mag. Buy "The Greatest Player Who Never Lived" instead.

At first I thought this was going to be a serious mystery novel, until I realized that each chapter was written by a different author. It was almost like they were challenging each other, coming up with situations that were more and more ridiculous. I found myself laughing out loud. I should have known something was up when I saw that Dave Barry was one of the writers. It's a great book for those who like golf and for those, like me, that have never swung a club.

It is said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Since a camel is very efficient doing what camels are intended to do, then the remark must mean that a camel is a very funny looking horse. Well, in The Putt at the End of the World, a committee of nine individually popular writers has turned out a very funny golf story.
The Putt at the End of the World is apparently the brainchild of last-listed author Les Standiford, shown as editor and compiler. It also seems to be a salute, at least in part, to recently deceased British writer Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series which includes The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It is certainly reminiscent of Adam's work, with zany characters interacting amidst nefarious schemes, all centered around a golf tournament. But not just any golf tournament. Computer zillionaire Philip Bates has bought a Scottish castle and cleared original growth timber to construct the ultimate golf course-as well as rehabbing the castle into an exotic hideaway retreat. This infuriates both environmental terrorists and the last of the MacLout clan, who claims that the MacGregor sellers usurped his family's claim to the property and he should have gotten the money. Then Bates (no relation to this reviewer) scheduled a conference and golf tournament inviting all of the world's political leaders and top golf players.
One of the invitees is Billy Sprague, club pro from Squat Possum Golf Club in rural Ohio. Billy is a magnificent golfer, unless there is money involved in which case he can't even get the ball of the tee. Billy's mentor is the old retired family doctor whose life is golf, who build the Squat Possum Club and who dies immediately after giving Billy his invitation and telling him that he has to go to Scotland and play in order to lift the curse and "...save the world as we know it..." Then FBI and British Secret Service refugees from the Keystone Kops get involved because of the terrorist threat, and the rest is-not history, but hilarious.
Each of the nine authors wrote one of the chapters. They did a good job matching styles, and/or Standiford did a great job of editing, because the novel is seamless. It is a farce, but at the same time has a "Bagger Vance" note of paean to the wonder of golf. It reads fast, and it reads great.

There are good books and bad books about the Revolution. This one is terrible. O'Brien goes on for 200 pages about Jefferson's support of the French Revolution (so what else is new?) before getting to his real point: Jefferson was a white supremacist because he didn't free his slaves and didn't support the revolution in Haiti. In O'Brien's drunken fantasy, there is something called the "American civil religion" which is going to split and Jefferson will become the patron saint of the white supremacist nutcases like those of Oklahoma City. (there, there, Con, put the bottle down and come to bed) It's a shame, because I recall that years ago O'Brien played a worthwhile--if strongly Anglophile--role in Irish politics. But now he has alighted on our shores to grind several of his European axes and savage a man who has seen worse and as ever emerges unbowed: a great, if complex, inconsistent and highly ambitious, father of our country. If you want to understand the many contradictions in Jefferson's writings and actions, simply read the essay on him in Professor Bailyn's "To Begin the World Anew". Twenty pages with more wisdom than any number of O'Brien's fulminations.

I would give this book a "0" if it were possible. This book by Conor Cruise O' Brien is a postmodernist/deconstructionist
"history" if it can be even called that. O' Brien, a socialist and Burkean, claims Thomas Jefferson was "high on the wild gas of liberty" because he supported the cause of Revolutionary France against the armies of the monarchies of Europe. This book was written to destroy the American people's connection to their great tradition of liberty and republicanism. O' Brien compares Jefferson to the communist butcher Pol Pot because he supported the actions of the Jacobins in the " Reign of Terror". O' Brien of course leaves out the brutality of the ancien regime, and the murders and slaughter metted out by the "holy alliance". Jefferson did believe in dying for liberty, a concept abandoned today by most plugged in Americans. Next O' Brien relates Jefferson is the father of the KKK, the militia movement, and white supremecy. All utter nonsense. If you want a good history of Jefferson and the French Revolution this is not it.

While researching Edmund Burke and the French Revolution, this book offered wonderful and unique insights into the debate through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson during the heat of the French Revolution (and even some things I did not know about Burke). Instead of just giving a personal interpretation, O'Brien relies heavily on primary sources, letting the reader read what the particular person had to say instead of summarizing (or as some authors do, reinterpreting). This book is essential to understanding either Jefferson or the French Revolution.

It is a shame to give this book a "Professional" title - it is rudimental in every sense. I can't even call it a rehash of the manual, because MS documentation is much deeper.
Book is un-inspiring and wriiten in a very bad language.
In general, I see Wrox sliding down on my scale, while Microsoft Press shining. Just try to compare this "Professional" book with Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows with C#"!

Ill-conceived and rushed into print

Wrox sure knows how to put together a beautiful looking book: the dazzling red color of the book cover contrasting with the bright yellow, shadowed titling shows that someone has done their homework on how to attract a reader to a book shelved alongside dozens of other similarly-titled books. Open up one of their books and you'll find a beautiful layout with gorgeous typography employing carefully chosen fonts for the various types of information being conveyed. Their books are chock-full of professional looking diagrams, tables, and screenshots that just suck the beholder into thinking that this must be some excellent book.

Sigh...if only the cosmetics reflected the contents. I know people who buy almost every Wrox book published, yet who express their disappointment time and time again because of a host of shortcomings common to so many of them. Talk about finding the sizzle irresistible regardless of the quality of the meat! "Professional Windows Forms" is a perfect example of a wonderful looking Wrox book that is just plain annoying when you get down into it. The book is supposed to teach you how to program with Windows Forms in the .NET platform (standard thick-client Windows programs). The book does cover all the bases, you can't fault it for that: there is a really good introductory chapter on the .NET framework itself, a fair overview of Visual Studio.NET, a good chapter on event handling (critical for Windows programming), how to connect controls with data from a database (something new with .NET), all the standard Windows controls (buttons, lists, trees, toolbars, menus, whatever), dialogs (modal vs. non-modal) and standard windows, common dialogs, GDI+, a chapter on debugging Windows Forms, even a chapter on localization (internationalization.) The book has all the usual Wrox shortcomings: a host of typos and misspellings, half the examples don't work, the source on the web site does not match the source in the book, sometimes the bugs are in the web site source, sometimes in the book, often in both, class and procedure names differ between the web site source and the book's printed source (so searches often fail), there is inconsistency in the presentation of material from chapter to chapter (because in this case there are eight different authors, which is actually below average for the "Professional" series Wrox books), and there is a lack of focus on the topics presented. There are a couple of extremely elementary chapters that seem completely out of place in a "Professional" series book: "Inheritance and Other Important New Language Features," and an insultingly elementary chapter on interface design (what's a button for, etc.). There are also some topics that may be interesting in themselves but are only marginally related to Windows Forms, such as "Components and Reports." This book is more like a grab-bag than simply Windows Forms. It even touches (but JUST touches) on building web pages with ASP.NET.

All that aside, the thing that I find most annoying about this book is the language mix used to teach the Windows Forms .NET classes. Three fourths of the examples in this book are in VB.NET, the rest in C#. Personally, I don't think any book purporting to instruct us about .NET classes should be using VB.NET, because the prolix and convoluted syntax of this horribly ugly language stands in the way of us clearly seeing what is going on with the .NET classes themselves, the actual topic under discussion. C# has far superior didactic power for this purpose, since it is concise and clean and lets the workings of the classes shine through transparently. A case could be made for saying that the only .NET books that should have VB.NET code in them are books whose main purpose is to teach VB.NET (it will be a detriment to the industry if this language catches on, but that is another story). But to mix VB.NET and C# in the same book, where there is not a total duplication of code for both languages (as some .NET books do), well this is simply egregious. Up to now, all serious Windows programmers, to whom presumably this book is addressed, have used either C with the Win32 SDK or C++ with MFC (or ATL). The natural language for this book's audience is C#, not VB.NET. To burden this audience with VB.NET for exposing the Windows Forms classes is an affront. Then to tease us with a little C# in an occasional chapter, especially when follow-on chapters later in the book are then presented in VB.NET, is a terrible frustration and road block for learning the actual topic at hand. Why cover up the meat with this mess of a language when it is so much more natural to expose it in C#? What was Wrox thinking? Especially nitty-gritty code like illustrating GDI+ you'd want to look as clean as possible, but they chose to write this intense chapter in the muck of VB.NET!!! Oh, how I wished I'd waited for "Programming Windows with C#" by Charles Petzold, which only just now came out. Unfortunately, "Professional Windows Forms" was the only game in town at the time I bought it and I did not look at it close enough before I brought it home and started getting into it, being suckered into it by its wonderful cover and smart typography. Oh, the price we sometimes have to pay for being early adapters!

With practically every book on .NET focusing (screaming ?) on Web Services and ASP.NET, this book is a welcome addition to those like me who write classic applications .. this book has been written wrox-style, with several code samples and a logical progression of content .. since this book has been published before VS.NET release, one can run into minor problems in running the code with the release version of vs.net.. but if you are brave enough to venture into VS.NET, then you should be brave enough to modify and compile them in the release version. Each new control in the toolbox has been discussed in the context of a project .. inheritance has been covered well with good samples .. chapter on components/reports is very new and helpful as these are new to the toolset of the .net programmer .. a comprehensive chapter on deployment will come in handy for those of us who deal with deployment as well ..case study at the end of the book is right-on-target in putting windows forms piece of the .NET into action .. since the title does not refer to either vb.net or c#.net, the code samples and discussions are both in vb.net and c#.net ..

again, with all the hoo-ha about web services and asp.net, classic applications are renegated to the back-burner .. but after one installs vs.net and tries to write their first "hello world" program, one will have to start with windows-forms to warm up to vs.net .. this book provides a good foundation for warming-up to vs.net .. could not give a 5-star rating since security issues are not covered