SMALL SOLDIERS Small soldiers is about a man called Larry who invented THE COMMANDO ELITE a squadron of muscle army guys.There was also a man called Irwin who invented THE GORGONITES a collection of strange monsters.But the boss Mr.Mars wanted toys that when you play with them they play back so they sended the toys to a kid called Alan so when he got them he started selling them.He got 6 COMMANDOS the leader was MAJOR CHIP HAZARD the rest are LINK STATIC,BRICK BAZOOKA, KIP KILLIGAN,BUTCH MEATHOOK,AND NICK NITRO.Also 7 GORGONITE the emasery of the GORGONITES was ARCHER and the rest are OCULA,PUNCH-IT,SCRATCH-IT,INSANIAC SLAMFIST,and who use to be TROGLOKHAN is FREAKENSTAIN. THE SMALL SOLDIERS WILL BE WON.

I gotta say that this book is a lot better than the movie.I like the part where the GORGANITES go to the lake on the boat that Alan had gave them. I would wish that there was a part 2 !!!!!!!!!!!

This book is about this guy named Alan.He gets a delivery of some talking toys.But these toys aren't ordinary toys.There toys that destroy everything in their path.And there is no off switch!

Even though I do not have children yet - I purchased this book for a friend. It was absolutely marvelous! I could not quit laughing and thinking at the same time how true it was after watching all of my friends go through the process!! I will definitely purchase additional copies to put with my shower gifts and go back and read it again when I decide to finally have children! I especially liked the work references!

I loved the collection of poems in this book. It takes you from the beginning to the end with continuously hilarious poems relating to pregnancy and childbirth. I am pregnant with my first child and this book has helped me keep my sense of humor while experiencing all aspects of pregnancy. The illustrations were also unique and imaginative.

I laughed so hard I peed a little! This book is so VERY true, so VERY funny, and really helps make the experience of pregnancy easier on the mother-to-be. I've been pregnant for 8 months now (feels like 8 years) and I wish I'd had this four months ago! Thank you, Ms. Hodes, for such a wonderful gift for mothers everywhere!
(In case you don't catch my drift by now, I highly reccomend this book if you know someone who's pregnant or have been pregnant yourself. You'll love it!)

This well-written and detailed booked about a young man who takes drastic measures to avoid being caught in a family snare kept me returning to it's pages night after night. It is filled with intrigue, passion, desire, mystery and more. I recommend taking this book along on a vacation.

Spiders and Flies is a gripping and thrilling ride into the psychological underbelly of desperation and desire. Vividly hallucinatory and lush, this book kept tight in its visceral web from the first page to the last.

In a short book, Adlerberg gives a travelogue of the emotional landscape of noir, with snapshots of isolation, passion, treachery, longing, and sociopathology. Paul Raven is as alienated an anti-hero as they come: unspeakably lonely, self-justifying of the most appalling acts, oblivious to consequences. Born into a different set of circumstances, he could be Gordon Gekko. This is a book at home on the shelf with early Ian MacEwan. A great vacation read, though perhaps not for those who want to lay on a Caribbean beach.

Intriguing from beginning to end, this first effort by Mr. Browning will be a light in the wilderness for more to come.

This book is a compelling adventure story set in the world's most unforgiving continent,
Antarctica. The characters are well-drawn, the plot clips along nicely, and the author's
descriptions of the vast, frozen hinterland are at times poetic. As I read, I couldn't help
but envision this tale being spun on film. Browning's movie industry experience has given this
story the edge it needs to become a box-office hit. I recommend this book for adults
only due to violence, moderate sexual content, and colorful language. For busy people without much
time for leisure reading, Scott Browning provides a fast-paced, fascinating diversion that can easily
be read in a few evenings, provided ofcourse that the reader can put the book down!

Having been the owner of a fast growing small business for the past 14 years and involved in many community and professional activities (in addition to family responsibilities), I have not taken the time to read an entire book for years, and I have not read a novel since before I started my business. I've bought recommended books from time-to-time, read the first few chapters, but have never finished reading any of the books.

Recently, a good friend recommended Scott Browning's book, Searchers, and I actually read it from cover to cover! I fould Searchers to be extremely enjoyable reading. The tale is filled with intrigue, excitement, adventure, risk, surprise and human emotion. I've always enjoyed science fiction, particularly when it is founded on theories that could someday prove to be reality.

I think Scott Browning's Searchers would appeal to most busy entrepreneurs who have an inherent drive to pursue the adventure of the unknowm and take risks. I recommend Searchers highly to other entrepreneurs as an outstanding diversion from the routing reading of business books and articles.

Chuck McCabe
President & CEO
Peoples Income Tax, Inc.

I was impressed. My girlfriend has been trying to get me to get out of the country for an experience that wasn't available here. I was given an opportunity to go on an archaeological dig in Peru and after fighting the negatives of leaving for 3 months, I was given this book and within 24 hours of finishing it I was in my bosses office with my initial proposal to go. It was great. If you want to know how the Leave went...I will let you know in August.

If polls are to be believed, nearly 70% of people with incomes of $40,000 or more a year (that's tens of millions of people out there) fantasize about taking time off from work (besides the standard 2-week vacation). Well, my wife and I were two of those people just a few years ago, feeling tired and burned out after almost 10 years in our jobs, and just basically in need of a break big-time. Plus, some friends of ours had taken a year off to travel the world, and we thought that would be awesome, since we both loved to travel and wanted to do a lot more of it before we "settled down" or got too much older. But how? I'm not saying it was simple or for everybody, but it CAN be done, and Six Months Off helped show us how.

Actually, my wife and I ended up taking MORE than 6 months off (by 2 months, to be exact). During our time off, we were on "Leave Without Pay" from our jobs, which we negotiated with our employers, but were still covered by health insurance. Mainly, we traveled: around Central and South America, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. We also took immersion Spanish classes and lived with local families in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, took some time to travel the United States (mainly through Kentucky, Tennessee, and down the Mississippi River to New Orleans). We rented out our condo, put our stuff in storage, called the IRS to find out what we needed to do as far as taxes were concerned, and found someone (my father) to handle our finances/personal affairs while we were gone. In all of this, Six Months Off was a great help in planning, as well as in knowing what to expect in terms of expenses and a million other things, including adjusting back into the "real world" when our sabbatical was over! Budgeting (we didn't go broke) is important, of course, as is health care, insurance, and having a job when you get back (although some decide to just wing it and look for a job after -- or more accurately, IF -- they come back).

Basically, we probably could have figured most of what we needed to do on our own, but Six Months Off (and other resources, like friends) were extremely helpful in making things go more smoothly. Many people dream of taking time off to pursue a dream, but very few actually do it. Six Months Off shows you how you CAN do it, and leads you through it step by step. I strongly recommend this book, and I strongly recommend taking Six Months Off if at all possible! What an amazing experience!

I found Six Months Off to be a phenomenal help in planning a sabbatical. The book gave me an an entire, but concise, philosophy or way of thinking about my sabbatical. The book also gave me a concrete and useful strategy for planning the sabbatical, covering ALL the bases from how to tell my boss to how to save money to places to help plan the actual time off and, then, finally for how I could re-enter the work force again. Truly phenomenal. The authors, led by Hope Dlugozima, have hit a home run with me.

Some have accused Proust of being "long-winded." However, he suffered acutely from shortness of breath but not shortness of breadth. Proust preferred to work on a large canvas. Having read the first four volumes of "In Search of Lost Time," I am even more convinced that Proust is a literary talent of the highest order. He is a writer of immense sensibility in the true sense of the word. His perception and memory and intelligence permeate his writing. Like Balzac, whom he admired, Proust focused his sensibility upon high society in Paris in his heyday. He continually discoursed about the the manners of the circles in which he moved and sheds light, as did Balzac, on the complexities of the strata and protocol and behavior of his social peers. One is able to get a close look at this realm in which he was considered a literary luminary and rightly so, after winning France's greatest literary prize at such an early age. Like Balzac he built his volumes in a "serial" fashion by ending each in dramatic fashion: the characters reappear from volume to volume. And one learns about their health, their misfortunes, their affairs often through the hearsay of other characters, as it happens in real life. Despite the despicable ways that the characters often treat each other, Proust speaks within the tapestry of the "human comedy" as the humble voice of reason. "When you reach my age you will see that society is a paltry thing, and you will be sorry that you put so much importance to these trifles," a judge observes. But for Proust society was his life and his legacy is partly at least the light that he sheds upon his own human comedy. The beauty of the language is breathtaking --the language is utterly lyrical and once one surrenders to the pulse and flow of his long sentence syntax, one finds the transforming genius of his art. I am eager to begin Volume 5 -- the man is a bonafide genius. He deals with sensitive subjects in good taste and with sage discretion -- Proust communicates with his readers as he probably did in society: honestly, articulately and with the best of all manners. He didn't live long enough to read the publication of half the volumes of his greatest masterpiece: Volume 4 was the last he lived to see published. What an absolute pity!

In this, the fourth volume of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (a.k.a. "Remembrance of Things Past"), the narrator is suddenly exposed to a new level of worldly knowledge, a knowledge that the previous volumes foreshadowed but never openly discussed. The volume begins at the apex of society, more or less where the previous volume ends (i.e., a reception at one of the fashionable Guermantes). We are then taken on a somewhat bumpy ride down from that peak, to the lesser salon of the Verdurins (previously seen through Swann's eyes in vol. 1) and the narrator's less-than-admirable conduct toward Albertine. Along the way, as the narrator becomes more of an actor in, and less of an observer of, the world, Proust's style likewise becomes, at times, more traditionally novelistic. Yet it retains the unique insight, precision, and vitality that make reading Proust a life-changing experience.

This book is rich with some of the most fascinating observations on love in general and homosexual love specifically. The flower metaphor at the starting of the book is particularly clever. Proust has more of a sense of humour than usual in this volume. Around the middle of the book this is especially evident; there is more sarcasm, irony, and wit throughout than in other volumes. I found myself highlighting many passages as I was reading, and oftentimes just one sentence of Proust's work is enough material to write a whole book on! His observations are so loaded and so true that they can be stretched out a long way before they've been used up. I find myself constantly in awe while reading In Search Of Lost Time; Proust was so gifted in so many ways that it's a privilege to read his writings! I can't think of anyone besides Shakespeare who comes close to Proust in his understanding of all apsects of human nature.

What does "Information Security" mean to you? To many, it means firewalls and encryption. To some, it means intrusion detection systems. Chances are the words "file servers" weren't high on your list, but they probably should be. After all, "information security" is about information, and when it's not flying across the network it's got to be stored somewhere, right? In fact, the security of the storage mechanism is often overlooked, which makes it an attractive target for attackers. In their new book, Storage Security, Chirillo and Blaul take a comprehensive look at this often-ignored subject.

Storage Security is not about turning on the right configuration options on your XYZ brand server appliance. It's about applying solid, methodical security practices to your storage systems, regardless of whether they are disks directly attached to a single computer, Network Attached Storage or part of a Storage Area Network. The authors address the full security cycle, too, starting with evaluating the security of proposed new storage solutions. Comparative data in hand, the book shows you how to narrow the field to a single solution that offers the best balance between functionality and security. And once the system is selected, you can't stop there. You've got to decide upon appropriate security policies for the new storage system, draft and implement a backup and restore plan, deal with disaster recovery and take care of a host of other issues. In short, this is a good guide to an entire range of considerations necessary to select, deploy and manage a secure storage solution.

The book's evaluation methodology is particularly valuable. Each type of storage (direct attach, NAS and SAN) is covered in a chapter of its own. Within each chapter, the authors address specific technologies used to implement that type of storage. For example, the direct attach chapter discusses such common storage technologies as SCSI and IDE, moderately exotic systems like USB and Firewire drives, and some more advanced solutions like HiPPI and SSA. Each technology is then placed in a matrix and scored in 11 different categories, including popularity and industry acceptance, built-in data protection features, typical fault tolerance and physical security characteristics. The authors assign each rating on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (the best). This gives a good general indication of how each technology measures up, but they tend to rely on a straight average of the ratings when determining the "best" technology. Although it's true that the average allows you to make a quick ballpark comparison, there are many other factors to consider as well, such as the suitability for your particular environment and the way in which your users need to access their data. The matrixes are quite useful, but just remember that you can't always boil things down to a simple numerical score.

Probably the biggest problem with this book is that it's pretty dry. As a reference book, the writing style is fine: since it's easy to find what you're looking for, and the chapters are concise. It's difficult to read from cover-to-cover, though, which is a shame because that's what you should probably do the first time through. Take it in small doses, a chapter or so at a time, and you should be fine.

Storage Security is about just what you'd think: the security of your data as it's being stored on your server(s). It's not a detailed look at the configuration of any one product, but rather a comprehensive, theory-based approach to managing the security of your storage subsystem from evaluation to purchase to daily operations. If you manage a small or mid-size network, you may not need this book. If you have a larger network, though, or have significant data storage needs, this deserves a space on your shelf.

Prior to this book I was ignorant of a lot of data storage issues. This book opened up areas to me that I had previously overlooked as I always took data storage for granted. The equipment breakdown and analysis was the most concise that I've ever seen. Nearly every page brought me a new item to learn or ponder. The sections on packet breakdown and network latency were fascinating. The information in this book is fully explained and with the author's help, easy to understand. The chapter(8) on designing and implementing a sound data security program almost serves as a blueprint as the steps and procedures are clearly outlined for the reader. This book provides BIG TIME info to the IT professional.

As a Project Manager for an IT company, I found this book to be interesting and compelling. It touches on many of the issues that are facing today's IT managers with it's discussion of SANs, NAS and DAS. The book offers explanations and histories of the technologies without insulting the intelligence of knowledgeable readers.

As stated in another review, the case studies are most helpful and give real world examples. John and Scott do a fine job of creating realistic scenarios and discuss the solutions in a positive way. Any reader will be able to relate in some way to the examples.

One of the features that I enjoyed were the "Security Thoughts" spread throughout the book. They make intersting points and give the reader some real food for thought.

Good job Scott and John! I look forward to your next book.

I was reading this book for an assignment in English, and the images that it left in my mind will remain there for a long time. The story of Tess, a truly Pure woman, facing adversities that scare the soul out of me, is a thoughtful and saddening one.

The Norton Critical edition is particularily good, containing reviews and poems of and about Thomas Hardy, a major advantage when trying to understand the atmosphere that produced this novel.

Though the novel is heavy in description, the description is not out of place. In fact, it is essential to the storyline.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, and it made me think and reflect on the values that I believe are truly important.

Morality is subject to some rolling blackouts in this book. At the end, the law stepped in and made sure that the destruction was mutual. Law seems to be particularly inept in situations where a book is this hard on the reader, and those critics in the Norton Critical Edition who consider this novel almost a crime against literature have a point. If all the characters were being put on trial, instead of merely trying to live, the law would allow each of them to be tried separately because of the doctrine of mutually antagonistic defenses. There were parts of this book I enjoyed: Angel Clare sorting the cows for milking made a lovely theme. Hardy kept referring to the barnyard as a "barton," but I'm sure he wasn't directing that jibe at me, personally, because this book was written long before I was born. I've been to barnyards that were as full of "mulch" as the "barton" described in this book, and Hardy is putting things mildly. I liked the part when Alec had been reformed and Tess discovered him preaching to the Methodists without thinking that he was any better for all the things he was trying to say. Somehow Alec getting on the other side of things was still Alec, and he would have preferred to be happy than to preach all the time. For me, the plot revolved around Angel Clare's need to find a place where he could get money without shame. Alec had as much money as Tess would ever need, and he wanted to give it to her in his own way. There is an early baby problem that Tess didn't tell Alec about until they had more problems than any novelist could make disappear. D. H. Lawrence tried to understand this book in unfulfilled male and female principles, and aristocratic principles which isolated Tess and Alec d'Uberville. I'm glad this book has been appreciated so long that I finally read it. It was an involvement that went further than just feeling like a barnyard.

Thomas Hardy's novel makes a heroine out of a simple girl. Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a nearly extinct noble line, leads a life of heavy responsibility where her impoverished family is concerned. At the behest of her parents, she seeks assistance from the D'Urbervilles who are, supposedly, relatives. This assistance yields disastrous results and Tess feels compelled to find work as a milkmaid where she meets Angel Clare, the son of an evangelical pastor, who is gathering experience in order to become a farmer.

Hardy does a splendid job of illustrating Tess's strength as she goes from innocent girl to pure woman. Though she is not as educated as Angel, in terms of theory, her experience with Alec Stokes D'Urberville has given her a deeper knowledge of life and acceptance. Ironically, it is this experience which captivates and, predictably enough, repulses Angel.

Hardy's narrative is a powerful one in this particular tale. It is clear that this is Tess's story and we, as readers, witness her painful journey. Through his subtle and understated use of irony, we come to realize the hypocrisy of Angel and wonder about the diabolical nature of Alec.

What Hardy does emphasize in this novel is the unwavering hand of Justice which allows the novel to come to a bittersweet end and lets no one escape its strong, yet objective, sense of judgement.

This book is full of valuable lessons. Even if you're a newlywed or not married yet, it shows you what can happen when couples don't communicate. The lessons learned from Juliet & Michaels experiences may help some couples to work through difficult times- other couples may learn how to PREVENT some of the problems outlined in this great novel. God has really given Mrs. Scott a gift- she is able to tell a tale that most people can relate to, and she illustrates it such a way that you truly feel the emotions the characters are feeling. I highly recommend this novel!

This is the first book I've read about how a wife feels when her husband loses interest in their love life. For any wife who feels that she is trying to keep the romance in her marriage alive on her own, this is a book you'll want to buy. One of the reasons this was such a good story is because Kathleen Scott describes this really depressing marriage that I think many couples will relate to, but then she shows how the husband and wife found ways to make things better again. It was really encouraging to me. Buy this book, you'll be glad you did!

The characters in this story seem so real that I'm still thinking about them weeks after I finished reading the book. I think anyone who is married will relate to Juliet's and Michael's problems. There are lessons to be learned in this story that I didn't see until I was almost finished reading it.

While I was crying with and relating to Juliet, I was learning something important that I think will make my marriage better. I recommend this book to anyone who has had their heart broken from being in love.