This book isn't what you might think, lookin' at the stupid Can Lit cover: dark storm clouds forming over a wheat field. Its like publisher Insomniac liked the idea of a having real-life Prairie writer, but hadn't read the book. Well I have.

Set in Regina, Just For Comfort is a comic thriller involving drugs, crooked cops, dog shootings, infidelity, grouse hunting and taxidermy. Author Ralph Osbourne can write some though, and knows where to start a story: the protagonist is trying to dispose of the assumedly OD'ed body of his bimbo future daughter-in-law. Hijinks ensue, and overall, not bad hijinks and not a bad read.

A few things bother me: our 'hero', Frank, a former bistro owner and currently a marijuana salesman is too capable, too worldly. He comes off as a poor man's James Bond. Apparently his secret agent training comes from being a bird hunter (for the record, the hunting stuff peppered through the book is pretty good and believable)

This first novel looks over its own shoulder a lot. Most of the characters knew each other in their gloried 1970's youth and there are regular winks to their bell-bottomed past; but despite the aging of the characters, wisdom has not been gained, throwaway Lao Tzu quotes notwithstanding. What you have is a collection of middle-aged guys who either haven't grown up yet, or have slided into a born-again adolescence. Most of them have quit smoking cigarettes, so that's something. The women, for the most part, are written as being either manipulators and/or psycho harpies. As far as I can tell, they smoke. Hmm..

As a plot-driven writer, Osbourne is happiest with one or two note characters; a few brief characterizations are sufficient, and then they all act out their roles with few surprises in this twisty little drama.

Just for Comfort is like an evening at the bar with a bunch of mates ' some tall tales, some casual we-are-all-men-here misogyny and enough gonzo danger to make the evening both mildly memorable and totally harmless.

It begins very well with the pot-dealing narrator trying to kill his irritating prospective daughter-in-law. After the fist 80 pages I found the action difficult to follow and clogged by irrelevant flashbacks and remiminesces. The plot seems to be about corrupt cops and murders. Excellent but digressive descriptions of birdhunting and some amusing outrageously behaving addicts and criminals. Good fight scenes and some funny lines The setting is apparently a Western Canadian city and I was not sure about the time frame. It has a "Withnail and I" 60's atmosphere (one character is a US draft-dodger)but it was all rather confusing. Maybe I'm just easily confused.

THIS IS A BOOK THAT DRAWS YOU INTO THE REALM OF THE CHARACTERS INVOLVED. ALMOST LIKE YOU ARE PART OF THEIR PLANS. IT IS WELL WRITTEN AND A GOOD READ. HOPE MR. OSBORNE, CONTINUES WRITTING AND LOOK FORWARD TO HIS SECOND BOOK.

He strikes an interesting balance between the various Luther mythologies: the "Oak of Saxony" of ideolized Protestantism, the "Devil's Spawn" of reactionary Catholicism, and the mentally disturbed creature of speculative psychology.

It doesn't break any new ground or make any brilliant points, but it's a fun read.

Not only have I read Luther, but I have performed in the play. I played the Role of John Tetzel, the Dominican monk who sells indulgences. I found the play rather boring. Tetzel's scene in Act 2 scene 1 is one of the few entertaining bits of the play though a 4 page monolouge is a lot to memorize.

Osborne, the popular enfant terrible of British drama in the 1950's and 60's (then ignored once his politics became unfashionable in artistic circles) won several awards for this play, an interesting but hardly comprehensive portrait of Martin Luther's career. The title role (originally played by Albret Finney)is challenging for an actor, and intriguing for the reader. The second act--in which Luther fights the Catholic Church--is strong and well-written; the first is also dramatic in its attempt to explain why Luther did what he did; the third, however, by viewing Luther at the end of his life, disappoints because we are only TOLD about his accomplishments rather than sharing them.

The scope of the play is too large--it tries to cover too much time rather than concentrating on one (or a few) specific events. But it is a curious and fascinating play; few are written about religion any more, and for that alone it is engrossing.

is there some reason for the perpetuation of stereotypes? the story of squanto, the helpful noble savage. the story of indians selling their land for $24 in beads. does anyone really look into the validity behind these tales? since history books teach our young children enough lies about colonialism and the indigenous people in the Americas it is the duty of the parents to help stop these sometimes hurtful myths. do your kid a favor and quit lying to them about history. learn the truth.

I like this book very much. Jack and Annie are whisked back to the first Thanksgiving in 1621. But they failed to catch eels and clams and burnt Priscilla's Thanksgiving turkey when Jack dropped it into the fire. They found the magic of community, however, in spite of everything.
Read more Magic Tree House books! "High Tide in Hawaii" is coming soon!

Your children will delight in this, the 27th installment of the magic tree house. This time the enjoy(?) exchanging 21st century dialog with America's earlier settlers. Your little one's will enjoy learning American history the fun way.

Well, once you get past Osborne's pedantic writing, it's an informative treatment of the subject. But, doesn't most academic writing suffer from the "write-like-it's-a-lecture" syndrome? I guess I'll always be a scientist at heart, never a humanist.

This book gave me a new look into greek art. I have read a lot of books about this period and I found that Robin Osborne added new viewpoints. I liked his style of writing, it invited me to read on.

There are many other books that offer deeper insight and breadth of perspective. This book is weak on historical information, shaky on doctrinal accuracy, and misses many of the distinctives of each tradition.

Osborne presents a well illustrated book on world religions that is apparently for children but is more than adequate for most adults. Sentences are brief. Words are not overwhelming - a glossary defines new expressions. The book can be a starting point for satisfying curiosity about great world religions. It is also a great help in reminding oneself about the basics.

What started out with Iroshi, the first book in a trilogy with amazing potential, ends with a disappointing Persea. Throughout the series, there is minimal character development, and the plots get shallower and shallower. I was hoping for much more. bsudy@bigfoot.com

I lucked out when I picked up this exciting sci fi/fantasy by Osborne. It was a quick read, full of action and great characters. Don't miss it!

This book lists many records from many genres of music. The prices are well researched and it includes many artists. I have found this book to be far superior to anything, anything, published by Goldmine, Jerry Osborne's main competion, but I find that Jerry Osborne's "Official Price Guide To Records" has much of the same information for half of the price. "Rockin Records" is basically an expanded version of "The Official Price Guide To Records" at twice the price.

I have bought guides from Jerry Osborne for the last 20 years. Each guide is properly updated without showing exagerated inflated values. In other words, it shows realistic market prices, not dealer prices! I give this 2 thumbs up!

I Read The Mekong as part of an intensive preperation for a trip to Southeast Asia this summer. It is a decent book with some interesting information about exploration in Cambodia and Laos.

The book starts off a little slow but gets much better as it tells the stories of explorers from Europe attempting to navigate the Mekong River. I had never heard of some of these guys and there stories were very interesting.

However, I was surprized that the stories were mostly about Laos and Cambodia and not much was written about Vietnam.

I was also surprized at how light the chapters dealing with the war in IndoChina and their aftermaths were. He never goes into deep detail about anything. What he writes about is interesting but it never gets into anything beyond the surface. I understand this is not a book about the war, but on the otherhand he does not reveal enough of his own experiences to make this fully a travel book.

I feel the book gets muddled again towards the end while discussing the impacts of building dams along the Mekong. The author repeats himself quite a bit at this point. I also felt his conclusions were a little weak, again not really revealing anything

The bottom line on the book is this: it is interesting in parts and is decent enough reading. But I do not recommend dropping everything and reading it. It is not horrible, but at the same time it is not THE book on Southeast Asia.

These are the reflections of a man who had studied this powerful river for the last 40 years.

The river ran through six countries and had seen civilizations emerge and disappear. It had also seen revolution, war, pollution, and destruction. Countries in the upper Mekong liked to dam the river to harness electricity while people in the lower part of the river need its water for agriculture and for its fish. Building dams in the upper Mekong could affect the ecology in the lower Mekong delta. The balance of these antagonistic goals could only be solved if the governments involved were more considerate to each other.

No one could tell the history of the Mekong better than the author.

you like adventure ,you like exploration you like travel ? this book is for you .

DISCLAIMER: I am also a tech reviewer, but trust me my intention is to provide an un-biased review here.

Let me start by sharing a secret: since January I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the 2nd Ed. of Ed Roman's hugely popular EJB book. Well, guess what: while Ed's book is going through community review at theServerside.com (I applaud Ed for being the first to do this, although it may or may not have slowed down the publication process), Wrox managed to go a leg up and became the first publisher of an EJB 2.0 book. Judging from the content of the current book, I have good reasons to say that it has raised the bar for the next generation of EJB titles coming out in the 2nd half of this year. Why? For one thing this book is based on the new EJB 2.0 spec and is up-to-date with PFD 2. As if this not enough a selling point by itself, Wrox also threw in a bunch of other high-octane topics, which made the total value proposition very compelling.

Let's now go through the content of the book, should we?

Chapters 1 to 4 mostly target EJB newcomers. Here you find short and sweet code samples for each flavor of EJB 1.1 session and entity beans. The author's emphasis is clearly on the client views and life cycles of these beans. Many state and sequence diagrams are used to help readers to come to a good grip of this critical material. I consider the goal superbly achieved, even though the code could have used some System.out.println calls to demo actually how bean classes are invoked by an EJB container. Well, save that as your homework.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover the new EJB 2.0 entity bean features we all have been waiting for, i.e., local interfaces, container-managed relationships, home methods, and EJB QL, among others. Dan O'Connor was at his best again explaining how the new spec solves some of EJB 1.1's toughest problems, like the need to use coarse-grained beans to cut down the number of remote calls. Experienced EJB developers, start here.

Chapter 7 introduces MDB. Frankly, I would like to see it augmented to include more details on transactional MDB. Well, Tyler Jewell should fill that void in Ed's book.

Chapter 8 deals with EJB environment, an often-confusing topic to many. How do I specify a DataSource in my ejb-jar.xml file? What does "java:comp/env/..." mean and where does it come from? You get the answers here.

Chapters 9 and 10 are about EJB transactions and Security. And let me tell you - read these vital topics here and forget about any other book. The discussion is so much better in breadth and depth than anywhere else. You need an example on a distributed TX? No problem. Want to understand security principals? They have it covered.

Chapter 11 starts a section on EJB design issues by providing some well-thought-out advice. The topics are so timely and relevant, like bean granularity, session vs. entity beans, BMP vs. CMP, which people ask on a daily basis at various EJB forums. EJB architect wanna-be's: read this chapter and start to enjoy what used to be sleepless nights.

Chapter 12 is about EJB Design Patterns. Well, I guess you cannot cover in one chapter what 3 Sun J2EE patterns gurus wrote in an entire book. Go buy "Core J2EE Patterns" instead.

Chapter 13 tries to show how to use UML to design EJB's. Frankly, this topic is yet to be mature and I doubt many people really practice such. It is still food for thought though.

Chapter 14: if you read no other chapter in the book, please do read this one. EJB developers live and die on the performance of the beans they write. Bean-test is probably the best-known EJB testing tool today and this chapter shows you how to use it.

Chapter 15 gives you more stuff like patterns, idioms that you can use to achieve optimal EJB performance and scalability. It also explains how EJB containers optimize callbacks. To be honest, things start to get a little bit repetitive but I had no major complaint.

Chapter 16: if you believe in BMP or writing SQL is in your blood, this is the one for you. You see how the dirty flag is used, and how coarse-grained bean modeling parent-child relational tables are written. This is a very useful chapter about handling traditional RDBMS-based relationships in the EJB 1.1 world.

Chapter 17: if you are a black-belt EJB developer and want to try you hand to become an EJB container writer, read this. If you brain is swollen by now, save this chapter for later.

Chapter 18 tries to put together a real-world J2EE sample application with servlets, JSP's and EJB's. Well, I only know one attempt that may have ended with some sort of a deliverable(the end-result is known as the Java Pet Store). FYI that pet project of someone has gone through 3 revisions and people are still tinkering with it.

Chapters 19 to 21 are about interoperating with EJB from COM, CORBA, and WAP clients. They are good enough to get you started by following the examples step-by-step.

Chapter 22 is about J2EE as Web Services. IBM's solution is the main one showcased here. Stay tuned.

The book ends with Appendices A to G, which all evolve around the deployment of a simple EJB app on various commonly found app servers. Take a look if you are starting out with EJB; otherwise join the Java Pet Store deployathon for more fun.

Now you ask me: what's missing from the book? Well, topics like EJB build and packaging strategy will definitely of interest to many. Discussion on clustering is also sorely missed.

Overall, I am excited about the book. I can imagine Ed Roman et al. and Richard Monson-Haefel working hard to top this one. To me, competition is a healthy thing.

I picked this up last summer as it was the only book at the time offering coverage of EJB 2.0.

In the tradition of Wrox books, it offers good coverage of the entire EJB API. While some topics weren't covered exhaustively, that is not what these books are for. This book does provide *effective* coverage of almost everything in EJB 2.0. There is also coverage of design, which is a nice addition!

It is GREAT for it's intended purpose. Highly recommended...

This book does cover EJB2.0 extensively (the review below must be for a different book!). It not only covers the differences between 1.1 and 2.0 but it gives great illustrative examples.

Although I have been working with EJB for sometime, the book covers the topics that I don't have time to play around with - it provides very good coverage of topics such as Local interfaces and their uses, EjbQL, and home methods (finally!)

The only chapters 19-21 are the only ones that do not go into real depth - but they shouldn't since they relate to topics not necessarily meant for this book; however, they give a great examples to start from such as the wireless one.

I definitely recommend this book - I already have to the rest of my team!

My first and biggest complaint was that I had no feeling at all as I read this that Agatha Christie had had any part in this. The characterizations, the dialogue, and the movement just didn't feel like her.

My second complaint was that hardly anything had been done to make this a novel. It felt like a play that had just had the stage directions and blocking taken out of it. More should have been done to have given this novel some novelization.

Third, this was the only Hercule Poirot novel with Captain Hastings in it where Hastings does not narrate the story, so why did the author even bother with Hastings? Hastings also blatantly eavedrops in the story, and in every other book he's ever been in he's always chastising Poirot for doing the same thing, and is embarrassed that Poirot would do such a thing. A most blatant derailing from standard Christie.

My biggest problem was that the story dragged on, seemingly endlessly for such a short book. I had this one pegged early, an unusual circumstance for me in reading a Christie story. Over all, I think Poirot should have been left dead, and this book never written since it did nothing to infuse me with a sense of wonder at his incredible rendering of a murder using his little grey cells.

Well, let's be brief. This novel was first written as a play, and even though Mr. Osborne, I'm sure, did his best to make it look like a novel, it still has the basic characteristics of a play. There is very little description and too much dialogue. The sets are limited to a single room, just as in a play. My impression is that Mr. Osborne tried to remain as close as possible to Agatha Christie's original play. Yet he could have been a little more imaginative, and I'm sure it only could have made the book more interesting to read.

As for the plot (without giving it away), let's just say that the mystery was easy to solve. To say the least, part of the solution had already been used by Agatha Christie in "The Mysterious Affair at Styles." Therefore, the publication of "Black Coffee" as a novel cannot be really justified, since this second-rate Christie material, for the most part, had already been used before in other Christie novels. Making a novel out of "Black Coffee" is useless. It's just the same as if someone wanted to write a novel version of Christie's play "Alibi," when the latter is already based on her novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd".

I found this book very intriguing! I was first hooked on Agatha Christie books last year when we read And Then There Were None in my language arts class. The latter still remains my favorite Agatha Christie mystery, but I found Black Coffee up there with the best (along with Murder on the Orient Express and Cat Among the Pigeons). The only fault that I have discovered in mostly all of Christie's novels is the fact that most of them have a rather slow beginning (except, for the most part, And Then There Were None, although this too was a bit slow). Yet Black Coffee held my interest from the very start. I did not find the murderer very obvious, since I kept changing my opinion of who the murderer was. Although Charles Osborne did a very wonderful job of writing the novel and keeping as close to the script of the play, it was not a true work of Agatha Christie. Therefore, I could not award this book a five. (Yet I thoroughly enjoyed the overuse of dialogue.) I still remain a major fan of Hercule Poirot mysteries, and Black Coffee was one of the best. Hercule is brilliant, and it certainly showed in this particular novel.

p.s. - After blabbing on and on about the wonderful Agatha Christie mysteries to my twelve-year-old cousin (whom I'm very close in relationship to), I've managed to get her hooked on the Agatha Christie novels. Hurray for me! Now I have a close friend to converse over with these wonderful books! We also exchange our Agatha Christie books with each other now, and recommend ones that we've borrowed from the library or another friend. I strongly recommended Black Coffee to her. She, too, has not read any Miss Marple mysteries yet, and is thoroughly interested in Hercule Poirot's cases. Ms. Christie has quite a brilliant mind, and we praise her for that.