The author notes that the First Amendment was designed to promote participation in our democracy, but much of the content provided my media outlets today actually lulls viewers into a voyeuristic mode, suppressing the will of people to participate. Still, most of what we see on TV is protected by the First Amendment, even when the result is contrary to the desired effect of promoting an active and involved democracy.

When reading this book, you might find yourself questioning court decisions, but you will also question the alternatives. This book provokes thought, as a good book should. I highly recommend it. You won't see the news or "news" magazine shows in the same light again!

How many times did you read a book, follow the examples and run it in the computer, and at end of it you can't write a program by yourself?
Delphi Unleashed is different! Just in the initial chapters you'll be learning the best way: experimenting.

While some books are introductory, others are for the experts, to be used as reference material. There are books that try conciliate both things, but few succeed. This one does it.

Charles Calvert, with your soft writing style and some sense of humour, leads you to explore the language from the beginnings to the most advanced topics, in a soft and pleasant way. He emphasises the most important points, even repeating some fundamental concepts, and pointing the trickiest subjects. Everything is minutely explained. It is impossible to not understand.

The examples are well formulated and are all reproduced on the accompanying CD, which carries too a bunch of tools and libraries.

The coverage of the book is fantastic. From the structure of a Delphi program, to variables and looping. From the use of functions, to strings and pointers. The object programming and client server techniques are explored in depth, as well as OLE, SQL and multimedia subjects.

The didactic is impeccable. An excellent book !

This one is easy to read, very informative, talks about the technology without getting too detailed and talks about some of the politics and difficulty without getting caught up on it.

It's black and white and medium format, so the Orlebar makes a nice color complement to it.

Enjoy

It is a special plane and it is flown in a special way. It is a must have for those curious about the concorde.

The CD is written in HTML, the "language" of the Internet, and requires web browser software to view it. It came up fine on IE 4.0 running on my 133 MHz PC running Win95, and later on a 450 MHz laptop on IE 5.0 under WIN98.

The book is written in chapter links which can be selected at any time, which I found convenient to use. It was mildly annoying to read so much text (many hours) on a PC screen, but the plethora of pictures helped break up the text, and the sound files were great fun. I scaled the text size up a bit for easier reading.

The history of the aircraft is absolutely first-rate; the book runs logically along its lengthy timeline, from manufacture to its final move to safety. I was fascenated with the many unique photos of the interior, engines being run up, and the various pieces being frantically moved out to avoid being scrapped. It was wonderful to discover the final fate of this big old bomber.

I recommend this CD to any aviation buff who would dream of discovering, restoring and flying an old abandoned military airplane - you will enjoy this story, and learn a whole lot about the practical problems that come along with such a great project.

First designed to attack Nazi Germany from North American bases, the B-36 became America's "Big Stick" at the height of the Cold War. The capabilities of the B-36 provided much of the deterrence that prevented the Soviet Union from attacking America or our NATO allies. B-36J #52-2827 was the last B-36 built, of over 300 produced. In 1958 she made her last flight and was put on display at Amon Carter Field.

When I discovered her in 1977 or so, she was in pretty sad shape. But a bunch of old guys (so they seemed to me) were putting her back together, and they didn't mind me hanging around and helping out. At the time, I was just a teenager crazy about airplanes. I had no idea of the grand scope of the project at the time, much less the incredible efforts of the "old guys" working on the plane.

Now I do. "Saving the Last Peacemaker" not only brought back a lot of fond memories, but gave me a deep appreciation for the amazing accomplishments of the dedicated men who rescued and restored #2827.

Today, the Last Peacemaker has been lovingly restored in painstaking detail and is currently awaiting a new home for permanent public display. Compare the photos of the stripped, vandalized cockpit in the late '70s to the photos of the interior after restoration, and you'll understand the labor of love involved.

Sure, lots of old airplanes have been preserved and restored, and the stories blur together after a while. But "Saving the Last Peacemaker" is no dry technical memoir. It's a cliff-hanger adventure story, complete with government agents, desperate races against the clock, last-minute reprieves, and plot twists.

It's illustrated with dozens of photographs. Model-builders will revel in the close-up photographs of the structure and the interior, revealing details seldom seen before.

If you're an airplane nut - of any age - this is a must-have item.

The facts relayed by Adm. Calvert coincide 100% with the versions of my father and many of his shipmates who I had the honor of meeting in 1989 at a reunion of the Jack's crew.

For those of us lucky enough to have never heard an enemy depth charge explode nearby, this book is the next best thing to being there.

The final pages that recount Adm. Calvert's "expedition" into Tokyo are absolutely hairraising. I wanted to run outside and wave the American flag in the street I was so proud. This book does the best possible job of describing the hardships that so many endured to preserve the freedoms we enjoy today.

If ever a course is taught called "Patriotism 101", this should be a textbook and Calvert the instructor.

David M. Craig

The marshalled evidence of the rhetoric of these ancient literatures is indeed impressive. Many parts of it --- specifically, the parts that discuss the various metres of the ancient poems, and suggest ways in which the sound changes of which we have evidence may suggest that these verse forms stemmed from common ancestors --- are convincing.

But the difficulty in parts of the book's argument is its failure to exclude other possibilities --- such as borrowing, loan-translations, or simple independent invention --- of the phrases and images it argues are inherited. Some of them, like the inherited phrase meaning "everlasting fame," are more convincing than others, if only because not only the idea, but the root words themselves, are inherited. We know from comparing Classical, Hindu, and Germanic mythologies that some god-names were inherited.

But when the book argues in favour of an inherited myth that says "a hero kills a dragon (or some other foe)," we're dealing with subject matters that are known to exist in literatures other than Indo-European ones. After all, this is what heroes do. It is unclear even whether these motifs are commoner in Indo-European literatures than elsewhere. Some attention needs to be paid to the possibility of other explanations, and why the hypothesis of inheritance is the likeliest among them.

In chapter 3: Poetics as Grammar, Watkins analyses the expression "Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow," demonstrating how the word order, alliteration and assonance form a perfect ring-composition. This formulaic utterance now functions only to amuse children, but in its essential semantics, formulaics and poetics it must have been continuously recreated on the same model over six or seven thousand years. He proves that is the central "merism" of an ancient Indo-European harvest song or agricultural prayer, by quoting from the Hittite, Homeric Greek, the Atharvaveda and the Zend-Avesta!

Selected text analyses an case studies from Anatolian, Celtic, Greek, Indic and Italic are found in chapters 7 - 11 of part 2, followed by the analyses of inherited phrasal formulas, stylistic figures and hidden meaning through chapters 12 to 16.

The remainder of the book presents the evidence for a common Indo-European formula in the expression of the dragon - or serpent-slaying myth. Over thousands of years this formula occurs in the same linguistic form as it existed in the original mother tongue. This formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text that has endured for millennia, a precise and precious tool for typological and genetic investigation in the study of literature and literary theory. It is thus of immense value to literary historians, literary critics and philologists.

I found chapters 50 - 59 of particular interest, as it deals with the application of the formula to the medicine of incantation in a variety of Indo-European traditions, and includes a discussion of the poet as healer.

This work is an opus magnum, and it took me months to read it. Even so, I cannot claim to have grasped all the complexities of the fascinating text in which more than 30 familiar and obscure languages are quoted. I strongly recommend this masterpiece to those interested in ancient history, language and its structure, and to literary critics.

The book concludes with 27 pages of references, an index of names and subjects, an index of passages, and an index of words quoted from the various Indo-European languages.

Nevertheless, it is absolutely one of the most fascinating books I have ever had in my hands. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "tour de force."

What Watkins is doing is the same thing J.R.R. Tolkien did for a living: philology. What's that? It's the insistence on studying language AND literature together: the union of the separate departments of linguistics and literature. Tolkien was a genius in this field, and it is awe-inspiring to see how much further Watkins can go.

Here you will learn how to extend the Comparative Method used in linguistics to the field of early poetry, and you will learn of common poetic expressions in use 5,000 years ago: "word-weaver," "immortal fame", "he slew the monster/dragon/worm." You will learn what poets were 5,000 years ago: what they did and how they did it. (They were the most highly-paid profession in ancient times.) It is just plain fascinating to learn that the proto-Indo-European language and people already had well known words for "god" and "Zeus/Jupiter" well before writing was invented, as well as "prayer" and lots of other things.

You will most likely not be able to understand every word in this book, but the messages are very clear, and throw an extremely illuminating light on human prehistory, language, and society. It will also make you realize what the whole point of poetry was in those not-so-far-off times.

Highest recommendation! Unbelievably good!