From the first cryptic three-line message found in a cave, to the final fading memory, this book stirred my soul with images of what the Christian walk really is, and what an awesome price was paid so that we might wear that title and travel that road. Don't expect a "whodunnit" here, not even one with as much inspiration as Alcorn normally writes. This book will have you in shame, in tears, and soaring in a victory we have yet to experience. It's fantastic and worth the time it takes to read it. Make sure you've got nothing to disturb you when you pick it up. You won't want to put it down!

Edge of Eternity was my first Randy Alcorn book. It was a challenge to read at first, but then when I picked up on more and more of the imagery for the spiritual metaphors, Edge of Eternity became a powerful and engaging book. I also got the audio book version on cassette. I highly recommend getting the tapes. Listening to the audio touched my imagination and my heart. I feel like I have a greater understanding of who Jesus Christ is, how close we are to the eternal and that we are very much involved in a spiritual warfare. I'm an audio book fan as well as a reader, so I recommend getting both. Either one would be good to give to a friend. "Edge of Eternity" by Randy Alcorn is right up there with "Pilgrim's Progress," in my opinion.

Once again Randy Alcorn makes us look within and into the Bible with his wonderful allegory "Edge of Eternity". A book that causes you to ponder, cry, cry out to God, and helps you see exactly who you are as you travel the red road along with Nick Seagrave and the rest of the chasm-crossers. A must read for anyone looking for the "right path."

I loved the idea of this book; there's nothing like a good send-up of the academic world. But it was the writing style that turned me off. While I'll admit my vocabulary expanded by leaps and bounds the further and further I read, it started to feel a little pretentious, and the story didn't move along quickly enough to keep my attention riveted. But, if you like extremely dry, prosaic humor, you'll still find many reasons to enjoy this book.

I love books that are so well-crafted that I want to read every sentence two or three times, and this is one of them. "Murder in the Museum of Man" can be read on a number of levels: the absurdity of academic life, Norman's position as Recording Secretary (writ large in Norman's mind), Norman's love life (or lack thereof), and of course the murder mystery itself. One of the funniest sequences is a departmental discussion on how to create a politically correct diorama of Neanderthal man (and woman). EVERYONE seems to be offended by at least one aspect of the proposal, from the color of the models' skin (the apparent compromise position is a tartan plaid) to the type of animal roasting on a spit (wild pig offends the Jews, cow offends the Hindus, etc.) to whether the food will be attended by a female model (stereotyping females as domestics) or a male (stereotyping great chefs as men). Norman faithfully records every hilarious detail, seemingly without cracking a smile of his own. This is Mr. Alcorn's first murder mystery. I hope he writes many more.

This book is only nominally a murder mystery. But that's OK. In fact, that's wonderful--because Alfred Alcorn has written one of the wryest, dryest, funniest send-ups I've ever read. With cleverness, wit, and something akin to slapstick, Alcorn skewers the pretensions of academia, the 1960s, elitist culture, multiculturalism, bureaucracy . . . you name it, he's got its number! I laughed out loud reading this book, and you will, too.

Ben Katchor is a cartoonist with a fine eye for the humdrum and magical details of city life. If he had run into a youthful, callow Italo Calvino at some point, "The Artist of the Missing" hints at the book the two might have produced.

Unfortunately, I don't mean this as a compliment. Mr. Lafarge styles his prose in exactly the way one would expect of a recent graduate from a writer's programme in which Borges, Calvino, and Perec were the modish subjects of study. Mr. Lafarge clearly has a knack for turning the mere cranking out of words into a beast of identifiable character.

At each point throughout this book, the style hangs together. Paragraphs read pleasingly. The turns of phrase are evocative. But the book does not have a set of characters to glue it together; it is bereft of people; of the intertwinglings between characters that drive a plot; of much life at all, alas.

While the absence of emotion or anything to empathise with can yield strength - Borges ascended to a pinnacle of 20th-century literary fame without squeezing either tear or smirk from the most pliant of souls - I fear this does not work well in a novel. Or perhaps merely not in Mr. Lafarge's novel. Ben Katchor's cartoons are compressed, even more so than Borges, and they succeed on some similarly passionless level. Alas, the chill that scratches over Mr. Lafarge's novel skitters on for scores of pages, rather than one or a dozen, and wearies where shorter stories might enliven.

"The Artist of the Missing" hardly rises above the level of self-conscious creative writing. Promising, to be sure, and a possible harbinger of something lovely from Mr. Lafarge as he gains experience, but ultimately not quite worth the trouble of reading.

At first, LaFarge's first novel "The Artist of the Missing" bears striking similarity to Paul Auster's existential style, especially Auster's famous "New York Trilogy." LaFarge's themes of absences, coincidence, loneliness and his pawn-like hero Frank also echo Kafka. The second part of "The Artist" drifts into Haruki Murakami ("The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle") territory, where the bizarre, skewed logic and mystic circumstances become merely commonplace. And it's in the novel's 2nd half that the plot, which starts out tight, atmospheric and menacing unravels. Frank, the self-taught "artist," is a sympathetic hero, diligently searching for his past, his vanishing parents, while taking his quest to a mythical, mercurial, nameless city. The quest becomes more profound after he meets and falls for a mysterious police photographer of the dead -- Prudence. After that, images, ideas, symbols, scenes, characters and adventures weave in and out almost indiscriminately. This severs what had been a snug bond with the reader. Overall, "The Artist" is still a good read, very original and LaFarge has a clear, erudite style. I'm eager to see what he comes up with next in novel No. 2.

"the artist of the missing" is good stuff. the story is filled with imagination, loneliness, curious illustrations, love and adventure. it has all the ingredients needed for a spectacular novel but doesn't follow a set pattern. the book takes twists in plot and is happily not formulaic. makes you think and wonder and realize and all that important inner stuff books should do. "the artist of the missing" is a good ride

My family has had this book since I was a child. I didn't appreciate it much until recently, when I began to look for children's songbooks for my own children. It has fewer common songs than most songbooks, such as Singing Bee; so it would be best for someone looking for hard-to-find songs or singing games. (It includes a section for singing games, with good descriptions of the actions for the children--mostly circle games, such as The Farmer In the Dell.)

The illustrations are very stylized. Most songs include a sentence or two describing their origins.

Some of its hard-to-find songs that I appreciate include: Frog Went A-Courtin', Aiken Drum, Michael Finnegan, If All the Raindrops, Ain't It Great to be Crazy?, The Animal Fair, and Kookaburra.

It's sections are:
Good Morning and Good Night (18)
Birds and Beasts (20)
Nursery Songs (21)
Silly Songs (20)
Singing Games and Rounds (26)

It's great to have Douglass' work in its own terms here - not as framed by some academic historian without a clue as to what freedom fights are really like.

The content of the book was easy to understand. Geared toward users with a very basic knowledge of HTML. The layout and format were excellent. My only problem with this book was that the data disk enclosed with the book did not match the exercises. I had the same problem with the Fundamentals book. I worked around the problem and got the full effect of the lessons anyway.

I was curious about this book because my wife and I have done some backpacking in the Sierra. I wanted to read what the women had to say and about the personal experiences of the author.
Many books don't hold my interest. Well, this one sure did. She kept the storytelling moving right along and didn't get bogged down in too much detail. I liked the mix of seriousness and light-hearted commentary and the fact she isn't afraid to poke fun at herself. There are some good backpacking tips and information sprinkled along as well. Made for fun reading over a couple nights.

Alcorn deals with first rate issues in a third rate manner. His presentation of systems is particularly lacking in depth. Bibliographic references are not directly tied to text. General chapter references are given at the end of the book, but these are often dated and thin.

It's not very wise if you approach this book with the mentality that within the book you are going to find all the answers that explain why and how the world functions they way it does. However, this book is designed to provide you with key tools that will assist you in your own personal expedition(s) of the world around you. The overall vision of the book focuses on systems, the "niche" of technology and it's evolution, and universal laws to mention a few. This book is an excellent book that gives you thorough and detailed insight on why and how things around you work, and how important and crucial technology is to our everyday lives.

I am a dean's list mathematics major and I couldn't follow this text at all. This is true because the book is poorly written in a very bland voice, the few examples are often difficult with little or nothing to do with common problems you will encounter, and as a whole, this book seems to assume that all of its readers have a solid background in statistics; the problem with that is this is used in introductory courses. Everything I learned in the class for which this text was required was from lectures, and I normally learn extremely well from text books. If you take a course that requires this text, either try to find another book or run (don't walk) to the good old drop and add department!

I have always loved learning from books, especially math and science books, but this book is impossible. I am a math major with a previous course in statistics and the best use I have found for this text is to set my calculator on it. The examples and exercises are so wordy and written so poorly I have gained nothing from them. I actually think I'm a little dumber after I read from it. This book is written for a reader with an advanced background in statistics and even there, I think those readers would be wise to shop around. I strongly discourage anyone planning on using this book from doing so, just let me sell mine first!

I'm a math/computer science major taking a stat course at virginia tech and the professor is using this horrible book. Reading it is pure drudgery. It is bland, boring, wordy, and hideously difficult to extract any real information from. It seems to assume the student already knows everything about statistics, as it's examples and explanations are so convoluted, lengthy, and conceptually incoherent that any attempt to follow them is a waste of time. The exercises (at least the ones my professor assigns) infallibly require a ridiculous amount of numerical computation that takes forever to enter by hand, like finding the mean of 60-80 sample points. This book made me hate statistics which is a shame because it is a beautiful and highly applicable field. If you are forced to use this text then do whatever you can to learn the material from an outside source, be it another text, a friend, the internet, anything but the book.

This book presents quite well the importance of a balance between grace and truth and some of the later chapters are quite good.

Unfortunately, the Grace and Law apparent paradox is erroneously translated as Grace and Truth in this book. Grace has 100% of truth in it, and it is a wonderful truth. As Jesus pointed out, someone could be abiding by the whole Law, and still miss the truth completely.

The first two chapters become correct if the word Truth is replaced with the word Law. In this case, however, someone could be misled to think that the Law needs to be balanced with Grace, which isn't correct either.

The Law is not our standard for salvation, and shouldn't be confused as our standard of living either. Jesus clearly set a much higher standard of living for us to follow, and this should be our goal. Going back to the Law would make us legalistic and try to change our life from the outside in instead of inside out.

I wish the author had been able to talk about the need for Grace and Truth without implying a paradox or confusing it with the Law.