Kilzer, a prize winning journalist, has produced yet another revisionist 'history' examining Winston Churchill's pivotal role in the Second World War. His prose can be engaging, his suggestions controversial, his conclusions thought provoking, and his documentation dubious. He jumps back and forth among a variety of persons and topics at a frenetic pace and with a bevy of 'revelations.' His premise is overstated, if not flawed, by the need to rehabilitate Hitler's reputation which he believes "distorted" while Churchill has become "a god." (p. 78) Thus, he endeavors to convince his readers that Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess and Hitler were both profound Anglophiles who wanted to share power with the British Empire while eventually destroying the hated communistic Soviet Union. Unfortunately, so the story goes, Churchill's immense ego, militarism, and Germanophobia compelled him to play a dangerous political game which co-opted the British 'peace party,' lured Hess to entrapment in Britain, induced Hitler to a Russian Gotterdammerung, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to decisive military intervention; all of which engendered mass genocide in Europe and the ultimate demise of the British Empire! It should immediately be apparent that this cause and effect Tour de Force ascribes far more power and pre-meditation to Churchill than is hardly possible for the embattled head of a tottering empire. Also, Kilzer's over-reliance on numerous works by vehement anti-Churchill 'historians' such as David Irving or the diaries of noted Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels and Walter Schnellenberg is certainly not credible. His numerous errors regarding military history and strategy do not inspire confidence, especially references such as the British assault at Verdun in 1916 (p. 139) when he obviously meant the Somme; his assignation of the sole blame for the Dardanelles Disaster in 1915 to Churchill, a very old red herring; or his continual remarks that the Royal Navy, still the world's foremost naval power, was powerless to resist a German invasion in 1940. Of special amusement is the great strategic weight he assigns to the Iraqi Revolt of 1941 which was, in actuality, little more than a sideshow. CHURCHILL'S DECEPTION is not the worst example of the revisionist excesses regarding the Second World War, Churchill's reputation, or the Holocaust which now abound in print, film, and the Internet. He is also not as vitriolic as Irving and some othes and he does raise important questions regarding reality and perception, then and now, although resolution remains as elusive as ever and subject to fantastic speculation which shows little sign of abating.

The promise of this book, stated on the back cover, is to uncover a "deception [by Churchill] that propelled ... Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union."

That promise is never delivered on. The writing style is merely passable. After a few false starts, the book goes into a very long digression into German and Nazi history which has nothing to do with the book topic.

The author constantly belittles Churchill as the self-indulgent imperialistic "old bulldog," "that damned warmonger at 10 Downing Street." Yet while the author once calls Hitler a "demon," Hitler is virtually praised as the misunderstood hope of a unified Germany, a man who by May 1941 had reached as far geographically as he wanted -- a man who only bombed London in an attempt to reach peace with England, and who was willing to give up France if England would only agree to peace. The holocaust? Why, blame that on Churchill -- the holocaust was started when Germany was tricked into invading Russia.

Why did Hitler invade Russia? The author can't make up his mind. Sometimes the reason for the Russian invasion is to convince England that Hitler's desire for peace with England is sincere, and other times Hitler was tricked into invading Russian because there was ALREADY a de facto peace treaty between Germany and England reached in May 1941. Somehow thrown into the mix is that by reaching peace with Germany and encouraging Hitler's invasion of Russia, this would force the U.S. to come into the war.

Whether Hess' flight into Scotland to meet the supposed leader of the British "Peace Party" came out of Hess' deluded mind, or was a secret mission from Hitler, that surely doesn't translate into either a "secret peace" or an intention on Churchill's part to cause Hitler to invade Russia.

Klizer lost his credibility on page 30 when he quotes Hess saying he turned his plane inverted so he could drop out and parachute down, and while he was dropping out he righted the plane and re-started the engine (so it would "hurtle to earth"). This is physically impossible, and otherwise non-sensical. The uneveness is between the early pages, which have a jerky and coy quality reminiscent of a lot of low end writing, and a marked change in tone to the sweeping style of a professional historian. It seems that two persons are writing the book. Maybe it's the lack of consistency, but I get the feeling that the historian is paraphrasing somebody else. The footnotes are mainly to secondary sources, like newspaper articles. It seems the research was simply compiling statements by others without any independent original work

Having had the opportunity to serve in a number of U.S. Army and Air Force Special Operations Forces(SOF) units during my dual-service career--and therefore having some sensitivity to security concerns in this field--I approach with skepticism anyone making such flashy "I had a license to kill" claims. Beyond the outright wannabes, there is another group that has learned enough of the SOF lingo and lore to give their tales a seeming touch of reality when delivered to those who have never served in the clannish & closed Special Operations community. And as an author myself of three non-fiction SOF books, I find it unsettling when an author claims "writer's license" (Foreword, p. vii) with such apparent ease in writing what he himself admits is a composite picture of his adventures. Who can know what anecdotes actually happened? For all I know Peter Mason is everything he claims and more. But unfortunately what comes across in this book is someone needing to make some money after his military pension was "impounded" as the author reports.

While I don't doubt the author's credentials as a special forces operator and small arms expert, it seems to me that he has taken too many fictional liberties in an attempt to make the book more readable. In the book he tells one (not quite believeable) story of how he killed the nazi war criminal Ortgies, while on the tv documentary about his exploits a completely different version is told. This could have been a major exposé in the tradition of "Spycatcher" and "By Way of Deception", but unfortunately the book is written like a cheap spy novel. However, if the author had found a good ghost writer, I'm sure the book would have been an international bestseller like the two above mentioned books.

I found this book - a few interesting bits heavily padded with material intended to provide color but which failed to engage my interest - to be the literary equivalent of a hamburger sandwich that is long of bun and short of beef.

it is very serious boo

This book was long overdue and somewhat of a disappointment when it finally arrived. Much of the information in it is dated, but it remains important information that was long overdue to be in print. Congratulations Stanley for pulling it together. This book, albeit pricey, is a must for historical archaeologists.

I gave this book two stars because I liked the fact that it uses Excel rather than SPSS, since more professionals own that software. They handle some topics really well, but others,... Let's just say that when they were good, they were good, but when they were bad (skimpy in explaining), they were really bad. The authors clearly knew how to use Excel to handle statistics with a lot of "nifty, real-world experiences". But, often, the examples do not map to the problems we "mere mortals" should attempt to answer or even map to the problems in the textbook. Sometimes it was as if one person wrote the example, but someone else did the problems at the end of the chapter. Your best bet is to hope that your professor maps to the problems, because the authors sure didn't. In addition, I'm somewhat old fashioned. I liked the answers to odd-numbered questions in the back of the textbook. The authors did not include them. I used to get a lot of extra study time, "plowing" through every type of question I could to see if I was understanding the concept. No such luck, here. You can answer questions until you're blue. There are no answers to double check. (There goes any attempt to be independent and do extra work) (And if I'm forced to be really ticky,...the print is small and the text is congested,...if you've got older eyes like mine, buy a magnifying glass or better yet, pick a better book. I understand the authors may have others that work much better.

This may be my least-favorite of the Volumes in this series I've seen. All the same, there are highlights:
"The Prisoners Of Lazareth" & "Penetrating Heaven" by Jon Macy are intriguing stories involving aliens from space and demons of hell-- I just wish the artwork lived up to the writing. "Heavy Loads" by Joe involves truckers; Joe's overly-muscled art is very "cleanly" rendered, though the drawing is far better than the visual storytelling. "Murphy's Manor" by Kurt Erichsen features cute, cartoony art & thoughtful, fun writing. "Johnny Shadow" by John Blackburn is, to date, the ONLY story I've seen him do with a hero other than his blonde character, Coley-- though the difference isn't that noticeable. "Friends" featured "Jack Masters Private Dick" by Joven in a case involving gay-bashing. "Rapid Shooters" by Sean has a group of guys wild-river rafting together (clothing optional). And "Jayson's Dream Man" is another installment in Jeffrey A. Krell's humorous sitcom-like series. Also worth a look is "Broc Of The Stone Age", a silent story all told in full-page panels by "Mike", whose rendering is far better than his actual drawing (the linework is very refined, but his human figures all have extremely distorted, exaggerated anatomy-- funny enough, his dinosaurs look fine!). Gerald Donelan contributes 12 of his light-hearted cartoons this time.
As usual, this series continues to feature a mix of good and really below-average work. As a forum for "up-and-coming" talent that's to be applauded; I just wish the format didn't make such a mixed product so pricey!

While tempted to call this a typical obsessive romance with some violence thrown in, i feel that i might be alittle harsh saying that. Although not a wonderful, original plotline, it was at least entertaining. A bored, married housewife with kids meets the mysterious drifter of her dreams and developes a deep bond with him while her kids get in trouble and her husband cheats on her on his "business" trips. The bond is so deep he gets her to do whatever little thing he finds exciting and that's where the thrill begins. This book is only good if you're not looking for a masterpiece.

Web Publishing With MacRomedia Backstage Internet Studio 2 by Shamms R. Mortier, et al was a very dissapointing work. It deals primarily with how to use the Designer to create basic Web pages. It does go into details on fluff about X-Res and Applet Ace but includes almost nothing about Backstage Server and database connectivity and application design. It refers the user to Backstages Help files for this and goes as far as to say they are a great source of info including the demos provided with Backstage! If you've spent more than a couple hours with Backstage this book will be of little help to you. If you're looking for a work to help you with the abundant but poorly documented advanced features of Backstage you will need to look elsewhere.

Painter 5 Complete is not a good introduction for the beginner or intermediate user. I have found I learned much more stumbling around in the dark or from the official Painter manual that ships with the program. The tutorials tend to be inaccurate and dont lead to a further understanding of the program. There is nothing "complete" about this book at all. Buy the Painter5 WoW book instead--although more advanced it will get you up to speed much quicker and more enjoyably.

It's not all bad however. I was at least able to use the manual to finally crack (understand) Painter 5. An example of an exeptionally well organised book is "P'shop 4 Artistry" by Haynes & Crumpler. "PS4A" cost about the same but was printed on quality stock & included color illustrations & extremely well thought out explanations. To be fair to "FDP5Complete", the in-many-ways impressive Painter program also has a loooong way to go before it is as well organised & as elegant as Photoshop. However all too often there were critical steps missing in a technique being described & these missing steps had to be discovered by the reader when presumably that was what the writer had been paid to do. The book's use of Black & White photos to demonstrate a color grafix program is pathetic & until I read the other reviews I had wondered if I was some kind of computer illiterate cretin for not being able to get any of the accompanying CD's images to appear as icons let alone open the wretched things. This book sadly is not the only one that doesn't check this otherwise obvious point before they ship. With the help of a friend we eventually managed to get the images out (using several different softwares, but a) the images took up 890Mb & b) they were very pathetic in quality & extremely pathetic in artistic standard. The CD only just barely qualifies as a coffee coaster. Probably because I use coffee cups that don't know any better. Summary: If there aren't better books in the store or you've lost your manual you WILL get a fair bit of value out of the book but it could have been so much better with a little extra effort.

I wish someone would go through these books first to see if all the images and tutorial items are complete with the instructions. I did a "find file" on the very first image I was told to open..in the mosaics tutorial..Guitar.jpg, only to find it is not on the CD. So I go to my collection of photos and get one of my own. Then the next tutorial I have to swap CD's to the Painter CD to use one of the images provided on it. I will never get this learning process underway if I can't find images and have to keep changing CD's. Sorry for the strong critique, but I am 50 yrs. old and don't have a lot of time to fiddle around all day swapping and searching..I am trying to acomplish some learning!

This book is not written by Winston S. Churchill. An earlier reviewer has already made this comment. Amazon still shows the author incorrectly in the search listings. I just hope someone at Amazon will take the S. out of the name.

CONISTON is by the American novelist Winston Churchill, not by (Sir) Winston S. Churchill, who wrote only one book-length novel, SAVROLA. -Richard Langworth, Prop. Churchillbooks http://Churchillbooks.home.ml.org