...I can honestly say that, if this were the only study guide Ihad ever seen, I would have given up on learning Italian. FortunatelyI own "Just Listen n Learn Italian"...and "LivingLanguage Ultimate Italian"...infinitely more valuable than thishalf-hearted effort. My main complaint with this course is the lack oftime allowed for the listener to repeat the phrases in thedialogues. Any other course I've used allows such time, so thelistener can repeat the previous phrases. How else can one practicewhat they've just heard? Do they assume we're supposed to stop thetape every 5 seconds? If so, we can just say that this is merely userunfriendly and let it go. However, I would also add that the wholesetup lacks any coherent sense of progression. There is just no logicto it. OK. Basta! You've been warned. Please get one or both of theothers that I mentioned. Or...the Pimsleur courses are the Cadilacsof the genre, but for the best deal, I still recommend the other two.

This course is acceptable for one who is beginning to study this language, but not for one who would like a thorough review of how to use the language. Unless you already have some experience in the language, it'll be difficult to follow the course. Wave upon wave of things to get on your nerves are found in this course. For instance, at the beginning, the book gets involved with teaching very little grammar but giving a lot of sentences and vocabulary. This would be okay and a good way to let the language sink it, but it then follows this with going into exercises in which the reader has to answer questions using the words he or she has learned. Without knowing which words are translated into which and without knowing the grammar to Italian, one finds this to be a challenge. Several instances occur where the book uses vocabulary or grammar before actually teaching them. The vocabulary is also listed at the end of each chapter, but there is no reference section or appendix for grammar or verb tenses. The verbs are sporadically listed throughout the text, and the reader has to search for them should he or she forget a conjugation. It deals with basically every verb tense except for those within the subjunctive mood. But, once again, the reader has to memorize them as they come because there is no appendix for grammar or verbs. The glossary also doesn't recognize irregular verbs, which might cause some confusion. Also, the native speakers on the cassettes don't always say the correct readings which are in the book. They change words and sometimes add them. The best parts of this course are the several conversations and that the cassettes read many of the exercises in the book. The only way I made it through the course was because I've had some experience with the language already. I've had experience in several others, as well, so I know what I'm talking about when I say this is a weak course. Try finding something else instead of this. The books "Colloquial Italian" or "Italian All the Way" are extremely good courses. If you have a cassette of Italian already and a dictionary that recognizes stress on words, you won't need the cassettes to these courses. Italian orthography and pronunciation coincide almost always. Knowing the stress on words can be difficult at times, but dictionaries usually list the words (usually verbs) that carry and irregular stress pattern. Either of those two courses provide a strong base for further learning.

I am a language learning lover and this was my first exposure to an Italian course. I got this kit a few weeks before my wife and I went to Italy for vacation. I managed to cover the first 6 lessons in 3 weeks and I was amazed by the amount of useful sentences/vocabulary that I accumulated by then. Listening to the tape is not enough, you have to grab the texts for the dialogues, read them over and over again and repeat the sentences so they really sink in your memory. The negative points, there is not long enough pauses between sentences in the dialogues to allow for you to repeat them and the grammar guides are scattered all over the place with no index at the end. This is a course geared towards everyday conversation essentials, renting a room, getting around the city, shopping, traveling etc. and I found it really worth the price.

This book made me wish for something more. I never give up on a book 3/4 of the way through it, but I just dreaded reading it. The pace was terribly slow. Price definitely has a talent for assembling words, producing wonderful sentences. He lacks the overall concept of a plot -- does anything ever happen in this book? This is a great book for an insomniac!

This book presents an interesting peek into the life of one family in the South around the turn of the century. It was definitely NOT a can't-put-it-down or can-hardly-wait-to-finish-it book for me, though. I found myself frequently flipping ahead to see where the story line would go, as the details became tedious and often seemed unnecessary. I am anxious to read the other two in this series, though, to see how they compare to this one.

Reynolds Price shows us again how a Southern family's life is anything but simple. Two families touced by the beauty, predjustices and shortcomings of the South are brought together to trimphant and fall with deep emotion and determination while remaining true to oneself and their heritage. Beautifully Written. A true beginning to a wonderful journey.

Another book that is not worth the paper it is printed on.

I wish I hadn't opened the CD encasing so I could return it and get my money back. Unfortunately, it was required for an AfterEffects class last term and I had no choice. By the end of the class even the instructor gave up on the book. This term the instructor went back to the Classroom in a Book even though it's for AE 5.0, and rightfully so.

The examples are impossible to follow, the support files are incomplete. It's just a pain to learn from.

This book is not very good if you are a brand new user to After Effects. I found myself continuously going to the help button to find the item the book told me to use. I thought about selling it back as a used book, but I didn't want to be responsible for someone else wasting their money. Do not buy this book unless you already know the basics in After Effects. There are some good tips, but that was not why I bought this; I had never used After Effects and thought this was a step by step tutorial.

I decided to read this book after seeing it listed on the USA Today book club. And boy was I disappointed! Perosnally, I found the book very hard to read. I consider my self fairly intelligent and found myself rereading many times, somethin that does not make reading enjoyable. And a few times, I still didn't get what was being said. I also thought that the story and plot were rather dull. I will admit that the first chapter was pretty good, but it went down hill very quickly. To be honest I was very disappointed that the author did not go into further detail when he discussed Noble's "relationships and encounters." While I was not expecting smut, I feel it would have added to the story.

I am a fan of a good Southern saga, and Price has written quite a few of those. Noble Norfleet, however compelling, was not his best. It failed to deliver on several levels, despite a strong premise: young Noble set adrift in the world after the death of his siblings by his crazy mother's hand.

There were many allusions to the spiritual world; Noble has several strange visions throughout the course of the story that the reader is left to decipher-is he psychic? Or just clinically depressed? Then, there is his "worship" of women. He really, really wants to devour their, uh, "essence." Of course, this must be related to his strange relationship with his batty mother, who has been institutionalized but still plays a pivotal role in Noble's life. She makes many cryptic remarks about Noble's destiny throughout the book, but they remain cryptic. In fact, the latter is a good word to sum up this book. The book, like all books, had to end, but it just felt so unfinished. It felt like Price had meandered too much off track and didn't know how to get back on again, so he just hurried up and slapped together an ending. Noble was an interesting character, and so were many of the "fine women he had the pleasure to know," (he talks a lot like this throughout the novel), but overall, there was no real cohesiveness. My reaction, upon turning the last page, was "Huh? What was that all about?" But an interesting muddle, overall.

Mr. Price has once again managed to consume my time with a novel worth reading. However, when compared to some of his earlier work, Noble Norfleet is a bit of a disappointment. (Still good mind you, but not up to his normal level). I found the premise of the book to be intriguing. Certainly being left alive when both your siblings are killed by your mother is enough to send most 17 year old boys into permanent la la land.
The basis of the story is sound. We are given peeks of Noble's life through his Army days, and then his career as a male nurse. As time goes on in the book, however, the attention to the story becomes thinner and thinner. Eventually, the story becomes so thin that it is trasparent at the end. While the book covers over 30 years, the greatest amount of detail is given to the first few months of the book and little attention to detail at the end.
The sex in the book isn't gratuitous and not necessarily over done, but important to the story line.
I recommend this book highly.

Yes, writing a global history is an impossible task. However, there are varying degrees to which you can succeed. David Reynolds comes up short with his book titled "One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945".

Reynolds' main theme is that, while advances in telecommunications have made communication easier and faster to all points of the globe, the world is not converging into a monocultural monster. Reynolds' believes quite the opposite is happening. Mass communication and increased education have aided the fragmentation of empires like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and France. The western European withdrawal from empire and the collapse of totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe have created many new states and allowed the rising consciousness of formerly suppressed ethnic identities.

Reynolds supports his thesis well but, aside from a few disgruntled French farmers, anyone with the requisite intelligence to even read a book such as this already knows it. Reynolds portrays his theme as if it were reinventing contemporary conceptions of the world when in fact all he is doing is reinforcing what any educated person already knows.

Regarding the actual history that Reynolds writes, he does well up until about 1980. The closer he gets to the year 2000, the more Reynolds gets wrong. He seems to have a particularly difficult time explaining the American scene since roughly the Ford administration. Two egregious mistakes he makes are blaming America's deficits on the Reagan tax cuts and claiming that Clinton was impeached for his sexual improprieties. What caused the large deficits of the 1980s was not Reagan's tax cuts but his inability to reign in (or his indifference to) excessive Congressional spending. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was impeached for having committed perjury and suborning others to do so too. I doubt the leaders of the impeachment push would have gone after Clinton for infidelity considering most of them were guilty of that same character flaw thereby making themselves obvious targets of public ridicule.

At least Reynolds does acknowledge that his interpretation is open to discussion. He has the sense to know that any history of such a recent period will not be definitively written for some years to come and it likely won't be beholden to this one.

Admirable in its goal and ambitious in its scope, David Reynolds' One World Divisible offers a truly global history of world events since 1945. Overall, it is a decent summary of the period (if 700 pages can be termed a summary) and could easily and confidently be used as a textbook for almost any modern history course, either as the central text or as a complement (I read it in class focusing on the Cold War). It touches on events in all parts of the world and also on social, economic, political, cultural, and technological trends. Reynolds does a particularly good job of chronicling the years of revolution 1989-1991, when so much was happening in so many different places.

However, for all its utility and detail, Reynolds' political opinions appear far too often--enough that it detracts from the book. Certain words and phrases (such as family values) receive the scornful, mocking quotation marks that academics often use. The tobacco industry is attacked. The American gun lobby is also criticized, and their positions result from a "selective reading of the Second Amendment." The Reagan administration, among other things, is termed "fanatically antigreen." "Many" senior Republicans who sought to impeach Clinton were also adulterers. Samuel Huntington is reduced to an opponent of multiculturalism. Margaret Thatcher responded to the Falklands crisis not only with resolution but also "relish." Vietnam protesters were "dignified."

I am also not quite convinced that his linking of various fundamentalisms (the American Christian Right with Islamic fundamentalists, for example) is appropriate or accurate. And his paean to series editor Paul Kennedy was a bit overdone. Beyond the political bias and some minor flaws of analysis, the book functions fairly well at least as a timeline and also as a generally cohesive picture of the past 50 years.

It is hard to believe but this breakthrough is a tangible reality. Full of in-deapth research, it covers a wide range of fledging issues in a humourous style. I enjoyed reading it.

This book did not use any good mechanics, and gave an exceedingly difficult pace to keep up with, thus, making for poor grades.

I have been teaching with this book now for many years, and I have finally come to the comclusion that my students are having too much trouble understanding what this book is trying to teach us. The lessons are fairly organized, but here could be a considerable amount of revising to be done before more students use it . Take for example "Dime Algo" and "Dime Mas" these, two books I have previewed and havef ound them to be excellent, not only do they show the time and effort put in, it is very logically organized. The lessons and all are very clearly explained. Unfortunately "Pasos y Puentes" does not lllive up to these and other expectations of myself, the students, and the foreign language department.

This is by far one of the best level two textbooks I have ever seen. I used both this and the workbook that goes along with it to teach my little brother Spanish (he used to be homeschooled). When he finally started public school he was far better prepared going into his level three class than kids who had both used a different textbook in public school and with their own families as homeschooled children as well.

Much of this has been covered before. What Reynolds offers is a mish-mash of previously available material dressed up as something new. Don't be fooled by this one.

While this FX Guide is true to the Alternity rules and can fit into virtually any setting, I can't help but dislike many of the choices for the new skills. Too many of the Arcane Magics have an evil feel to them (summoning evil spirits, blood magic, fire magic, etc), and too many of the Faith Magics are difficult or dangerous to use (alienism, shamanism, etc). This makes many of the new skills inappropriate for heroes in most settings. The Super Powers are, sadly (in my opinion), the best made and most playable.

Despite those complaints, it is a well written book and anyone who is interested in putting magic into their setting will want it. I will only warn Game Masters about the power of FX Skills--they will put Psionics to shame. Be very careful to balance them if they are used.

It is a ..shame that Wizards discontinued Alternity.

This guide is an excellent example of the versatility of the system. Beyond Science gives you the strait goods on how to add magic, faith and super powers to any campaign. All the abilities are well thought out and pretty detailed. They even throw in some FX using monsters for fun like golems, familiars, demons, angels and vampires!

On book quality, the art work on the cover and the inside are well done.

Now...my gripes. I feel that such a versatile thing such as FX should have been included in the Player's Guide (I know, it was included in the Gamemaster's guide) along with Psionics and cyberware. I also was dissapointed by the lack of a FX skill page for photocopying and such. Finally, FX can wipe the floor with Psionics and the guide dosn't go into enough detail about how to counter this overpowering. They aknowledge it and go into some detail about balancing but not enough for my tastes.

It may seem like alot of complaints but I am still very satisfied with the guide!

I found this book very hard to read, since the author jumped back and forth continuously from past to present. Not only that, but he would make a statement and then go off on a tanget and back it up with two or three paragraphs worth of filler; sometimes making a comment that would give you a glimpse into either the past or the future, and sometimes not, thus making it hard to follow. As for the content, I was not impressed. Here is a 35 year-old man who emotionally hurts his mother, wife, and daughter over and over again, all the while condemning himself and saying he realizes what he's doing to them is wrong, but he can't seem to help himself. However, if the author's literary goal is to get the reader to read the whole book, then he was successful in that. As hard as I found this book to read and follow sometimes, I saw it through to the end just to see how it would turn out. Unfortunately, it was not the type of ending that made the time and effort of reading the book worthwhile. I thought it was very disappointing, to say the least.

Reynolds Price writes of incest and pedoohilia in such a courtly style that I had to re-read certain passages to verify the recitation of unspeakable acts committed on children by people whom they trusted. The "hero" is not a likeable person and it is difficult to comprehend how his mother, wife and daughter continue to give him so many "second" chances. His weaknesses are apparent, as is his awareness of the hurt that he inflicts; however, he doesn't redeem himself by being aware since he continues to pursue his own desires even while knowing how hurtful these actions are. Reynolds Price is an author I have liked for many years. He doesn't fear to tread where others might, but his style is under-stated and very southern in tone so that the reader is sometimes taken unaware. This is not his best effort, but I will continue to read what he writes.

It is just a matter of opinion but i didn't like this book. I guess insest is a touchy subject for me, and I didn't care to read about it. THe book was well written. If you want to read a book that goes straight to your heart, read Stolen Moments by Barbara Jeanne Fisher. . .It is a beautiful story of unrequited love. . .for certain the love story of the nineties. I intended to give the book a quick read, but I got so caught up in the story that I couldn't put the book down. From the very beginning, I was fully caught up in the heart-wrenching account of Julie Hunter's battle with lupus and her growing love for Don Lipton. This love, in the face of Julie's impending death, makes for a story that covers the range of human emotions. The touches of humor are great, too, they add some nice contrast and lighten things a bit when emotions are running high. I've never read a book more deserving of being published. It has rare depth. Julie's story will remind your readers that life and love are precious and not to be taken for granted. It has had an impact on me, and for that I'm grateful. Stolen Moments is written with so much sensitivity that it made me want to cry. It is a spellbinder. What terrific writing. Barbara does have an exceptional gift! This book was edited by Lupus specialist Dr. Matt Morrow too, and has the latest information on that disease. ..A perfect gift for someone who started college late in life, fell in love too late in life, is living with any illness, or trying to understand a loved one who is. . .A gift to be cherished forever.

This book is nothing more than a suppliment advertisement.

Please make sure that when you're buying this book, you're not under the misconception that this is by any means a nutritional book. I was looking for dietary hints from people who I thought would be most in tune with their bodily needs. Instead, I received a book full of 'feel the burn' and 'maintain discipline' lifting slogans and little useful information for anyone who is not preparing for a competition. If that's what you're looking for, this is a wonderful book for you. For useful insites into nutrition and lean muscle mass correlation to your daily diet look somewhere else.

This book is the only book I've found that goes deep into the importance of nutrition in bodybuilding. I refer back to it time and time again and each time I learn something new! It's great for those who just want to shed a little body fat for summer and for those who want to "cut-up" for competition. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about diet, exercise and strength training!

The Story Knife is a bit of a disappointment. The descriptive history of Alaska and Native American culture is informative and sensitively treated, but the characterization of women and the language used to describe them is antiquated and shallow, even for this genre. For this line to succeed, the priest, the women and the married relationships require more depth and less cliche. Fr. Townsend is supposed to be the protagonist, but in actuality, the mystery solves itself. We need a little more wheat and a little less chaff.

For a first mystery, this is extremely good. The story drags at times, and more editing would have helped, but the author has vivid descriptions, lively action, and an unusual setting. The local touches are occasionally overdone; one more description of someone as "white" was about to make me scream, especially as I never thought of Eskimos as "non-white"! But the language, arts, and culture are handled well.

This book was a very good mystery, but it took a while to get into the suspense and excitement. I thought the author could've maybe gotten into a better mood and started things faster. The author also added a lot of unneeded information. Most of the facts about the Eskimos were interesting, but pretty much useless. The author definitely showed his knowledge about Eskimo lifestyle, but a lot of the Eskimo speaking and reference to it was not needed. If you read this book you will know a lot more about Eskimos, but a lot of the time you will just want to get to the story. I did like the author's description and I thought that it made this story interesting. The story was very exciting and kept you on the edge of your seat when the author stayed on the story line. I think that during the first one hundred pages, the author could've maybe made a small reference to who the exact killer could be so the reader could be thinking. I know that after the explanation of the murder and characters the book went no where for a while. A little hint or clue in these first pages could have improved this book enormously. After reading the book and getting a resolution to it, I think that it was pretty good. I think that the book could have been a little more exciting and shorter without as many Eskimo facts and information. The end feeling of this book is pretty good though, once the book got started it was very good. The only bad parts were at the beginning. I would recommend this book to people who like mysteries and would like to know a little Eskimo culture. If you want a book that gets right into the plot and reads fast, I think you should try a different book.