since only braine lee pardoe writes about the highlanders, there is really no other writers i can compare him to. but rather than writing about them indepth he just writes about them alot. there is just that difference. his characters are rather, i should say, flat. who would trust a death commando so blatently even though he has some 'family connection'? it makes the colonel macleod look like a gullible old man.

being a death commando, their loyalty to the chancellor is not as easily swayed as loren is. making him a totally unbelivable death commando. even the supposed self-conflict is nothing but his own annoying rants.

one more thing, the epilogue with the conversation between jerry cranston AKA galen cox and victor steiner-davion was so out of their respective characters. especially for victor who seems old, cranky and highly irritable. please, victor is way beyond that.

and ROC, bring back michael stackpole.

Major Loren Jaffay of the elite troops of the Death Commandoes of the Capellan Confederation is sent on a mission to destroy the "evil" Highlander Regiment because they deserted the Confederation in thier time of need. I think this is a pretty exciting book to read because in the middle of Jaffay's mission the Highlanders split up and battled the Eighth's RTC units. Buy this book it is a good read!!

The Jaffrey Family left the famous Northwind Highlanders almost three decades ago. Now the man who rules the latest generation of Jaffreys, Chancellor Sun-Tsu Liao, plans to use Loren Jaffrey, the grandson of two of the heroes of the war of 3025, to destroy the Highlanders. But who will he fight for? A nation that he was raised in? Or will he break from every thing he has known to help his ancestors' unit

Mr. Yorgason may know his Mormon history but he sure blew it with the rest of this story. His credits claim that he has degrees in history but it's more than obvious that he didn't bother to use anything he learned about researching the subject before he put this one together! He's used one reference (and we all know which one it is)without bothering to authenticate any of the details and, unfortunately, he's so far off the money that he took much more than "literary license" with a story that was confusing enough already. Now he'll have even more people mixed up about what happened since some obviously can't separate fact and fiction. How would Civil War buffs like it if an author moved the date of the Gettysburg fight by a month!!

This is an excellent book and I liked the story line, but I found the author to be lacking in his ability to use simple descriptive words. This made it difficult to keep up with the story. I don't mind stretching my vocabulary some, but there were times these unusual words caused me to drift from the story. Like I said, I did like the story itself, except for the female lead character repeating her efforts to repent of her sins. It became a little boring there. But overall I give it 4 stars...A good book. I will buy book 3 when it come out.

The Awataguchi Shinto School of Sword Making IS A GREAT BOOK if you are collecting sword or having one ,if you want to make a sword this book is not for you cause details are less,but to maintian a sword like sharpness and free from dust and BLOOD ...he he...., if you are in sword collection go for it anyway

The Kirkus review of this book was fairly devastatingly nasty, but honestly the only defense I can offer is that it isn't as bad as all that. Condemning it with faint praise, I realize.

Anyhow-- the debut Blaine Stewart novel. It introduces her gun, her dead ex-husband, her drinking problem and her itchy trigger finger. Starting to get the drift? Even with all this, Zukowski has a flair for her writing and it manages to be reasonably entertaining despite the cliche-ridden backdrop. No small accomplishment.

I bought this book with my school and really liked the idea of TPR Storytelling, including stories in the teaching of a foreign language. The teacher's guide is "multi-lingual", it is the same for all languages. The workbooks are language specific. Although the content and ideas are great, I have a few remarks. First, I found that the teacher's guide did not really explain much more that the student workbook. You have to do a lot of figuring out by yourself. However, what I found the most disturbing in the French student workbook was the number of typos, grammatical and syntactical errors, anglicisms etc. I wondered if the book had been reviewed by a French-speaker (I know Blaine Ray teaches Spanish) and edited at all. If these errors could be corrected in the next edition, I would recommend this method 100%.

Most programmers ask themselves, "Why aren't my tools this easy to use?" According to the contributors to this book, the answer is that we make far too little use of interactive 2D and 3D graphics. Even the most advanced integrated-development environments (IDEs) are built around a text editor. If you compare this to the dozens of sketches that programmers draw to show data structures, inheritance, and control flow, you can see how much more we could be doing. Most of the systems discussed in Software Visualization use visualization to examine or explain existing programs. Some of the results leave me cold, but some, like the classic "Sorting Out Sorting" by Baecker et al., are truly illuminating.

The book, actually written some 40 years later, is set in the late 1940s, with an LA-based PI (Mike Garrett) on a case that takes him to El Paso, where all of the action takes place. The noir-ish mood is direct homage to Raymond Chandler, and the ultra-wealthy Colonel is reminiscent of General Sternwood in "The Big Sleep". Plot is OK, body count is high, violence and sex are about typical for the genre, and the book is fun for the lover of this style. Downside, and maybe the explanation of why Blaine was a 2 hit wonder (and probably neither hit actually went very far out of the infield), is a very derivative plot and characters with no real originality. You have to be an aficionado of the genre to appreciate this book. If you are an aficionado, you will figure out "whodunit" a whole lot faster than our hero does. It is entertaining fluff, but there are a lot of better books out there.
The title refers to jade figurines of a prince and a princess, sacred to the Mayans, that may have a curse on them that causes death to those who would steal them. The wealthy and powerful Colonel and his family own the statues, which are mysteriously being auctioned off. Garrett's client hires him to attend the private auction and bid on the statue on his behalf. The client is then murdered, the first of five dead bodies that will accumulate on this case, and Garrett is driven to solve the case pretty much pro bono out of loyalty to his former client. There are plenty of hoodlums, plenty of crooked or inept cops, plenty of blunt and sharp trauma to Garrett, and plenty of booze is consumed before the resolution of this mystery.

Never a mormon city found. Show me some ancient north american elephant bones. These guys forged and cast metal right? Show me an iron spear from a nephite? or laminite?. Spelling? I'm sure Blaine M. Yorgason is a genius(under hypnotic spell A.K.A. BYU). But it is impossible to make something out of nothing. Put your beliefs on trail, scrutinize every detail.There lies the truth, not professeing that Joe Smith was a prophet of god like an android every Sunday. If the glove doesn't fit you must acquit.

Don't waste your time with this book. For 170 years now there hasn't been a scintilla of evidence found which substantiates any LDS claim that Christ visited the Americas or that any of the Book of Mormon peoples, cities, histories, etc ever happened or ever existed---except when it is being argued by LDS scholars. Please, please, will any Mormon please recommend even a single book, written by a non-Mormon archeologist or historian, which corroborates ANY Mormon claims concerning the pre-Columbian New World?

The evidence and arguments presented by this book are so compelling that anyone who doubts that Jesus visited America is kidding themself. Surely after reading this Book Alex Loya will need to accept that there is abundant archeological evidence for the history included in the Book of Mormon.

el viaje perdido is sooo horrible! Its a book made to help 3rd year spanish students learn the langauge, but the book is so ... and lousey that it's really a big waste of time. nothing happens in the book! these two idiots are on a cruise in puerto rico, they miss the boat and their money is stolen. They meet up with this prissy ugly woman that they met on the cruise, and for some reason one guy has to pretend that he's married to her, while the other guy has to work in the grandma's farmacy... but the grandma is a fat ugly witch doctor that ends up finding out about the pretend marriage through her "phsycic powers" and kicks the two guys out of her house, and then they go home the end.

This book tries to give the basics of the intelligence organization of the western countries, the USA, UK and France. It comes off as a very high level, average and uninspiring work. There is just nothing new here and I wondered if maybe this was not written for an age group of under 15. I was surprised because I had heard good things about his other work. This is a rather dull book and I would suggest looking elsewhere.