I bought the book because of the interesting description on the back cover and the note that said the author was the "winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction." This book was dreadful. Thoroughly unsympathetic characters, terrible dialogue, and an unconvincing plot. Sometimes I laughed out loud at the contrived conflicts and plot twists. I felt I should finish the book just to make sure it was really that bad. It was. Please don't waste your time reading this dud.

I loved this book. It is probably my favorite Robert Olen Butler book. The book is sort of a cross between Camus "The Stranger" and Hemmingway's "A Farewell To Arms."

Whilst the book itself is quite well written the contents reveal a professional footballer expecting sympathy for the fact that he has to travel long distances for out of season friendly matches and he had to sacrifice a lump sum payment to play for one of the best teams in the world. There is little real insight into the professional game or recognition that the top players are priveleged individuals who are extremely well paid but who have responsibilities to their adoring public. The book fails to provide a good insight into the pleyers views on the key issues facing the sport. It is a major disappointment.

I have always wanted to know about the behind-the-scenes world of football and this book does the job. It drags on at times and is way too focused on Manchester United but Jaap gives a pretty decent account of his 3 years in english football.

Typifying the greed, arrogance and foolishness that has become the Man Utd marketing machine this book is perfect for those wanting to flush their money down the MUFC marketing toilet.

This book has every game from the 99/00 season ,the reveiws of all the games may be little biased but then again it is a united book so why not. I know that i wouldnt like to read to read reveiws from people who cant stand man utd .The book has just about every stat from every game and every competion from rio to tokyo and back to old trafford this book is the only guide to our record breaking year a good chance to relive your fravourite games from a specail season for all red fans.I enjoyed reading this so much i will definatley be making future guides a permanant fixture.

This module was definitely a waste of money. An obvious attempt to abuse Forgotten Realms players. This series and the Adventures with Volo series were a good example of why TSR was failing. Novice DMs could write a better adventure. I will say that the premise is an excellent idea (too bad they didn't put any work into it :(

The majority of the adventure details the overland trek to get to the tomb. Unfortunatly it is not well developed and I would have done better rolling encounters off a wandering monster table! Once you get into the tomb you get this wierd feeling. DID I PAY FOR THIS? WHERE IS THE ADVENTURE! The tomb turns out to be horribly short, and the ending leads into the next module badly. You can't roleplay a month of searching to no avail; players won't stand for that. So I had to tell them once they got back to Shadowdale that a month goes by and then they have this dream. Hmmmm...lame

But just wait if you play the next adventure it gets much much worse. Uhhhh :(

The Advedture was well presented and easy to follow. From a Dm's point of view the module is easy fit into most campaigns based in the Forgotten Realms. Players who have not had much/any experience, as well as seasoned players will find this module and it's companion modules challenging and fun.

This is a great book if you want to compare the everyday life of someone in one period with another period in a general way--but it is less fulsome on details than other historical guides specific to one period, and is not terribly specific about when these changes took place. You get lots of phrases like "in the second half of the 17th century" which give you a fair amount of guesswork. Still, if you are interested in daily life in a historical perspective this should prove to be a good addition to your bookshelf.

This book was more a dictionary than anything. I thought it would explain historical terms as in a story, but it has terms and definitions. Good book if you are looking up terms but as to everyday life and language it is not so good.

I used this book for research on Yeats' Byzantium poems, & I must admit that Adams presents many wonderful ideas about WBY, but he does so in a way that is so difficult to decipher, it hardly seems worth the effort. I am by no means a literary mastermind, but neither am I a terribly "slow" individual, & I found this book to be fairly difficult reading. I had to read several passages over, & very slowly, to decipher Adams' "academese." He could very easily have expressed the same ideas without such pretentious jargon and structure. All in all-- it is filled good ideas which are rendered virtually incomprehensible by their presentation. I suspect that most people who make an attempt at it won't last very long (I dredged through it solely out of neccessity). What a waste :o(

Edgeworth wrote about the protestant upper class in Ireland around the turn of the 18th/19th century. At the time, especially in Rackrent, her most famous work, she wrote of the machinations of bad landlords and how their families died out. It is interesting that she was writing about the demise of these bad landlords, suggesting that things had improved in this more enlightened age, at a time when the Irish Peasant was worse off than ever. Edgeworth wrote of a society that was on the brink of extinction, but she was not aware of this, since she was part of that society. This book is noteworthy for what it is not. It is not Irish literature. It is poor british literature and would have no merit at all if it did not serve to contrast with the high quality scribblings of the uneducated and unwashed downtrodden masses. Like the protestant ruling class it is sparse, stilted and haughty. Not a fun read.

I collect cookbooks (and own about 2,000), and three of my all-time favorite authors are Edna Lewis, Vertamae, and the Darden sisters -- all of whom are African Americans. Their books are written with incredible warmth, and introduce each recipe so you'll know what to expect, and why it is special to them. Although Cleora Butler appears to have been a singularly gifted and accomplished cook, I didn't get the "warm fuzzies" derived from other African American authors. I had bought the hardcover edition, but ended up giving it away ... as a Northeastern WASP
who knew little about either African American or southern cooking, I really missed not having warm intros or descriptions of the recipes. This is a real shame, since Ms. Butler appears to have accomplished wonders in that environment during that period, and I really wanted to love her book.

_Coffin and the Paper Man_ is an interesting book in that it deals less with the central aspects of who committed a brutal rape/murder of a young local girl and more with the aftereffects as someone in the community tries to take vengeance into their own hands.

Butler is a talented mystery writer, but this is not one of the strongest John Coffin mysteries. It feels a bit like an afterthought and many of the aspects that make Coffin books so good (relationship with Stella, presence of his sister Letty) are missing here.

While there is some interesting stuff in this book, there really isn't anything new, or fresh here. Though it was written well enough there could be more. There are authors that were forgotten, like Richard Paul Russo who while maybe isn't considered by many to be true cyberpunk, he writes with a cyberpunk edge, and is definately techno punk. The book is pretty good for what is there (though I do remember some mistakes);I would only reccomend this book for die hard cyberpunk fans, otherwise pass on this one.