This book, in my opinion, is the best wiretaps book out there. It includes intricate and easy to comprehend details in the using and purpose of various items in the intelligence field. I would reccomend this highly to all people who have the urge to learn wiretapping skills. Furthermore, the author, Anthony Alberti, has an obvious passion and deep understanding of his profession and can easily protray this in his book. So if you are interested in learning wiretapping skills, this book is top of the line and good for you.

I found this book to be highly informative. The author seems to be an expert in this field

way to go tony........

There is little I can add to the very thorough Atlanta review which follows this posting, except to say the following: the performing community has needed a book like this for a long time, and Dale Girard delivers in spades. Having had the privilege of working with Mr. Girard numerous times over the years, I can attest both to the depth of his scholarship on the subject of the sword, and to his being one of the finest teachers of staged combat extant. Combining years of the author's experience on stage, on film, and in the classroom, "Actors On Guard" is a marvelous guide to beginning rapier-play. With detailed text and copious illustrations, the book pulls off the marvelous trick of being simultaneously easily accessible and deeply comprehensive, making it an invaluable work for performers who have never touched a sword before as well as those with years of training under their belts. While no written work can ever substitute for instruction from a qualified teacher, "Actors On Guard" comes pretty darned close!

"Actors On Guard" represents many years of personal research and professional experience by one of the true scholars of the art of Stage Combat, SAFD Fight Master Dale Anthony Girard. In his prologue, Mr. Girard describes stage combat as a "living, maturing art". [p.xvi] Girard's work represents another leap forward in the maturing process. The 467 pages of text that follow include a thorough handling of the safety, training, acting, and performance of the single rapier, and rapier and dagger fights for the stage and screen. These are followed by equally valuable appendices providing detailed listings of the various fight Societies, Swordcutlers and Suppliers, information on weapons maintenance and an exhaustive glossary of common swordplay terms. In limiting itself to the concerns of just these weapons, rapier and dagger, Girard has, happily, accomplished a work far too detailed to be completely illuminated in such a short format. Mr. Girard's text begins in chapter one with the maxim that unites all Fight Directors and Actor Combatants of quality . . . "Safety First!", and this theme is echoed on every page thereafter. New students of the craft often find the task of teaching their bodies the mechanics of the art an exercise in frustration when what they really want to do is fight NOW. Girard recognizes this tendency and offers a detailed argument of just why the learning of these techniques cannot be rushed. "By rushing the learning process, you miss the inherent safety of the technique through an incomplete understanding of the process". [p.5] Girard explains that the basic principles of kinesthetic learning, total body-mind learning, provide the foundation this learning process. Mr. Girard is an outstanding scholar of the sword in history and offers a concise and useful history of the rapier before detailing the anatomy of the weapon itself. These explanations are accompanied with fine illustrations of various fencing and historical weapons, a valuable reference. The information is summed up with a thorough checklist to assist the reader in selecting a safe stage weapon. The meat of Girard's text, chapters 3 through 18, is concerned with the actual learning and performing of safe stage techniques for the rapier and dagger. While there have been many texts written concerning the general techniques of safe stage combat, I know of none that concern themselves with such excellent detail of practical technique and their historical background. Beginning with an explanation of just what is "proper alignment" and how to achieve it, Girard utilizes precise descriptions assisted by appropriate illustrations (excellently drawn by Zina Lee) to explain the basics of stance and footwork. I especially like the explanations of stationary offensive and defensive positions [chapter 3], an afterthought in much of the training I've received to this point, before moving on to actual footwork. Girard moves on to the basics of advances and retreats (broken down into 5 stages and accompanied with illustrations), passes, lunges, "circle steps", and each is presented in an easily understood format. Perhaps most valuable are Girard's drills and exercise detailed at the end of the chapter which are intended to develop individual consistency of stance and movement, and the maintenance of consistent measure between partners. These exercises, notated in easily understood terms, will undoubtedly aid in ending a new combatants footwork mistakes BEFORE they become ingrained as personal habits. The individual blade-work drills Girard offers should be a daily routine for any aspiring combatant. These drills do not require a partner and make for fun reading when you put a sword in your other hand. More importantly, these exercises develop precision and blade awareness and the ". . . strength, agility, and dexterity of the hand and wrist. . . "[p.73]. These individual footwork and blade-work exercises are a gold mine for those who wonder how they can train without a partner. The chapters concerning blade-work cover an amazing breadth of basic techniques. From a detailed description and application of Guards, to the complexities of kills and attacks on the blade Mr. Girard has managed to detail their execution and practice with clarity and precision. Chapter 6 is worth the price of admission for anyone teaching or studying the parries for its clear explanations and thorough illustrations. Every chapter concerning technique is accompanied by drills to develop the technique in practice and a review of their basic principles and safety measures. It is perhaps a testament to the thoroughness of Mr. Girard's text that partners do not cross swords until Chapter 8, where detailed discussions of measure, timing, "Action-Reaction, Action", eye contact, and safety are accompanied by four fine partnering exercises. Aside from the invaluable and painstakingly researched techniques described in this text, I must state that the chapter 20, "Acting the Fight", is the most essential text on the subject of stage combat acting I have come across. Girard explains this necessity of this subject by stating that "The artist needs to develop an acting process for combat that, after the physical skills have waxed, still provides a system of dissecting a physical encounter and making it and integral part of the acting process, the characters and the production."[p.433] Specific techniques for developing character choices within the action of physical conflict are presented to the reader in the format of the "Five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and the objective choices the actor must make in regard to the text, but often fail to do so when it comes to a choreographed fight sequence. The section titled "The Sounds of Violence" is certain to become required reading in all my future classes no matter what weapon is being taught. Girard advocates the "Vocal Orchestration" of a staged conflict in order to "reinforce the movement of a fight"[p.446] and breaks this process down into an easily understood format. Vocal heath, a discussion of "voluntary sounds" and "involuntary sounds" (such as reactions to injury), round out a section that is certain to become a much referred to text. Dale Girard's text, "Actors On Guard" is a culmination of many years of study, exhaustive historical research (evidences throughout the text by informative explanations of techniques and accompanying plates), and practical experience gained by years of teaching and performing stage combat as a professional. What the reader gains by obtaining and using this text is a great wealth of information and proven training techniques offered by a master instructor. I recommend this book highly, and am personally a better teacher and performer for having read it.

Having read so much 20th. Century literature in English, I was amazed and embarrased not to have come across this important book before now. This is doubly so having read Orwell since my teenage years, yet I believe this book is far clearer in its critique of state facism than 1984. The leisurely pace and clear prose, set in the beautiful English countryside is deceptive. The story builds up to a threatening climax. It is a story of authoritarianism and love, of clear and singular vision and muddled human reality. A real must to read. Primo Levi would understood this book all too well.

Much as I hate to admit it now, I'd never heard of this book nor of Rex Warner until stumbling upon a list Anthony Burgess did for the New York Times Book Review of his Top 99 Modern Novels. The copy of the book I have just happens to include a forward by Burgess, so it seems safe to say that he did his part to maintain the reputation and readership of this fine book. And it was heartening to see that it is still in print. Heartening because this is a novel that deserves to be read and should have made many more "Best of" lists.

One strange deficiency in the literature of the 20th Century is the relative paucity of novels about fascism, its attractions and its awful consequences for those who believed. Sure, there are plenty of books about the Holocaust, but almost all are written from the victims' perspective. But while we have a rich literature depicting the mindset of Communists (Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, etc.), there aren't many similar books describing how someone, a young idealist perhaps, might have been drawn to fascism, even Nazism, but then been disillusioned, or even eaten by the revolution they helped to foment.

In at least this regard, Rex Warner's Aerodrome may well be the best novel ever written about fascism. The book is a pretty simple allegory--which though the critics I was able to find say was influenced mainly by Kafka, seemed to me to owe much more to Orwell's Coming Up for Air. The narrator, Roy, has grown up in The Village, a bucolic country town with more than its share of drunkenness, adultery, and incest. Bordering on the Village is the Aerodrome, clean, orderly, modern, technological, it represents everything that the Village is not.

Amidst a burgeoning mystery over who his real parents are, Roy joins the Air Force, drawn by its orderliness, attempting to please his girlfriend, and deeply impressed by the rigid but charismatic Air Vice-Marshal. The Vice-Marshal is determined to expand the Aerodrome and bring the Village under his control, remaking it in the same sterile image as the Aerodrome.

Roy meanwhile comes to realize that for all the disorder and human frailty on display in his home town, it is at least alive with possibilities :

I began to see that this life, in spite of its drunkenness and its inefficiency, was wider and deeper than the activity in which we were constricted by the iron compulsion of the Air Vice-Marshal's ambition. It was a life whose very vagueness concealed a wealth of opportunity, whose uncertainty called for adventure, whose aspects were innumerable and varied as the changes of light and colour throughout the year. It was a life whose unwieldiness was the consequence of its immensity. No skill could precisely calculate the effects of any action, and all action was dangerous.

There, in a nutshell, is the human dilemma : on the one hand we long for a world that would be safe and predictable and would yield to calculation, but, on the other, such calculations are beyond our meager mortal powers, so that whenever folks seek to impose order, they succeed merely in eliminating freedom and stifling progress. The appeal of fascism--or communism, or Nazism, or all the other -isms--is precisely that it holds out the promise of having finally invented the human calculus which will provide security, without any of the nasty side effects. That this appeal has always proven false does not seem to dampen the human need for, nor the responsiveness to, such promises.

Perhaps the best aspect of this novel is its timelessness. Though it is clearly a comment upon the 1930s and 40s, the Village, with its verdant fields, its convoluted genealogies, its interfamilial murders, and lurking just across the way the orderly utopia of the Aerodrome, suggests Man after the Fall as much as it does Britain just before WWII. The themes that Warner is dealing with are eternal. That he manages to present them in such a natural and readable way makes the book one that everyone should read.

GRADE : A+

Powell is one of the truly great writers of the second half of the 20th century. His 12 volume Dance to the Music of Time is a monument of British literature.
This is a lesser book, but still great. No one writes what the English like to call Comedy of Manners like Powell.
His command of the language makes anything he writes a joy to read.

It is regrettable that Anthony Powell's splendid satire "Afternoon Men" is out of print. I learned of Anthony Powell's work through his obituary in The New York Times in March, 2000. Mr. Powell (the name rhymes with "Lowell") had been highly regarded as a brilliant author by such literary giants as Evelyn Waugh, a fastidious and snobbish critic who seldom had a kind word for any writer. Since I admire Waugh's work, and since he had read and enjoyed Mr. Powell's novels, I immediately read "Afternoon Men," a shorter work and, I might add, an excellent introduction to his vast literary output. "Afternoon Men" deals with a group of rather seedy eccentrics in Bohemian London during the time between the World Wars. It is peopled with those characters so beloved by readers of Waugh and Kingsley Amis: the bored, intellectually witty survivors in a new society, surviving through alcohol and shakey friendships with often disreputable people. Mr. Powell's satire is razor sharp, but not cruel, particularly when he chronicles the pathetic and disastrous love affairs of these vulnerable people. His dialogue is beautifully developed, especially in the several alcoholic party scenes that were a major part of this generation. The character of Fotheringham, for example, is a beautifully delineated eccentric who appears throughout the book and whose dialogue is tight, witty, and hysterically funny.(Fotheringham's dialogue was quoted by The New York Times in Powell's obituary.) Yet Mr. Powell captures, with a few literary strokes, the inner pathos of Fotheringham's character. The story is told through the person of William Atwater; the book is more of a character study of Atwater's friends and their foibles, eccentricities, amorous needs, and survival instincts. Anglophiles who read 20th century British satire will probably want to search for this out-of-print book in second-hand book stores or in libraries. I found a dusty copy on the top shelf of my local library that had not been checked out since 1949. Perhaps Little, Brown and Company will sense a renaissance of Powell's work and reissue this book. At any rate, I am about to embark on the adventure of reading Anthony Powell's masterpiece, "A Dance to the Music of Time," a six-novel, satirical saga of British life in the 20th century.

As a bilingual and second language teacher, I found this to be an excellent text for my students as they learned English. The pictures are fantastic! The students love searching through the intricate drawings, labeling items and just having fun looking at the anthill as viewed by Anthony Ant and friends. We sang the words together, with the students shouting out the chorus as they became more and more proficient. This is also an excellent book for children just learning to read, a fun book for parents and children to read together. The illustations are excellent. The words are catchy and easy enought for beginners. We always used this book in conjunction with a science unit on ants. As part of the project we set up our own ant hill in the classroom to tie in with the adventures of Anthony Ant. As a teacher and partent I highly recommend this book. I am now looking for a new copy to purchase to share with my students who are preparing to be teachers.

We had great fun with this clever, imaginative book. First we sang the verses in this book to the tune of 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'. Then we tried to guess what's under the flaps, which is an exercise in imagination and rhyming. Then, each page includes a maze, and a search for Anthony Ant. This is repeated from 1 to 10 ants, so it's a counting book as well. It takes a while to go through all this, but it's well worth the time. We all fell in love with this book. I recommend this book for all ages. Let's hope this book gets published again. Until then, be sure to check it out of your library.

I first purchased Mr. Bourie's annual book many years ago, andlook forward to each new and expanded edition of his work. He tellsyou practically everything you need to know about casino gaming, then describes the basic offerings of every casino in the country, and then provides coupons that will save you hundreds of dollars when you visit many of the casinos listed. What else could you ask for? Any casino player who doesn't purchase this book every year is missing the boat!

Like to gamble? Me too! This guide tells you where all the casinos are in the good old USA. There are maps, plus detailed city maps of Las Vegas, Tunica, Biloxi, and others. It has strategy tables for blackjack and coupons for various discounts and freebies. You'll find me at a video poker machine--see you there! Good Luck!

"In Valerio's hand, Anita Garibaldi emerges as the courageous but vulnerable woman from southern Brazil, whose singular and precious spirit was caught in the times. 'Anita Garibaldi' is a romance discovered in history's embrace. Valerio creates the Brazilian ethos in its emerald presence as the brillian nerve in Garibaldi's brave but short time. This biography has a texture like a Renoir film, broad and expansive, swimming alog in voluble seas."

--A. Weaver, Simmons College

"Anthony Valerio's genre-crossing biography provides unique insight into Anita Garibaldi's short, glorious life. Valerio writes with a novelist's dedication to character and an historian's dedication to the past."

Janet R. Jacobson, Director, Center for Research on Women, Barnard College

I highly recommend this book to those who are not familiar with Anthony de Mello, and to his fans and critics. The editor provides an excellent introduction to help us to have a better understanding and appreciation for de Mello's numerous writings. The selections give us a potential experience of personal awakening or freeing encounter with "God" or the Self of self. I hope there'll be an audio book edition with excerpts of deMello's retreat talks so that his mellow voice and hearty laughter can be captured while we read his writings. (Please cf. my review for Walking on Water for more background.)

De Mello is a spiritual master and is the most insightful of the "self-help" authors that I have read.His books, especially this one, are easy to read and are a source of enlightenment and awakening for life and happiness.This book will help you to reexamine your life and the spirituality of it.A MUST-READ!

Tony Robbins covers in detail his extensive steps for creating change! Great tape for creating more change in any area of your life.

Any Anthony Robbins book, cassette, CD or other publications are well worth looking into. If you want to change your life, set life-changing goals and learn to live with passion, you must begin reading his books or listening to his tapes!