I've read this series serveral times and it always has held my attention (i.e. caused sleep to be lost). Hughes is a clever and enjoyable author.

I have read I would imagine some four to five thousand fantasy and SF books, and quite a number of others besides, and yet this book - the first of a series of three (Pelmen the Powershaper) is one that I simply return to again and again - rereading is like revisiting and old good freind.

The Characters are very real, the plot amazing, the combination of both is enchanting. Picking up the book you just cannot let it down. The humour that Don Huges shows is masterful, and the twists and turns of it leave you amazed.

I would suggest the book to Fantasy and Non-Fantasy readers alike - it would leave anyone with a wonderful feeling - GARANTEED!

I think that the other review does a good job reviewing, but I'll take a stab at it...I am an semi-experienced fisher who needed to learn more about reading the water, and I am gaining a wealth of good information. The only drawback, and this is coming from me, is a lack of good illustrative pictures. Reading about a riffle or ledge is good, and I am learning alot, but if the book had more photos I would think it would be perfect. But I would definately recommend this book.

Dave Hughes does an excellent job describing and teaching how to read water. On most rivers, you will often see flyfisherman fishing the wrong type of water or at least fishing certain types of water with the wrong technique. Dave Hughes explains the basics water types (riffles, runs, pools, dead water, etc.) in detail. He also explains the different types of aquatic insects found in each type of water and why will be found in certain types of water over others (e.g. why certain nymphs are found primarily in the riffles and others more in pools. He explains where fish will be in each type of water, what insect types will be in each type of water and what techniques work to catch the fish in each water type. It is an all-around very educational book for both the beginner and advanced flyfisher. The beginner can get a wealth of information from the book. A more experienced flyfisher will get many tips/techniques from this book and can use it as an all-around reference book to be read at least once a year. Don't pass up this book because the title seems simple. Everyone can learn a ton from this book. I highly recommend this book.

What a great book. It is amazing how much correspondence reveals about people. This book was so interesting. It truly covers decades of Black artisitic history.

Bernard gathers and edits the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, written between 1925-64, presenting a notable work of Hughes' mentor and the friendship which evolved between the two men. From discussions of literature and the publishing world to politics and gossip, these letters hold important keys to the personalities and concerns of two great men of the Harlem Renaissance.

This book has had my son absolutely enrapured for weeks. There are probably 50 (+) or so line drawings each of snakes, salamanders, turtles and other lizards each with an interesting explanation. Your child can color in each drawing after finding its picture somewhere in the book. The diagrams are detailed enough for older kids as well as little ones probably starting with age 5 or so. This book also has pages of colored stickers for extra fun and observation. This is absolutely the best book of its kind.

Quiero las publicaciones en español sobre las aves de mèxico y los anfibios y reptiles

This is a great book well worth the money. it reminded me alot of the old days flying the airplane. very good book highly recomended

I think this book is a rich reference about the most representatives aircraft in the USAF history.

Cover all parts in aircraft development's, from the USAF requeriment's for a new nuclear fighter-bomber, passing for prototype, F-105B,D,F & G; also the the F-105 cancelled projects and their roll in Combat speciality in the Vietnam War.

This book have a good reference of technical details with good explanation in the diferences between F-105A,B,D,F,& G and others projects.

Contains many photos and detailed technical drawings that can help to understand the past existence of this aircraft in the USAF.

Highly recommended for modelers.

If you are reading this review, I suspect that you are already aware of the stature of this book, and are simply browsing to see if everyone else agrees with what MUST be your shared opinion: that this is the retrovirology bible. How could it possibly earn less than 5 stars? It is as up-to-date and specialized as possible at the time of writing (1997). In preparing my master's thesis in the field of virology, this text was absolutely indespensible. The organization is top-notch, the breadth of coverage is comprehensive, the diagrams well rendered and informative. It is the epitome of what a good textbook should be. I was particularly pleased by the inclusion of a chapter on retroviral vector development.

This text is enormously informative, attractive, destined to be a classic, and should be on the shelf of your personal library if you are in any way connected with the field of retrovirology.

As a side note, the publication of the paperback edition was a godsend to a poor student who was at odds with the prospect of paying for the high-priced hardcover.

Dear Dr. John M.Coffin! There is Dr.Adelya R.Kalinina, M.D.,Ph.D., Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry Russian Acad. Sci., Moscow, Russia.

Take my admiration about your book!

I would be very thankfull for you if you could send me sheme(illustration) of Mouse Mammary tumor virus...It's very important for me, because I want to use your data for lectures materials for student study. Sorry, right now we (Russian scientists) have not possibylities to use modern scientific literature in full volume.

Thank you very mush.

Dr. Kalinina Adelya.

This book is a breath of fresh air in today's world of yoga and spirituality. It is unusual to read from a teacher who has not only gained intellectual understanding of a particular system, but has also experienced the reality of its practices.

The first chapter 'Fifteen Verses of Wisdom' went straight over my head, which shows I still lack understanding in this area. The chapter 'Talks on Practice' reveals the mechanics of meditation according to the system of Kashmir Shaivism. I found it clear and insightful. This was balanced by the chapter 'Talks on Discipline' which shows that Lakshmanjoo has the integrity to give clear guidelines to the spiritual aspirant on how one should conduct oneself on the spiritual path.

Finally in his last chapter 'The Secret Knowledge of Kundalini' Swami Lakshmanjoo gives real insight into the mechanics of the mysterious subject of kundalini. To date I have found other material on this subject to be rather nebulous and mere fantasy, based in the vivid imaginations of so called gurus and well read authors. Swami Lakshmanjoo takes this mysterious subject out of the category of fantasy and clearly defines how kundalini functions. His intimate description of the various modes of rising of kundalini clearly shows that he has experienced this himself.

This book is a revelation for the earnest seeker on the spiritual path.

It is the first book of kashmir philosophy which covers all the aspects of the title.It is the complete informative book about pre-history age of kashmir.

Everyone who has read this book has said it was the best book on Shakespeare they have ever read. So why is it still out of print? This book needs to be republished with a new cover (possibly with the goddess instead of the boar?), and it needs an index, perhaps instead of the outline form table of contents. It is a classic!

What makes a genius tick? What made Shakespeare tick? If Shakespeare's vision seems inexhaustible, all-encompassing, transcendental - one might say 'mythic' - then how did he manage it? Where did that vision come from? And where, while we're at it, did the *poetry* come from?

Many of the world's finest literary minds over the last 400 years have been drawn to such questions, and more than a few have made valuable strides towards the answers. But even so, you would search long and hard for a book to equal Ted Hughes' "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" - if it's those big questions that you're interested in.

Whilst no brief summary can really do this book justice, here's a rough attempt anyway...

1. For the last fifteen plays of his career (i.e. throughout his artistic maturity), Shakespeare consistently employed the same basic prototype plot structure - what Hughes calls his "Tragic Equation". That plot structure was derived from the inspired fusion of the plots of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". Hughes demonstrates (with staggering thoroughness) that behind every major male protagonist (Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear etc.) is the god Adonis, and behind every female figure (Cressida, Gertrude/Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia etc.) is the goddess Venus - or, more accurately, the Goddess of Complete Being.

This alone would make the book an astounding achievement of literary detective work. But there is much more to it than that...

2. By combining the two myths in this way, Shakespeare hit upon an unfailing source of dramatic (and poetic) power. Indeed, what he tapped into was virtually the power source of all human feeling itself. To understand this, think about myth and religion and what they seem to be, VIZ, the expression of our profoundest primal instincts, of our deepest psycho-biological mysteries. They are, if you like, the DNA code of our very souls. (Or to put it less ridiculously, they are the living artistic expression of everything we think and feel at our core.) Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Mary, Krishna, Shiva - and countless others from around the planet - these gods (and their experiences and sufferings) embody our brightest truths and our darkest mysteries. Their stories are the stories of our collective consciousness.

3. This explains why Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear somehow feel like gods to us too: Shakespeare was quite deliberately forcing them to live out the mythic destiny of Adonis himself. Adonis is one of the oldest prototypes of the worldwide phenomenon of the sacrificed god; as such, he is a near relative of Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, and countless others - just as Venus/Lucrece is a first cousin of Isis, Demeter, the Virgin Mary, etc.

4. Moreover, Shakespeare's *mythic intuition* was somehow greater than other writers before or since. In other words, he discovered all the mythic possibilities of these two key stories - what exactly they were expressing. (Without going into *what* they do express, which is a key theme of Hughes' book, all I shall say here is that they are born of very deeply rooted impulses in all of us, that their key cultural manifestations are what Hughes terms "the Great Goddess and the Sacrificed God", and that they express, if you like, humanity's *tragic dilemma*.)

5. Once he discovered this mythic key to his imagination (i.e. the two poems explosively combined), Shakespeare could then dedicate his entire mature career to exploring the corridors it unlocked. He harnessed all the various potentialities of those deeply rooted ancient stories for his own Elizabethan dramas. To use a rather violent analogy, his 'Tragic Equation' was a kind of dramatist's atomic bomb: once he had discovered the essential nuclear reaction, he could go on finding new ways of inducing it, ways of making the explosion bigger or smaller, and even finally - in "The Tempest" - how to prevent the explosion from occurring at all. He spent twelve years pursuing this obsession, and the results speak for themselves.

6. Indeed, Hughes goes on to show that it's always at the same particular moment in each play (i.e. when "Venus and Adonis" metamorphoses into "The Rape of Lucrece" (and in the late plays, back again)) that Shakespeare's poetry takes off to ever-greater heights. In other words, Hughes argues that by touching the primal mythic sources of the human imagination (where the two myths collide), Shakespeare gains direct access to his Muse. He touches the vision itself, and records its feel in his poetry.

"Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being" is a work that forces itself upon your imagination and stays there. It is not, however, for the skim reader. It requires dedicated concentration and some considerable patience for complex, detailed argument. It also needs a fairly healthy knowledge of up to a dozen or so of the mature plays - you might need to get out your edition of the Complete Works and start revising.

Yet for all that, this book is a real joy to read. Its luminous prose could only come from a poet of Hughes' own calibre; its massive scope (compassing everything from the shamanic initiation dream of a Siberian Goldi leader to Occult Neoplatonism in Renaissance Europe) is endlessly exciting and surprising; and its ear for Shakespeare's poetry and eye for his mythological allusion is virtually unparalleled.

But it's really for the insights into the nature of genius that this book is truly unforgettable. By the time you've reached "Our revels now are ended..." (at the end of the long dramatic sequence), Hughes has shown you exactly *how* Shakespeare keeps managing to follow his Muse up to ever more dizzying heights - almost as if you're a passenger on the journey with him. And *that*, for a 'mere' work of literary criticism, is surely astonishing.

The Sound of God's Applause deals with one of the most basic of human needs: approval. Through insightful examples and biblical analysis, Dr. Hughes examines our need for approval and leads the reader to search for approval from God rather than others. The writing style makes it seem like a conversation between the author and the reader. You will find yourself underlining passages and perhaps wanting to shout out, as a lady in one of the anecdotes does, "Fix it, Preacher." When you finish the book, you may feel that the author has helped you to fix it. Highly recommended.

Rarely does an author's first book strike so near to the heart of an issue. Dr. Hughes invites the reader, by means of the printed page, to share a casual conversation over a cup of coffee about the subject of approval. Through relevant examples, and with careful attention to the biblical witness, the author suggests that a life truly worth living is one lived seeking God's approbation, not that of other humans.Get this book, read it, underline it, re-read it, and then send a copy to a friend whose life has become mere existence.

Wow! Wow! I could not put it down. This is the smart man's John Grisham. If you love current events and are into the psyche of white supremacists like Timothy McVie and black muslims like Louis Farrakan, THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU. I promise you will not put it down once you pick it up and you will never forget it.

I never read a book that kept me awake at night until now. All of The Spark's characters; Ruddy, Sister Farah, Bowman, come to life, and the realistic possibilities of the pent-up anger the blacks had for the whites, and the deep-seeded suspicions the whites had of blacks brought out in this story left me feeling cold and thrilled. I love Hughes' writing. It's a combination of John Grisham and Stephen King. I hope he continues his Bowman character in his next book. The Spark destroyed many beliefs that I had about my 'white prespective' of the current race relations in this country. It also destroyed a full-day at the beach. I stayed inside to read and never left my room