As an avid reader of biographies I look for those that will lead me directly into the life of the subject. I don't want to just read the facts. I want to be there...be a part of the story. Richard Hack has done a superb job researching the multi-faceted life of Howard Hughes.... I was glued to the pages as I read about his early years, his many business successes, his life in Hollywood, his many really weird habits and the effect he had on not just those who worked for him, but on all of America. This book has it all. I recommend it to anyone who would like to be a fly on the wall of a business titan or Hollywood magnate or to anyone who wants direct accesss to the mind of a truly remarkable man.

....I settled on this book because I thought it would be account of Howard Hughes's weird and wanton ways, like several of the other books on this very original American have been.
Much to my amazement, I discovered that this book, which the publisher has unembarrassingly labeled "the definitive biography of America's First Billionaire," was not exaggerating. The story that unfolds here is a real pageturner...one of a life that hit upon politics, Hollywood, aviation, science, and parental neglect of the most extreme variety. What makes this book work as well as it does is the ability of the writer, Richard Hack (of whom I know nothing but intend to read more), has built the plot as if writing a novel. His words are lush with emotion and frustration, as the reader is brought along as an innocent observer of an incredible life story. It took a special talent to make material that has been attempted to be told elsewhere new and exciting. "Hughes" is both well researched and beautifully written. I cannot recommend it highly enough to men, women and teenagers.

There has been a lot of writing about Howard Hughes. A lot of it was based on incomplete or just flat out false information, going back even to when he was living with the Clifford Irving hoax. If we are to believe the author of this book had access to thousands of never before available documents, and he's telling what he found factually, this would be the definitive Hughes biography to date. That he makes it a fat, juicy biography makes it great reading.

So I would nominate George Clooney to take this role to the big screen. There are remarkable similarities in their looks, and the public would just eat up this tale. Here we have a man who was lucky enough to inherit a big fortune early in life. But he didn't just sit on his money. He re-invested a lot of it into other industries, such as movies and airplanes. His resources greatly advanced the art of aviation in it's time, and his movie marketing greatly enhanced Jane Russell's breasts in their time. He was a hands-on, get involved manager who flew test planes himself, setting many speed records.

This dashing lifestyle also made him the darling of Hollywood. His string of glamorous conquests was a who's who of movie actresses, from budding starlets to major icons. He literally had the world in his hand for awhile.

Alas, something happens to people when they gain so much power that there are very few people or institutions that can tell them "No". We've seen this in the last 100 years with characters such as Hitler, J. Edgar Hoover, Elvis, and Michael Jackson. They get a few successes, and think they are infallable. This leads to bad decisions in life that either deteriorate them, or leave a mess for those that surround them. They also withdraw, always mentally, sometimes physically, from the world around them, as if they were surrounding the wagons to protect them from that world.

This also happened to Howard Hughes. We see early signs of where he's going when he was merely a ruthless young business man. The first thing he did upon inheriting part of a company was to immediately buy out all the other inheritors to give him total control. Holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas mean nothing to him, and he calls upon his associates to work on these days to get more done. Marriage had it's uses, but none of them ever involved love.

So we get to see one side, which is this dashing young millionaire who becomes America's first billionaire. We see him as he lands at crowded airports after setting yet another air speed record. We see him with every hot babe on the silver screen, and a lot more hoping to get there. America even liked him thumbing his nose at the government when he felt they were digging into his private life too much. This would all have to be portrayed.

But we would need a director like Martin Scorsese to turn this into a "Raging Bull" type of hell. Yes, he had the women, but the feedback from them seemed to indicate a very selfish lover who often couldn't produce where it counts. Yes, he directed several films, but was such a control freak that the products went way over budget. And the volumes of instructions he wrote to his staff on how to guard against germs, real or imaginary, show a very disturbed mind.

And the movie would have to show how this increasingly lonely man deteriorated in his last ten-fifteen years of life. While it is true, as suspected, that his paid caretakers took advantage of his situation, and in fact sped up his demise, it is also surprising how much of his faculties remained in his later years. While he was well on his way to looking like the Walking Death he eventually became, he still had the ability to conduct a two-hour press conference to convince the world that the Irving biography was a hoax.

But the ultimate ending would have to show that all the money in the world cannot buy happiness. For the last several years of his life, he was surrounded only by people who were paid to be there. His hair, beard, and nails grew to extreme lengths. While obsessed with germs, he ended up living in putrid squallor, with jars of his own wastes stored everywhere. His body was stoked up with enough drugs to kill an average person, and he even had the remnants of five broken needs inside his arms.

This could be Oscar time for both Clooney and Scorsese if Hollywood lets them do it right.

I picked this book up at a used book sale because I'd heard of the name and it cost fifty cents. No one I knew had heard of it, much less read it, but I didn't have too much to lose except a couple of hours and the money to buy the coffee to be consumed during reading.

So, out of the blue: Pirates!! Hooray!

A High Wind In Jamaica is of course more than just some dumb book about pirates. It was later described to me as a 'Lord of the Flies' on a boat, and I after reading it I can associate with that. Kids and violence and lies and pirates and whatnot, with a smattering of philosophical wandering on the nature of kids in general (mother and father cling to the idea of their kids; the kids forgot about them quickly).

Overall, I'd say that the prose sings, zips along incredibly fast (read the book in a single sitting) and is engaging. The author covers deeper meaning with an engaging story and works the two together very well.

I've recommended the book to a lot of people, and the few who've bothered to track it down concur: it's a great little book.

I feel no shame in pronouncing "A High Wind in Jamaica" one of the greatest books of the century, regardless of native language. What I feel shame for, however, is that I had never even heard of the novel until it appeared on Modern Library's list. Now I rank it among my favorites.

What impressed me most about the work is the number of levels upon which it works. A child could easily read this book as an adventure story, while an adult would read it and grasp the minute horrors that its children face. To say this is a masterstroke of its author would be putting it mildly. Very few authors can successfully pull it off, and Hughes deserves any and all recognition he receives for that accomplishment alone. Forget that the book is a lightning fast read on its own.

"A High Wind in Jamaica" is quite possibly the best book about children written in 20th century. It's two successors being William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," and J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye." Richard Hughes' uncanny ability to lay bare the mind of a child offers continuous, piercing insights unclouded by judgement or sentimentality. His prose evokes the strange, often bewildering perception of the innocent, with an objective, childlike point of view. Be forwarned though this novel is not for those who would dislike spending a day in the mind of young children. Those, however, interested in child psychology or just facinated by the nature of the young will enjoy this rare gem of a book.

This is a great Star Wars book, but after waiting several years for it, my expectations of it grew huge, hence the 4-star rating.

This book is being released now pretty much to bring all the new Star Wars readers who are starting with the New Jedi Order series up to speed on all the Bantam books and comics, and it does a very good job. Although it does focus just a little too heavily on the movies, that's come to be expected.

But where this book really comes in handy to Star Wars fanatics like me is the little between-the-scenes stuff, filling in details about what was happening politically and in the big picture between the books.

This book is also filled with a bunch of incredible (and a few not-so-incredible) illustrations by Bill Hughes. These illustrate key scenes and characters which we haven't seen before. What this book does not try to do is fill in what was happening day by day like so many online timelines, rather it sticks to a history-textbook like feel so that we get the "whole picture" instead of a bunch of little unrelated incidents.

Also, this is good because Kevin Anderson's writing style and Wallace's previous writing experience are more suited to this. While Anderson's SW novels seemed condescending at times because he made everything too obvious, here that's the point.

I definitely recommend this book to any star wars fan, new or old.

One of things I have always admired about Star Wars in general is the fact that the universe is for the most part internally consistent, that is one story doesn't contradict one that preceded it, (Phantom Menace notwithstanding). Even in the Expanded Universe-the all-encompassing title given to that which takes place outside of the current four-film mainstream, the continuity is generally pretty tight, which is a major feat considering the number of authors involved. Characters created by one author often appear in stories written by others, instead of treating each book or series of books as a closed environment, rather agreements have been made between writers to make use of each other's characters, places, or events i.e. Michael A. Stackpole using Mara Jade in "I, Jedi" or Zahn using Corran Horn in "Specter of the Past/Vision of the Future".

The history of Star Wars or the Galactic Republic encompasses 25,000 years, plus an unknown time of pre-history, the period before the Republic. Recorded Terran history is only 10,000 years and even if rendered down into a brief missive on the events in that time it would fill volumes. Condensed here in a little over 190 pages is the "Essential Star Wars Chronology" which ends precisely at the point that "Vector Prime" and the New Jedi Order begins, which is odd because the New Jedi Order began in 1999 and the "Essential Star Wars Chronology" was published in 2000. And given the importance of the New Jedi Order, one would think that they at least would have added information on the first three books by Salvatore and Stackpole.

"The Star Wars Chronology" covers only about 5,000 years of galactic history, beginning with the Dark Horse Comics excellent "Tales of the Jedi" series and the rise of one of my favorite characters, Nomi Sunrider. It deals with the beginnings of Naga Sadow, Freedon Nadd, Ulic Qel-Droma and Exar Kun, of Jedi Knights Cay Qel-Droma and Tot Doneeta. It adds some clearer information on the background for LucasArts' masterpiece, "Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight", explaining how the planet Ruusan a battleground that led Kyle Katarn there centuries later to free the thousands of trapped Jedi spirits there after defeating the Dark Jedi, Jerec.

Where the universe falls apart, and this is not Chronology author's Kevin J. Anderson's fault, is that it shows that the Jedi seem to be perhaps more of a hindrance than a blessing, and that very nearly every problem in galactic history is related to some Jedi falling to the Dark Side and causing problems. If every era is plagued by some resurgence of the Sith or a cabal of Jedi who fell to evil, why wouldn't the public at large demand the removal of the Jedi as a precaution? Simply put, guys like Exar Kun, Ulic Qel-Droma, Palpatine, and Darth Vader seem to happen an awful lot, leading to massive conflict and loss of life. Is the risk worth the existence of the Jedi Order at all? I feel that it is, but I also feel that too many authors are obsessed with the Dark Side because they think it's 'cool', and so they write it without considering that so many others are doing it also.

Lastly, however well written and laid out the book is, the art goes beyond bad. Bill Hughes' pencil sketches of squat, square jawed characters and their angular features, gives the innards of this book a rushed and cheap look. Given the shear number of quality artists producing material for Star Wars, why in the name of the Force did they select this guy? Why not Dave Dorman? Why not R.K. Frost who did the wonderful art for the "Essential Guide to Alien Species"? Kevin J. Anderson and Daniel Wallace's writing must also be credited for making this book a breeze to read and locate information. For the most part this is a very good source for finding out what and when.

The Force will be with you, always.

I was really anticipating the release of the Essential Chronology, as I was looking forward to an official effort to define the flow of the often cumbersome Star Wars Universe. I was not disapointed. This book fits all the puzzle pieces together, from KJA's Sith comic books to Episode 1 to Shadows of the Empire and beyond. One of the really helpful aspects to me, is it 'finishes' a lot of stories. The authors were allowed to fill in the gaps, and so we now know what happend AFTER The Truce at Bakura, and just where those awful young adult novels involving Tricolus fit in. As other people have mentioned, the book is very brief in its descriptions, and really leaves out a lot of detail that would be nice to have. This is not to say that the authors skipped massive parts of the expanded universe, just that there are small bits missing. As one reviewer noted, little to nothing of the Rogue Squadron comics were included, while Kevin J Andersons own Tales of the Jedi have entire chapters devoted to them. More than making up for these gripes is the effort put into getting as much major information in as possible. For example, readers of the now defunct Star Wars Adventure Journal may remember the Pentastar Alignment, but how did it form, and what happend to it? Now we have the answers. Also corrected are the discrepencies between the Sith as presented in the Tales of the Jedi, and in Episode 1, and the explination is very interesting, as it also ties in elements from the game Dark Forces II Jedi Knight.While the text can get a bit oppresive if you try to read it through, it works great as a refrence, just look up the period you want to know more about. All in all, I have to say this is a great book, all that is keeping it from the full four stars is the lack of details in some parts, and the attempt to include the young adult books at all, they should have been dropped along with the Ewok movies. Other than that, I would reccomend the purchase of the book, it is quite worth. 4/5.

WINTER notes from Montana is a diary of Rick Bass' first winter in the Yaak Valley of Northern Montana. The book details his on going struggle of learning about and surviving the hardships of living in the snowbound Yaak Valley

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Bass moves from the warm climate of Texas were he was a geologist to the Yaak Valley to write. The book details Bass' struggle as he works to find enough wood to last the long winter and to learn all the tricks of survival in the cold and snow. Bass subtly points out changes happening to him through out the book and this is brought to light when his father comes to visit. While they are fishing ""you've changed," my father said, not uncomfortably, as he mended his line." I think this points out Bass' reason for moving to the Yaak Valley and his purpose in being there. Bass wanted to give up the life of the daily grind and to become one with nature and life.

Although the book is meant to view Bass' ideas on environmental issues, he doesn't over state any of them or push them on the reader. The book is well written and very enjoyable to read. Whether the reader is pro or con on the issues in the book he/she can take an enjoyable hour or two and read the book for the pure enjoyment of Bass' writing.

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I read this book during my first winter in Colorado which, having moved here from Arizona, has also been my first real winter ever. "Winter covers some things and reveals others" (p. 162), Rick Bass observes in his journal, which recounts the first winter he spent with his artist girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, without electricity, phones, or paved roads in Yaak Valley, Montana. In his 162-page "journal of winter, a journal of peace" (p. 28), Bass also discovers that winter has the power to transform. After "floundering for thirty years trying to figure this out, trying to get along in cities, trying to move fast," Bass encounters the "deep, dark woods," and the "quietness, a slowness" of winter (p. 161), which causes a change of seasons in his own heart.

Except for a only handful of neighbors, and the "no glitter, no makeup" (p. 77) regulars at the Dirty Shame tavern, Bass shares his "wild, magical valley" (p. 3) with grizzly bears, grouse, moose, mule deer, elk, porcupines, ducks, geese, owls, rabbits, mountain lions, bobcats, black bears, coyotes, gray wolves, badgers, martens, fishers, wolverines, lots of snow, and silence. "We had never felt such magic" (p. 5), Bass writes. "This valley shakes with mystery, with beauty, with secrets" (p. 61).

WINTER is to Rick Bass what DESERT SOLITAIRE is to Ed Abbey. Drawn from journals, both books address the important question of why wilderness is essential to man.

G. Merritt

Julie Parsons Review Winter Notes from Montana

Fantastic! Five thumbs up. Rick Bass brings to us city dwellers a love for open spaces,

wilderness, and the untamed north country. The simple common outdoor sights become unique

through Bass's writing. The wait for snow becomes an adventure in suspense. A walk in the snow

brings a new awareness of what silence is all about. Through Rick Bass's easy flowing style of

writing you experience the excitement of seeing tracks of wolves, deer, and bear it grabs at your

imagination. You want to pack your bags get in the car and head for the north land.To drive until

the road ends, to blaze a new trail. Rick Bass takes nature seriously, he sees nature and our

relationship to it as the most important purpose on earth. He write of a romance with the open

spaces. Trees are sacred for their splendor, yet necessary for those who chose to be apart of the

Yaak valley. Throughout Winter you feel a sense of purpose, A desire to communicate with

nature, to build a relationship bound on unspoken trust, to realize your place in the scheme of

nature. Rick Bass takes you on a journey while telling us how to relate to the elements. Rick Bass

portrays his love of nature, simple pleasures and man in a powerful, complex and compelling way. If you love nature want to feel the freedom of the wild while sitting in a comfortable chair

Rick Bass has a way of making you feel you are there.

Let me reiterate what a few others have said:

"This book is for thinking and researching."

"This is not a book that you can read while sipping a glass of wine..."

"the bible of computer graphics"

This is not a book that you will end up copying source code out of(a good thing). This book was my first step into the hardcore graphics world, and it was great. I don't think that more source code would enhance this book at all, mabye even the opposite. Source code is not what this book is about. If you are planning on implementing some of these algorithms, you must know how to code well, period. This is not a "here's how to code in C" manual, it's a "these are the principles of Computer Graphics." It's everything it claims to be.

I particurally like the excercises at the end of every chapter. Although I don't do them all, it gives me a guide to practice what I learned. The math in this book is not as hard as some make it out to be. It is Matrix/Vector algrebra and some calc. A glossary would have been a nice touch, as some of the vocabulary can be overwhelming at times, especially the acronyms.

"Recommended for the hardcore programming freaks." Hope the authors (I'm going to give credit to more than Foley) plan to write again.

Most people don't think of technical computer books as potential "classics", but this is one. I would not recommend this to beginners, but if you already know computer graphics, you should have this book. If you can, take a class where the instructor is using this book to teach. You will not regret it. Since it is, in essence, a teaching book, you will NOT find compelte solutions to graphics problems. The authors leave it up to the reader to implement everything in C, and to complete the algorithms. As a basic example, you will not find a complete integer line drawing algorithm in this book. The reader is only given a formula on how to draw lines from point A to a point B East-North-East of point A. You have to figure out how to do the rest. That is why this book is NOT for the beginner, unless you have an experienced teacher guiding you through it.

Ok lets see, we have one person complaining that its to hard becuase you must concentrate, another saying its to mathematical. Well I hate to say it, BUT THAT IS THE POINT of this. Computer graphics isn't like 1+1=2. More along the lines of 4(4(3/4 - 1/2)*4)= X. This book presents everything perfectly. A great recommendaiton for anyone 'who wants to learn it' but if your thinking of just a simple, 21 days or don't have time/concentration, don't get this book. I recommend looking into 'other' subjects.

This colorful and splendidly researched history of Australia's founding is breathtaking in its scope. The book is not only a story of Australia's beginnings, but an impressively researched history on the political pressures in England that led to the founding of Australia as a penal colony and of the struggles over penal reform. Perhaps most fascinating, and Hughes never fails to communicate his own sense of fascination, is the microcosm Australia offers as a society founded from wholecloth and how it evolved into a complex society. I read this book right after reading Son of the Morning Star (another superb book) and was very much struck between the parallels between how Americans who settled the West viewed and treated Native Americans and the Australian settlers' views of the aborigines whom they slowly but surely displaced. The wonderful stories would stand on their own even if ineptly told, but they really come alive with Hughes' writing style, which would be the pride of any novelist...Bravo!

Fatal Shore is a rare achievement in history writing: truly fascinating history by a wonderful writer. As a Time magazine writer and art critic, Robert Hughes obviously knows his way around the English language and shows it by crafting readable, entertaining history. But the book's true strength lies in Hughes' -- who is Australian -- brutally honest assessment of his country's fascinating founding. Hughes' voice makes the reader feel like he is getting Australia's story from the famously blunt lips of an Aussie over a few beers in an outback tavern. And why not? Good history SHOULD be brutally honest, not watered down with political correctness or the dry touch of an academic. Particularly strong are sections in which Hughes tears down the fiction -- created by Australians as an defensive reflex against their less-than-proud background -- which says the country's first convict citizens were mostly unjustly convicted and primarily political prisoners. The book is peppered throughout with gritty anecdotes and based on solid and extensive research. I had no idea Australia's founding was this interesting. Hughes shows us what an incredible tale it really was.

This is one monumental and fascinating work, equivalent to a university course in the history of Australia's founding. It is at once easy to read and hard to get through. It took me two full weeks of reading 2 hours a day to finish it, due to the wealth of detail in each chapter. I found myself going over some paragraphs twice to pull it all in. Hughes also has a vocabulary that is of the highest order, so he kept me busy looking up quite a few unfamiliar words. I definitely increased my word power (ha). A good thing, always. It is also not laid out in a strict chronological order; rather, the chapters run over one another in their time periods because of the weaving of the overarching story of the transportation system and its genesis and oversight from England into the narrative. There were also distinct differences between Australia and Van Diemen's Land, and further subsets involving those prisons where repeat offenders were sent -- most notably, Norfolk Island.

I had only a vague idea of Botany Bay and the convict history of Australia before I read this book. Apparently, so did many Australians until quite recently as they sought to bury their hellish past and the stigma they associated with it by simply blotting it out of existence. Hughes cuts right to the core of this by exposing it all for what it really was -- brutal, savage, unjust and sad in the extreme. He does not look upon this with anything but a keen eye and evenhanded, masterful grasp of all of the factors that were in play. While certainly most of the convicts could hardly be judged guilty of anything more than the pettiest offense in our modern eyes - if any offense at all - there were indeed those who were hardened criminals. None, however, particularly the women and children, were worthy of the sadistic brutality heaped upon them by those in charge, some of who were clearly evil to the core.

For anyone who wants to really understand the truth of the convict history of the land down under, this book is absolutely essential reading. For anyone who wants to be immersed in the depths of human misery and suffering, and ultimately be inspired by what these poor souls endured to build the nation of Australia, this book is required reading.

Decline of The West is a book squarely beyond the range of typical modern literary critique.

The fact that Dr.Spengler discovered a true existence of a living form in the history- and life-cycles of civilizations has been deliberately ignored by critics. The importance of this discovery for History as a science is on a level of Copernican helio-centric (Sun-at-the-Center) discovery in spatial sciences which inaugurated the modern advance of physical science. Yet it has not brought the official recognition that is its due.

Today, as it was 500 years ago in "The Middle Ages", the ruling spirit of the establishment feels threatened by the new revolutionary discovery and is trying to find ways to live with it without the consequences and implications of Dr.Spengler's discovery presented in this book. The Roman Catholic Church tried to spread ignorance of Copernicus as well, but will its modern-day equivalents be more successful in hiding the discovery?

It is up to the interested reader not to let this crime happen any longer.

Having in mind the huge scope and distance both in Time and Space that Dr.Spengler's book covers, the enormous energy and time spent by him in creating the material presented in this book becomes even more astonishing considering that the book is so deeply involved and touching upon the daily events of the times we live in.

Dr.Spengler in his work definitely belongs to the realm of the modern "TABOO," and precisely uncovers all the important facts and ideas, that our "accepted" intellectuals of the day DARE NOT touch upon, and prefer to avoid and misinterpret and misrepresent Dr.Spengler's thought and observations---for these are all too unnerving to them and too uncomfotably revealing about the character and direction of the times we live in.

Even though the Author has died many years ago, his insight and thought is squarely present in our every day problems, troubles and uncertainties.

Seldom will one find a philosopher, political scientist and a natural scientist-all in one and yet so penetrating in his thought and truly relevant and accurate to the daily life many years after his death.

Despite our civilization's boasting about the hitherto unheard-of levels of progress, creativity and prosperity unimaginable only a few dozen years ago, "Decline of the West" deals with the significance in them. The vision, understanding and practical forecasts of Dr.Spengler's scientific discipline of History encompass all of those and go beyond, at all times maintaining the "eagle's view from above" of life.

The 20th century is known for its false prophets and broken ideologies, yet amid all the storm and dust raised in the conflicts of this century, people have not noticed that all this time there existed a profound voice of calm unshaken in his beliefs and unmistaken, unshakeable in the strength of his experience and position, always proven right by facts beyond his control.

This is Dr.Spengler, and that makes him a lone example of a true scientist of politics.

This revelation then has to tell us something profoundly significant about the nature of our Western civilization's Information Age stage and the direction it is heading in, when a person from a 100 years ago can tell us so much more intimate and relevant things about the politics, science and life of people many years after his death, than the leading historians of the day can.

The average person's inability to tell truth from faleshood in the news goes beyond mere wealth of information phenomenon, and the popular Computer represents the vehicle of the Information Age, nothing more.

Today it is easy to be unaware of the profound and deep metaphysical roots underlying our advanced technical civilization's materialistic developments, yet Dr.Spengler in this work masterfully uncovers them.

That is why this book, Decline of The West is so important, and will help the modern reader understand much better, than through any other immediate means, the true scope, understanding and meaning of the age we live in and of the age our descendants will live in.

It is a true example of the intellectual nihilism of our times when works such as those of Dr.Spengler are deliberately passed by the intellectual elite keenly aware of its inability to deal with the disturbing insights of Dr.Spengler's mind, and consequently of its inability to rise to the rank of Spengler, prefering instead to sometimes select quotations from this great thinker in order to make themselves look bigger and wiser, --thinkers such as Hughes, Fischer and Connelly are among those.

To paraphrase Spengler, nobody can escape from History's all-encompassing reach, we humans only have a luxury of pretending that we can, and like a grotesque Ostrich we bury our heads into the daily mass-circulation media training our minds, making us increasingly less capable of exercising independent thought and judgement.

In the introduction, Spengler quotes his spiritual father, poet-philosopher Goethe with the description of confidence in life:"Inward form of significant life which unaware and unobserved inspires every thought and every action." That this description is no longer adequate for the life of Western Man provides a food for thought, since everything genuine in the way of feeling and thought is left open for unrestrained dissection and criticism by the standard-bearers of the modern intellectual inquisition which stifles any richness in the modes of thought in our universities, and has assumed the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury in Media's daily virtual courtrooms, alias mass-circulation news. Hence the public truth of the moment holds sway.

The lack of inward form in our daily personal lives should not therefore come as a surprise since we are trained daily to seek programmable inspiration from the external world of the macrocosm, shunning away from our own inbred microcosm and the wealth of inspiration it could have provided us with, had we given it a chance.

At the very least "Decline of The West" enables the interested reader to form his or her own conclusion, which is something that Spengler's past critics could not afford to do.

Decline of The West is a book squarely beyond the range of typical modern literary critique.
The fact that Dr.Spengler discovered a true existence of a living form in the history- and life-cycles of civilizations has been deliberately ignored by critics. The importance of this discovery for History as a science is on a level of Copernican helio-centric (Sun-at-the-Center) discovery in spatial sciences which inaugurated the modern advance of physical science. Yet it has not brought the official recognition that is its due.
Today, as it was 500 years ago in "The Middle Ages", the ruling spirit of the establishment feels threatened by the new revolutionary discovery and is trying to find ways to live with it without the consequences and implications of Dr.Spengler's discovery presented in this book. The Roman Catholic Church tried to spread ignorance of Copernicus as well, but will its modern-day equivalents be more successful in hiding the discovery?
It is up to the interested reader not to let this crime happen any longer.
Having in mind the huge scope and distance both in Time and Space that Dr.Spengler's book covers, the enormous energy and time spent by him in creating the material presented in this book becomes even more astonishing considering that the book is so deeply involved and touching upon the daily events of the times we live in.
Dr.Spengler in his work definitely belongs to the realm of the modern "TABOO," and precisely uncovers all the important facts and ideas, that our "accepted" intellectuals of the day DARE NOT touch upon, and prefer to avoid and misinterpret and misrepresent Dr.Spengler's thought and observations---for these are all too unnerving to them and too uncomfotably revealing about the character and direction of the times we live in.
Even though the Author has died many years ago, his insight and thought is squarely present in our every day problems, troubles and uncertainties.
Seldom will one find a philosopher, political scientist and a natural scientist-all in one and yet so penetrating in his thought and truly relevant and accurate to the daily life many years after his death.
Despite our civilization's boasting about the hitherto unheard-of levels of progress, creativity and prosperity unimaginable only a few dozen years ago, "Decline of the West" deals with the significance in them. The vision, understanding and practical forecasts of Dr.Spengler's scientific discipline of History encompass all of those and go beyond, at all times maintaining the "eagle's view from above" of life.
The 20th century is known for its false prophets and broken ideologies, yet amid all the storm and dust raised in the conflicts of this century, people have not noticed that all this time there existed a profound voice of calm unshaken in his beliefs and unmistaken, unshakeable in the strength of his experience and position, always proven right by facts beyond his control.
This is Dr.Spengler, and that makes him a lone example of a true scientist of politics.
This revelation then has to tell us something profoundly significant about the nature of our Western civilization's Information Age stage and the direction it is heading in, when a person from a 100 years ago can tell us so much more intimate and relevant things about the politics, science and life of people many years after his death, than the leading historians of the day can.
The average person's inability to tell truth from faleshood in the news goes beyond mere wealth of information phenomenon, and the popular Computer represents the vehicle of the Information Age, nothing more.
Today it is easy to be unaware of the profound and deep metaphysical roots underlying our advanced technical civilization's materialistic developments, yet Dr.Spengler in this work masterfully uncovers them.
That is why this book, Decline of The West is so important, and will help the modern reader understand much better, than through any other immediate means, the true scope, understanding and meaning of the age we live in and of the age our descendants will live in.
It is a true example of the intellectual nihilism of our times when works such as those of Dr.Spengler are deliberately passed by the intellectual elite keenly aware of its inability to deal with the disturbing insights of Dr.Spengler's mind, and consequently of its inability to rise to the rank of Spengler, prefering instead to sometimes select quotations from this great thinker in order to make themselves look bigger and wiser, --thinkers such as Hughes, Fischer and Connelly are among those.
To paraphrase Spengler, nobody can escape from History's all-encompassing reach, we humans only have a luxury of pretending that we can, and like a grotesque Ostrich we bury our heads into the daily mass-circulation media training our minds, making us increasingly less capable of exercising independent thought and judgement.
In the introduction, Spengler quotes his spiritual father, poet-philosopher Goethe with the description of confidence in life:"Inward form of significant life which unaware and unobserved inspires every thought and every action." That this description is no longer adequate for the life of Western Man provides a food for thought, since everything genuine in the way of feeling and thought is left open for unrestrained dissection and criticism by the standard-bearers of the modern intellectual inquisition which stifles any richness in the modes of thought in our universities, and has assumed the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury in Media's daily virtual courtrooms, alias mass-circulation news. Hence the public truth of the moment holds sway.
The lack of inward form in our daily personal lives should not therefore come as a surprise since we are trained daily to seek programmable inspiration from the external world of the macrocosm, shunning away from our own inbred microcosm and the wealth of inspiration it could have provided us with, had we given it a chance.
At the very least "Decline of The West" enables the interested reader to form his or her own conclusion, which is something that Spengler's past critics could not afford to do.

History ebbs and flows. The illusion that we are somehow at the 'end of history' and that civil organization and values as they now stand are beyond history's broader and deeper currents might be the great popular Myopia of our time. Spengler in this book has applied his voluminous knowledge and interpretive skills to the rise and fall of civilizations. Does the 'West' conform to the definition of a civilization in the age of global communications and entertainment? If so, are its prospects different than those of its predecessors? Schools no longer prepare the mainstream student for learning and argument at this level. Spengler's thesis hinges on the leading intellectual & aesthetic edges of the last 1000 years of our culture as compared to those of civilizations of antiquity, notably the Greco Roman.

There are scholarly contrasts to Spengler's study. William McNeill's 'Rise of the West' provides a direct challenge to many of its conclusions. Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' or Werner Jaeger's 'Paedeia' (on Greek classical culture) might be good comparative reference books, but these have now been relegated in public familiarity to dusty and esoteric academic departments. Spengler's work, however, falls squarely and uniquely into the realm of a great work of the Deist tradition of Western social philosophy, from which its reputation for skepticism comes. Its apparent mysticism emanates from the deep investigation into the intellectual attitude of the Western mind. There are, of course, other traditions in the 'Western' mix which have broad and predictive implications. This opus should not be misconstrued of as a work of pessimism. Constructive action and faith are, in fact, its basis for the prospect of vigorous and sustained regeneration of the human cause.

This is an exacting study. It requires a critical attitude to penetrate and to see that it has a fundamentally human and hopeful (and debatable) message. Decline of the West does in fact provide drama, grandeur, context and understanding to the sweep of history. It is accessible, though, to the determined general reader and constitutes a significant contribution to 20th Century thought. Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.

For my fellow reviewers who choose to simply pass this play over because of the prevelant violence, I must point out the complex, witty character of Aaron the Moor. Shakespeare either intended for this play to be a parody of Marlowe/Kyd, or he wanted to experiment with a character, Aaron, to evoke every possible feeling from his audience. And, in my humble opinion, Shakespeare succeeded at this. Aaron is, at the same time, evil and cunny, witty and horrifying, and compassionate and stoic. His final lines, as he is buried up to his neck, left to starve, are some of the best confessions ever produced by the bard. It takes a truly cruel and uncaring individual to not feel for Aaron, who gives up his life for his child's, and who hopelessly and blindly loves a cruel witch of a woman. This play is worth reading, or seeing if you should be so lucky, simply to indulge yourself in the character of Aaron the Moor.

On a superficial first reading, 'Titus Andronicus' is lesser Shakespeare - the language is generally simple and direct, with few convoluted similes and a lot of cliches. The plot, as with many contemporary plays, is so gruesome and bloody as to be comic - the hero, a Roman general, before the play has started has lost a wife and 21 sons; he kills another at their funeral, having dismembered and burnt the heroine's son as a 'sacrifice'; after her husband is murdered, his daughter is doubly raped and has her tongue and hands lopped off; Titus sacrifices his own hand to bail out two wrongfully accused sons - it is returned along with their heads. Et cetera. The play concludes with a grisly finale Peter Greenaway might have been proud of. The plot is basically a rehash of Kyd, Marlowe, Seneca and Ovid, although there are some striking stage effects.

Jonathan Bate in his exhaustive introduction almost convinces you of the play's greatness, as he discusses it theoretically, its sexual metaphors, obsessive misogyny, analysis of signs and reading etc. His introduction is exemplary and systematic - interpretation of content and staging; history of performance; origin and soures; textual history. Sometimes, as is often the case with Arden, the annotation is frustratingly pedantic, as you get caught in a web of previous editors' fetishistic analysing of punctuation and grammar. Mostly, though, it facilitates a smooth, enjoyable read.

Now that the film "Titus" is about to open, I thought I had best hear a recorded version of the complete play to keep my mind clear during what is bound to be a perversion. Of course, many consider "Titus Andronicus" a perversion anyway; and to tell the truth, I do get a little queasy during the various mutilations that make the deaths at the end a relief rather than a shock. But accepting the play on its own terms, you will find the reissue on tape of the 1966 Caedmon recording of (CF 277) possibly the best directed of the entire classic series. Howard Sackler has a bunch of professionals on hand and he lets them (with one exception) tear up the scenery. Poor Judy Dench, who has so little to say as Lavinia before the plot makes her say no more, can only make pathetic noises for most of the play until her final death cry. The evil brothers, played here by John Dane and Christopher Guinee, are not only evil but sarcastically so--and this works on a recording as it might not on the stage. Perhaps Maxine Audley's Tamora is a bit too Wicked Witch of the West now and then; but her co-partner in evil, Aron the Moor, is brought to life by Anthony Quayle in a role he made famous on stage, going even further in the outright enjoyment of his ill-doing. Yes, this play can easily raise laughs and takes an Olivier to keep the audience in the tragic mood. (Reports are that he did it so well that some audience members became ill and had to leave.)

Which brings us to Michael Hordern's Titus. Hodern is a fine actor but not a great one. He suffers well but not grandly. I am surprised that his Big Moment--"I am the sea"--is lost among all the other images in that speech. But anyone can direct someone else's play. This recording, soon to be rivaled by one in the Arkangel series, is definitely worth having for Quayle's performance alone.

Simply put, "Birthday Letters" is not Ted Hughes's best work. It contains some moving poetry, particularly "Life after Death," but overall it is lax and digressive both in form and in content. Many of the poems assume the titles of Plath's own work, but instead of illuminating her, they merely reiterate familiar images. "Birthday Letters" also exposes a contradiction inherent in Hughes himself: while in many of the poems he seems to abrognate responsibility for his wife's suicide by subscribing to the belief that, in a sense, Sylvia was doomed from the start. In his translation of Alcestis, one senses that the character of Admetos is one with whom Hughes identifies: Look what you did: you let her die instead. You live now Only because you let Death take her. You killed her. Point-blank She met the death that you dodged...

"Birthday Letters" should not be read biographically, for it is art, not a memoir of Plath or their marriage. To obtain a deeper understanding of Hughes and his marriage, one should read the visionary poetry of Alcestis and Hughes's masterpiece, Crow.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, is the author of more than forty books of poems, prose, and translation. He has received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and now the W. H. Smith Award for his Tales of Ovid. However, what first brought him into the limelight was the death of his poet wife, Sylvia Plath - an incident that sent shock waves through literary circles in1963 and had all the radical feminists up in arms against the man who had allegedly driven his wife to a self-inflicted death. Ever since, Hughes has been at the centre of controversies.

Condemned to live on as a survivor, for many years Hughes wrote nothing but children's verse. At the same time he concentrated on bringing out Sylvia Plath's poems, letters (edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath) and journals. And then, when he did turn back to poetry, not surprisingly, he focused on the negative side of life, the darker forces in the universe which are forever threatening man. He did not write of personal experiences. He did not write of his wife's suicide, or of emotional and other disasters he surely must have suffered. And yet the sense of doom crept into his poetry through symbols from the animal world: the jaguar, the the hawk, and the crow - masks from the world of nature that the poet donned to hide the pain he lived through. Meanwhile the Plath myth has grown. It has all the makings of a cult: the love and the hate, the betrayal and the anger, with the sensationalism climaxing in self-destructive violence.

The present volume of poems, Birthday Letters, is very different from the earlier collections. Whereas earlier Hughes liked to assume the role of a sort of wild man of the woods surrounded by his animals and birds, here we have Ted Hughes the man, the husband and the lover, without his mask. These are poems, personal and intimate, addressed to Sylvia Plath, written over a period of thirty-five years following her death.

In order to appreciate the poems of Birthday Letters fully the reader needs to be familiar with the life and work of Sylvia Plath. There are at least three crucial biographical facts that cast their shadow on her work: one, the premature death of her father when she was barely eight; two, the separation from her husband, Ted Hughes, in whom she saw a father surrogate; and, three, her suicide attempts, the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty-one, and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. On these major events of Plath's life is based her major poetry, its cries of helpless rage alternating with gloomy despair, its narcissistic concern with the individual self colouring all themes and subjects she chooses to write of. And these are the events referred to repeatedly in the new poems of Ted Hughes.

Birthday Poems may thus be considered a companion piece to Sylvia Plath's poetry, offering another understanding of it by filling in the background to poems, to the early days of their courtship and the growing intensity of their relationship. A sense of fatality seems to be an integral part of the relationship, right from the beginning:

"Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes."

A suicide, they say, kills two people - the one who dies and the one who doesn't. As the survivor who didn't, Ted Hughes has silently borne his private hell over the last thirty-five years. This is what the poems testify. But if writing them must have been a painful process, breaking his silence and compiling them for public consumption could not possibly have been easy. And so he speaks of the
"Old despair and new agony / Melting into one familiar hell."

Images and themes from Plath's work find their way repeatedly into Hughes' poems. "Sam" refers to the time when Plath's horse (Ariel) ran wild. She had hung on to his neck and returned to the stables in a state of shock. The image of the Hanging God from Plath figures several times and is linked to the Daddy figure that, according to Hughes and other Plath critics, was the harbinger of doom in her life. The arrow symbol of "Ariel," the fixed stars governing one's life, the Bronte countryside, the man in black, the stalking panther, azalea flowers, the works of Giorgio de Chiricio - these are images from Sylvia Plath's work that Hughes draws upon and they all testify that for him she is still a presence that he must live with whether he likes it or not.

Perhaps Hughes is trying to exonerate himself. It is not surprising that he talks about Sylvia Plath's life as a struggle to keep in control. Driven by the demons to succeed, she had to pay a heavy price for fame and recognition. In "Ouija," Hughes describes an early premonition of doom:
"Maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
'Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.'"
Hughes poems are like snapshots frozen in time, best understood by a reader who approaches them without prejudice against the author. They give us the survivor's story of what it was like to be bonded to a brilliant, fiery individual who was to be transformed into a myth, into something of an immortal cult figure, who was destined to live a brief but meteoric life. And who flamboyantly proclaimed that dying was an art: like everything else she did it exceptionally well.

Since Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, Ted Hughes had been unfairly demonized by Plath's largely feminist following as an unfaithful domineering bully who allegedly drove his wife over the edge. To his credit, Hughes had always kept a dignified distance from his detractors. He finally broke his silence shortly before his own death in 1998 with this beautiful collection of poems which appear in chronological order as letters of reminiscence about their life together, written in reply to Sylvia Plath's published diary account of their marriage. You only have to read Birthday Letters in conjunction with the Journals of Sylvia Plath to realise how deeply Ted Hughes loved and missed his first wife. Touching and heartbreakingly sad, and very moving.

Awesome coverage of networking and streams. I love their *real* examples. Its different to the other network books i've read. Where else do you learn how to write a real Webserver with CGI support and stuff like that. CORBA coverage was fairly brief but I guess that's not their focus. Can't wait for their crypto book!!

Although some reviewer said the I/O coverage is too much for a networking book, I think it is good to cover that because networking is based on I/O stream, and the coverage of I/O in this book makes you able to write advance java network program with the lowest-level programming technique, i.e. I/O stream (though Java itself is high-level oriented) that makes your application more powerful and your coding smarter. Though not explored deep enough, other broad-ranged topics in this book, with all the excellent real-world examples, will assist you to choose a best method in Java Network API for you implementation.

I have surveyed a number of Java Networking, distributed computing books. I decided to buy and read this book because it get a great coverage of topics, such as Java Threads, I/O, Socket, HTTP, RMI, CORBA, Messages. If you are developer from C++ or OO background, the topics can be understood in lightspeed. The source code of the book can be easily downloaded and run. The code is clear and reusable in your next Java networking project immediately. In particular, I like the chapter describing how to write a full-feature HTTP server, including serving web pages, executing CGI programs with multi-threading backend. After reading this chapter, all the mystery about web server is dissolved because you can write one by yourselves. This improved the learning curve for great variety of web server. In summary, the book encourage reader to learn and play with the sample codes. You can become a Java networking expert in a week with this book. No one can scare you with another Java networking jargon.