Educational value aside, you will find reading the book a delight thanks to the way Fulton employs his well-honed sense of humor to make his points. Be prepared for a real treat when you add this insightful book to your personal library.

He uses few words and is to the point. The inexperienced writer comes away with confidence, "I can get a book published, but it won't be easy."

The author uses selections of other well-known writers who share a storehouse of knowledge on everything from punctuation to
procedures.

I would recommend the book, But, You Know What I Mean:
An Editor's Point of View, to anyone interested in writing.

Mary Gravitte, author
River Over the Ogeechee
And Other Short Stories

I found the first half of each chapter quite fascinating, as Massa describes the days of Thomas Merton, Notre Dame's rise to academic excellence under Rev. Ted Hesburgh, the first Sunday of Advent, 1964 (the first week when the Vatican II Mass was conducted in churches across the US), and more.

Unfortunately, Massa would fill up the second half of each chapter with analysis from (what he called) "famous" sociologists. I haven't taken sociology since my undergrad days, so other than Andrew Greeley and Max Weber, I heard of none of these "famous" people. Massa's lapse into dry academic language each chapter slowed down the book considerably, and I found myself skimming over those sections after reading a few chapters. At times, his book read like a sociology textbook.

Charles Morris' _ American Catholic : The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church_ makes similar assertions as Massa's book, but it is far more readable and deals heavily with 19th century America more than the Cold War. However, it eventually is Massa who makes a more forceful argument and deals more in detail with the transformation of the American Church after World War II (_American Catholic_ goes into very little detail about these changes, oddly enough).

All in all, an uneven but promising work better suited for a sociology class than for a general reader. If you read it, I recommend Morris' book as a worthy complement.

Massa's interdisciplinary approach expands this work beyond mere religious or cultural history. The chapter on JFK ranks with some of the best political writing I've seen, and the section on the results of Vatican II contains superb theological analysis. The truths revealed in this chapter alone have serious implications for Christians of all traditions.

A must-read for all those interested in American culture during the latter half of the twentieth century.

In this short but fascinating novel, Ruth Birmingham makes her own contribution to this *corpus* of post-Viet Nam mystery literature through the quest by her protagonist, Sunny Childs, to discover the fate of her long-lost father, who reportedly was killed mysteriously in Viet Nam, and yet his name does not appear on the Washington, D.C., Viet Nam Memorial. Why?

The story is imaginative, complex, and sometimes horrifying, and it successfully dredges up a lot of the most painful aspects of the Viet Nam war and its aftermath. Once started, it's a hard book to put down.

The only real weakness of the novel is that its basic structure involves Sunny in a series of encounters with Viet Nam vets and other characters who in turn provide their own recollections of the "real story" of what happened in Viet Nam involving Sunny's father. There is something of a "Rashamon" quality to the different perspectives offered by the various characters, and this makes for fascinating reading. However, there is also a certain literary clunkiness to the way that this succession of narratives is set up. Formerly taciturn characters suddenly launch into long and revealing monologues that seem in some cases really contrived. This structural flaw notwithstanding, the book is certainly fascinating and it contains some real historically significant insights regarding the history of American involvement in southeast Asia.

Being familiar with the Atlanta setting for the story, I can also vouch for Birmingham's knowledge of that metropolis and its geographical intricacies. Consequently, Atlantans especially will find Ruth Birmingham's work fun to read.

Sunny Childs, a private detective at Atlanta's Peachtree Investigations, knows nothing about her father who died in Vietnam when she was eight years old. Her mother has always been reticent on the subject. Hoping for closure, Sunny travels to the Vietnam Memorial Wall, only to learn that her father's name is conspicuously absent.

As Sunny begins her quest to find out what really happened, a friend who served with her father in Nam, allegedly kills himself. The deceased's widow swears that he would never have committed such an act of self destruction because he shied away from guns ever since he left the service. Sunny obtains a list of former GIs who served with her father. She soon realizes that the troops are hiding a several decades old incident that involves the CIA, drug trafficking, and covert operations. If Sunny persists on obtaining the entire truth, she will have to confront the modern day tentacles of the CIA, who have reasons to keep her father's story erased.

The war in Nam has been over for more than two decades, but for those who served and those anxiously waiting for news of their loved ones, the anger, resentment, and confusion remain as powerful as it was in the late sixties-early seventies. Many individuals, even some to young to understand what was happening at that time, still struggle with coping from the horror and ultimate uselessness of the effort. With dignity and respect, FULTON COUNTY BLUES looks inside the head of an indirect victim of the war. Readers will agree that Ruth Birmingham has written a compassionate, empathic, and realistic journey.

Harriet Klausner

This book is filled with such sweeping generalities and general statements that sometimes it is hard to take Sheen seriously. In fact, this is one of the criticisms levied against Sheen by Thomas Reeves in his book America's Bishop. Reeves notes that many of Sheen's works include so many broad assertions and generalities that Sheen often had to defend and recast some of the things he wrote.

Just a few of the grand assumptions Sheen makes are things such as, since Jesus taught so much to the Apostles in the span of 3 years, just imagine what he taught His mother over the span of 30 years. How does anyone know what he taught Mary while he lived with her? Scripture is silent on such issues, but scripture does tell us that Jesus became actively involved in his public ministry after his baptism in the Jordan. Any imaginative specualtion about Jesus' years with Mary is just that, speculation.

Moreover, in the beginning Sheen attributes some verses in the book of Proverbs describing wisdom to Mary. These are new developments to me! To assume that Mary was innocently playing during the acts of creation by God is quite a grand leap in logic. At one point Sheen remarks that this Wisdom being discussed in these verses is Jesus, but in the beginning of his book he says these verses are describing Mary.

Also, implicit in Sheen's book is the idea that Mary is the pinnacle of human creation; The capstone of God's handiwork if you will. I have no qualms by saying that Mary was one of the holiest, if not the holiest person born of man who ever lived, but I don't place her at the pinnacle of human creation. Sheen's remarks about Mary being the quintessential woman and what every man desires as the perfect mate, and what every woman aspires to be in earnest are grand assumptions indeed.

Nevertheless, I did appreciate a few aspects of this book. I loved how Sheen illustrated that every Christian who ignores Mary's epithet of mother of God can be classified into four groups all condemned as heretics. All Christians need to recognize that Mary is in fact the mother of God and needs to be called by that distinguished title; To not do so is to rob her of the distinction she claimed for herself in the first chapter of Luke when she stated that all generations will call her blessed. Second, I liked how Sheen debunks the view that Joseph was an old man when he married Mary. Sheen does an excellent job of showing why such a view is erroneous and implausible.

Like I stated at the beginning, I am a great admirer of Sheen and love his literary works, but this book had too many defincencies and does not live up to the quality of some of Sheen's other works. Read this book to gain a greater appreciation for Mary and to contemplate her role in the New Testament, but do not take everything Sheen writes at face value.

No matter. This is a beautiful book on Mary, and I heartily recommend it (along with "A Woman Clothed with the Sun" as a delightful companion piece).

What captivated me about this story is the way that Fulton dissects this falling-out so carefully... taking the length of a book to narrate the couple of months it takes for this family's inevitable disintegration. This kind of information gives birth to gossip in the real world, but here we get the whole, messy, painfully honest story. While the ending did leave me feeling slightly depressed, it is also very realistic and, therefore, leaves that small crack of hope open. This is a wonderful story written by an author who truly knows his characters.

The main complaint I have about "3S Studio Max 4 Complete" is the same one I have about the tutorial manual that ships with 3DS Max 4. There is information that is just plain wrong! Example files are not referrenced correctly, some icon illustrations are incorrect and whole pages of are missing their example illustrations. It is very hard to work when the information given is wrong.

I would not recommend this for someone just starting to learn 3DS Max 4, as it is too confusing. As a supplement to my other manuals, it isn't that bad. I've purchased worse and I've purchased better.

Also, when I did get stuck (due to a mistake I made
during installation of MAX) I emailed them.
They actually emailed me back within 24 hours!
You know any other authors that email their readers back?
I love this CD. You will too.

note: Fundamentals from riders is a book made for intermediate people. ( too standard and just explain stuff generally).

As a warm-up in Part 1, the author gives an overview of calculus in the plane, with the intent of eventually defining the local degree of a mapping from an open set in the plane to another. This is done in the second part of the book, where winding numbers are defined, and the important concept of homotopy is introduced. These concepts are shown to give the fundamental theorem of algebra and invariance of dimension for open sets in the plane. The delightful Ham-Sandwich theorem is discussed along with a proof of the Lusternik-Schnirelman-Borsuk theorem. I would like to see a constructive proof of this theorem, but I do not know of one.

Part 3 is the tour de force of algebraic topology, for it covers the concepts of cohomology and homology. The author pursues a non-traditional approach to these ideas, since he introduces cohomology first, via the De Rham cohomology groups, and these are used to proved the Jordan curve theorem. Homology is then effectively introduced via chains, which is a much better approach than to hit the reader with a HOM functor. Part 4 discusses vector fields and the discussion reads more like a textbook in differential topology with the emphasis on critical points, Hessians, and vector fields on spheres. This leads naturally to a proof of the Euler characteristic.

The Mayer-Vietoris theory follows in Part 5, for homology first and then for cohomology.

The fundamental group finally makes its appearance in Part 6 and 7, and related to the first homology group and covering spaces. The author motivates nicely the Van Kampen theorem. A most interesting discussion is in part 8, which introduces Cech cohomology. The author's treatment is the best I have seen in the literature at this level. This is followed by an elementary overview of orientation using Cech cocycles.

All of the constructions done so far in the plane are generalized to surfaces in Part 9. Compact oriented surfaces are classified and the second de Rham cohomology is defined, which allows the proof of the full Mayer-Vietoris theorem.

The most important part of the book is Part 10, which deals with Riemann surfaces. The author's treatment here is more advanced than the rest of the book, but it is still a very readable discussion. Algebraic curves are introduced as well as a short discussion of elliptic and hyperelliptic curves.

The level of abstraction increases greatly in the last part of the book, where the results are extended to higher dimensions. Homological algebra and its ubiquitous diagram chasing are finally brought in, but the treatment is still at a very understandable level.

For examples of the author's pedagogical ability, I recommend his book Toric Varieties, and his masterpiece Intersection Theory.

Brought up in want, Fulton became apprenticed to a jeweler, and learned to paint portraits. He got money somehow, and went to England to improve his painting skills, and did indeed exhibit portraits at the Royal Academy. More importantly, he was fascinated by the British system of canals, and invented a gadgets having to do with them. In France, he tinkered with submarines and naval mines. Back at home on the Hudson, he did the work that made him famous. He made a maiden voyage in 1807 from New York City to Albany, 32 hours in the steamboat _North River_. (It was not the _Clermont_, an error in Fulton's first biography that has been reproduced in countless textbooks.) On the very return trip, he took paying passengers. Though Fulton's boats had a superb record for safety, they caused alarm in those who had never seen anything like them. One spectator wrote that when villagers saw this "strange dark-looking craft... some imagined it to be a sea-monster, whilst others did not hesitate to express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment." Although commercially successful, he spent a great deal of time defending his controversial patent rights and trying to maintain boating monopolies. If he had spent that time improving his products (which were, indeed, superior boats) and arranging for more commercial incursions into such lucrative markets as the Mississippi River (where steamboats forged the most change), he probably would have been richer, happier, and more famous.

Sale has taken such facts as are available and with welcome rhetorical flourishes has built a novelistic and satisfying portrait of an enigmatic man. He places both Fulton and the steamboat in a larger history, and just as he is enlightening about the darker or shallower parts of Fulton's character, he is ready to tell about the casualties of the steamboat, such as the Indians or the forests. It is true that America is vastly different because Fulton came along. Mark Twain, who certainly ought to know, wrote "He made the vacant oceans and idle rivers useful, after the unprejudiced had been wondering for years what they were for."