The title of this book is a little misleading in that you might assume it's more about the design of an accounting system as opposed to an introduction to Access. A better title would be, Introduction to Access 97 Using Simple Accounting Examples. The first half of the book introduces Access to beginners and includes no useful accounting information, while the second half discusses how to create an accounting database and the accompanying forms and reports. The sample database barely scratches the surface of what even a hot dog vendor would require. For example, the very core of any accounting system, the general ledger, is not designed into the database. In fact, you won't find any entries in the index under general ledger -- a glaring omission for a book on accounting. Too many pages are devoted to listing tedious, step-by-step instructions for creating the simple tables, forms and reports. The authors would have done better to do this only for the first example and then refer the reader to the accompanying CD in later chapters. They could have used the newly acquired space to develop a more complete database along with a higher level discussion. Somebody with no accounting experience, no programming experience and no Access experience may find this book useful, but anybody who needs to build a real accounting system will be frustrated.

Finally a book that doesn't use useless access work-throughs like student databases to teach microsoft access. This book is very basic though. This book is what you would expect to find in an introductory accounting system course taught at most colleges. It covers all of the basic accounting cycles but leaves you with a lot of issues to figure out on your own. The chapters seem to be repetitive in that the book never moves on to more complicated issues such as creating modules. You will only see very basic macros in only one chapter. The book doesn't even attempt tell you how to tie all of the cycles into a general ledger and therefore ignores the creation of financial statements. So at the completion of the book all you have are bits and pieces of an accounting system. I question whether the authors have ever developed a full blown accounting system. If they have I hope they will expand the coverage of the book in future editions. If there were any other books on access and accounting I might not recommend this book. However, if you are a beginner to financial systems this book may get you started.

Its not as in depth as I thought it would be. Putayanimo

If you are interested in the fabulous work of Rich Phaigh, look for his four video set with four workbooks, entitled, "The Treatment of Pain," or "The Onsen Technique." These sold from ads in massage magazines in the 90's. The material in these videos and workbooks is indespensable. I no longer own the videos, but I would like to find copies. I own the workbooks, which were handed out during his four workshops which I attended. Rich also published four articles in Massage Therapy Journal, which can be found through their website author index, and he was interviewed with his bold face across the cover of Massage magazine in May/June 95.

A great concept for a book. However, I was disappointed. I had hoped to find something that would address the issues faced in building a double entry accounting system in Access.

Instead I found something that missed the mark in terms of Access -- Access 97 Power Programming, Access Bible, and the VBA books by Getz et al. hit this mark much better -- and missed the mark in terms of accounting -- no discussion of how to integrate a chart of accounts, the authors dismissed the need for double-entry bookings and never developed it, and then the book only addressed a couple of the accounting cycles.

I awarded two stars because the book would have been a good book if I were just learning what a table was in a relational database and I had an avid interest in accounting and only wanted to get a feel for what the other book written by these two authors by almost the same title was like.

However, I do applaud the attempt for someone with an accounting background to write a book that might help others better understand accounting and apply it using an application that is so readily avaliable.

"The Case of the Smoking Chimney", first published in 1943, was the second - and, thankfully, final - entry in Erle Stanley Gardner's short-lived attempt at putting together a series of detective stories about grandfatherly free spirit, Gramps Wiggins. Neither this book nor its predecessor, "The Case of the Turning Tide" (1941), give any indication that posterity missed out on great things by his bringing this series to a quick end.

The second book is the better of the two, but is still very slack, much too loose in construction and in the writing to hold its own in comparison to Gardner's two other great series, about Perry Mason, and Donald Lam/Bertha Cool (written under the pseudonym A.A. Fair).

A crafty businessman arrives incognito in a small town, where he takes up residence at a cabin and - under another identity - starts to acquire property, apparently in an attempt to hoodwink the town's property owners. When he is found dead in the mountain retreat there is no shortage of suspects with excellent motives. Gramps Wiggins's granddaughter is married to the local district attorney, giving him an inside track to the physical evidence and to the misguided interpretation of that evidence by the authorities.

This book is something of an anomaly. The clues are good - puzzling, yet not so obscure that it is impossible to interpret them correctly and piece them together into the right conclusions. The mystery is good, and its solution fairly satisfying. Yet the book itself is pretty awful. It is basically short story material that has been expanded to novel length, and in doing so, dissipating tension, focus, and the reader's interest

Gardner tries hard, but in the end can't quite convince us that anybody could find Gramps Wiggins as adorable as the granddaughter and her husband apparently do. Their tolerance of him is a contrivance, a manipulation of the characters authentic feelings to preserve the structure of the story that Gardner needs to impose. I suppose that the Gramps Wiggins character can be thought of as Gardner's abortive attempt at creating an amateur detective who is more adept and insightful than the pros by virtue of his no-nonsense understanding of human nature, much like Agatha Christie's highly successful Miss Jane Marple. On that level the character - and the two books - have to be judged as failures.

Gardner was a writer of limited skills, and was certainly a poor creator of three-dimensional characters. Gramps Wiggins is as an insufferable bore with a terminal case of cutesy, that, unfortunately, doesn't reach the terminal stage nearly fast enough to suit me.

The title character of Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Case of the Stuttering Bishop" enters Perry Mason's office one day and presents an enigmatic story about the granddaughter of a wealthy man. The girl's mother gave up the child for adoption long before, but now the granddaughter is coming forward to claim a share of her grandfather's estate. At the same time, an imposter has come forward--or so says the stuttering bishop. But is he for real, or is he merely an imposter, too?

Before Mason can determine the answer to that question, the bishop is attacked in his hotel room and then disappears, apparently into thin air, while boarding a ship. At the same time, Mason is trying to track down the various parties and to determine who's who. When the wealthy grandfather is murdered, though, it appears that Mason has his first guilty client.

Unlike many Perry Mason novels, "The Case of the Stuttering Bishop" does not end up in a dramatic court confrontation, and it therefore deviates somewhat from form. The case here is also significantly more convoluted than that in many of the Perry Mason novels. Because of this change of form, I found the novel less satisfying than the other Perry Mason novels I've read. The name Perry Mason, after all, connotes brilliant lawyering, and the emphasis on the detective work here left me disappointed.

Blaming Steve Perry for not being Robert E. Howard is like blaming a fish for not being a cat. Howard is a hard act to follow, but Perry isn't even trying. The tone of the whole book is way to light to be a true 'Conan' story. We have a Cyclops and a giant worm who are an Abbott and Costello like comedy team; a nyphomaniac witch and a psycotic warlock who mirror each others movements and fumble over each other trying to get to Conan; a hemorphidite warrior that is just embarressing and very discomfeting. And Conan himself dosn't seem to well thought out this time. If there are any redeming qualities to the book, it is that it is short and easy to read. Conan is meant to be entertaining, but not as a slapstick comedy.

Disappointed and just a little bit mad, that sums up my feelings after reading this book. I had high hopes for the book given that I had read a similar book on another camp that was very good. This book, on the other hand just was very lacking in detail and organization. The book is the 7th Army's report on the camp issued shortly after the liberation. The book tried to cover the set up of the camp, what took place in the camp, the make up of the SS staff, and a few personnel accounts of time in camp. The authors just did none of these items very well. The book was poorly organized. The coverage of the camp set up and running of the camp was far too short and really lacked in detail. And the personnel accounts were mainly of people in somewhat privileged support roles quite unlike the average prisoner.

I wish this was the extent of my issues with the book, but on top of all this the writing just was not that good. The writing was rather jumpy and not very challenging. It was like reading a bad high school history report. Overall I would pass on this book. There are far too many quality books covering this topic to spend any time on this one. The only reason I am giving the book a two is I somehow feel guilty about giving a very low rating to book dealing with such a horrible event.

G.K. Chesterston displays sparkling wit and trenchant insight into human nature in this as in his other writings: the man is charming.

He is also an ignoramus of staggering proportion when it comes to basic matters concerning political economy. His criticism of the free market consists of a belief that the poor are wretchedly poor because the rich derive wealth from the poverty of the poor. Poverty exists because the rich, merely by wishing the poverty into existence, create it. Once the poor are wretchedly poor, only then will they be cowed enough to work in factories. Chesterton, with a straight face, announces that the poor who are moderately poor do not seek wages, and rich people do not seek to hire them.

He also thinks the rich could wish poverty out of being using the same magic power that they used to wish it into being, but that they selfishly refuse to use this power, because, if the poor were not wretched, the factories would find no employees, and the rich would be less rich. I am frankly baffled, in this analysis, what Chesterton thinks the factory owners do with manufactured goods once they are produced: if the rich had the power to wish wealth into being, would they not wish for wealthy customers to buy their goods? If no one buys the goods, what good are they?

Chesterton concludes his (ahem) 'analysis' by saying that the rich have unwisely 'allowed' the poor to multiply in great numbers, so that the overpopulation would increase the labor supply and drive down the height of wages: but they miscalculated in their villainy, and now they fear the numbers of the poor they way the Pharaoh feared the swelling ranks of the Hebrews. The Eugenics movement of the 1910's was a plot by the wealthy to control the numbers of the poor, who, apparently, can magically raise population rates when it suits them, but not lower them again.

He also pauses to call the rich all the usual nasty names that writers blissfully ignorant of economics call them: parasites, robbers, flint-hearted sinners, etc. Apparently wealth merely exists as a given, appearing naturally for no cause and at no cost, like manna from heaven, but the rich (somehow) with their hoodoo magic have usurped all the wealth, so the manna meant for us falls only on them. This is the economic theory of a cargo-cultist.

Chesterton's economic theory does not realize that the consumers, not the whim of the factory owner, sets the price of goods and the price of every factor of production, including the wages of labor.

His theory does not notice that the poor factory worker was mass-producing cheap goods for the poor, at prices they could afford, leading to the general rise of wealth and luxury of the nation. It is the capitalist, who invest, builds the factory, and creates the jobs. It is the capitalist who allows the poor shoeless man and the poor shoe-factory worker to make a mutually advantageous exchange.

If the rich man who built the factory were a thief, and hanged as other thieves are hanged, the victims that he robs would be the richer when he leaves off robbing them.

In reality, if the rich man does not invest, the factory is not built, and the poor man who wanted to by shoes will go unshod and the poor man working in a shoe factory will go begging.

Read this book for its lucid prose and droll paradoxes in which Chesterton finds delight: but for an understanding of how the market system works and why it works, read HUMAN ACTION by Ludwig von Mises.

The title of this book promised a vitriolic indictment of religious politics. One would expect within the pages of something called "God's Bullies" some content about the actual bullying.

What appeared, however, was rather understated. No long series of anecdotal atrocities, no systematic refuatation appeared here; instead, a great deal of self-analysis by the author occupies the first half of the book, by which time he gets around to criticizing an obscure Republican staffer for a congressman who pushed an anti-homosexual agenda (this staffer, the author says, spent his time away from work cruising gay bars).

After looking for this book for thirteen years, drooling over the prospect of a work that would flay Jerry Fallwell, I found that the book did no such thing. This is just as well, perhaps, since Fallwell ceased to matter after 1984 and I had ceased to care about him years before I located a copy of this book.