Derik Burleson's brave and terrifying book about genocide in Rwanda broke my heart.As a PCV in the seventies, I knew many of the places he loved, Lake Kivu, Virunga National Park, and the touristy visit to the gorillas who seemed bored with pounding their chests. Burleson's poems remind this reader of the pain of growing to love a country, then seeing its people destroyed in a bloodbath. Worse yet, destroying one another. One tribe played off against another, thanks to the Belgians and their colonial preference for the Tutsis' aquiline features. His use of imagery seems to draw all of nature into the violence,"the pale and carniiverous orchids," the chameleon's tongue "like a bullwhip," "the thin-featured woman/who sold bright fruit door to door,"--now gone. And everywhere men "fingering their machetes" and bloated bodies in the lakes and rivers. Burleson's use of African folktale, as in the woman who can turn herself into a hyena("Nyavirezi"), is charged with premonitions of what is to come. Most powerful of all for this reader were the Remera poems, written from an African point of view, and recounting sorrow after sorrow. Burleson draws on every poem he ever read, and every moment he spent in Africa, and maybe every experience he had as a human being to write this book and help us to understand what happened, and how it happened.

Burleson's poems keep pulling me back with thier elegance, their depth of vision and their travels through human existence. I am thankful that he has the courage to write these poems.

This is a strong book of poems. It is particularly interesting to me as a linguist. Remera's poems echo the origins of language in a fascinating way. Burlesson is on to something fundamentally human with this work. These are images that CNN never brought to us.

"Beyond the Lamplight" is probably the very best collection of horror stories I have ever read. Donald Burleson is nothing short of a brilliant author, long over-looked by the reading public. This is a great, high quality book from a small press company. Editor/publisher Aniolowski has the midas touch, and like his books for Chaosium Inc. Publishers, this one is a hit. In a field too often weighted down with poorly-written and just plain old bad work, it is refreshing to read a book like this. I hope to see more from this winning team, and from this small press.

Donald Burleson may be the most under-appreciated genre writer. He has an enormous talent for creating the creepiest situations, his stories often concerning the most vulnerable and sympathetic characters in modern horror fiction. There are only a few writers working in horror these days who can create a genuinely chilling atmosphere by way of their prose. Among these are Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti...and Donald Burleson. If you want to enjoy a collection of skillfully executed stories, then reward yourself by purchasing a copy of BEYOND THE LAMPLIGHT.

From supernatual happenings, to urban legends; this book is one of the best books in the world. out of ten I give it a eleven.

It is a great book. It lack grammatical explanations, but it does provide phrases on many subjects, often those you won't find in phrasebooks (e.g. conversations with ranchers on their work). I think not only it may give you specialist vocabulary, but can be a good introduction to conversational language.

Although I speak spanish fairly well, I do not know many of the more technical terms. When my truck broke down in the middle of the Chiapas, I did not know how to begin to tell the mechanic that I finally located what was wrong and what I needed to fix it.

Without the helpful technical phrases abundant in this book, it would have taken me much longer to find the tools and equipment that I needed to repair my vehicle.

I highly recommend it to anyone traveling in the outback in Spanish-speaking countries.

The best part of this book was the amount of time that was spent with PRACTICAL data warehouse techniques. I throughly enjoyed reading this book, and I found it extremely useful in planning and implementing my Data Warehouse. I have all of the Oracle Warehouse books, and this is the one that I refer to most often.

This is an outstanding book for Oracle Data Warehousing. I have a very large data warehouse, and I found this book to have suggestions that dramatically improved my performance. The writing style is very clear, and the book has insights that I was unable to find anywhere else. Overall, an outstanding book.

A very entertaining read; This collection of stories gives a vivid image of daily life as seen from Carolina old-salts and islanders.

This is the eleventh book in Chaosium's Cthulhu Cycle series. This volume features tales of Lovecraft's most well-known creation, the octopus-headed entity, Cthulhu. Included are the foundational stories (i.e. "The Call Of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft and "The Black Island" by August W. Derleth), some rare reprints (i.e. "Some Notes Concerning A Green Box" by Alan Dean Foster) and some interesting new stories of Cthulhu in the modern world (i.e. "Rude Awakening" by Will Murray). In any collection the stories are of varied quality but I enoyed the majority of the works collected. If you are a reader of Lovecraft's Mythos fiction then this is a must for your library.

Genealogical Data on Burleson Family, Gives data on the migration of the Family from N.C. to Tenn.,to Georga ,to Alabama and to Texas, Biographacal data on General Edward Burleson Early life, Indian Troubles, Mexico, Gen. Burleson Captures The Alamo from the mexicans, Ordered out of the area to train troops, Later a Sen. in the Republic of Texas , President Pro tem of Texas. Stories, Data, Family history, The History of Texas is in here. A great read.

There are sections of this book that are just about as wrong as wrong gets. For instance, the section on concatenated indexes (page 214) was true in version 7 but is greatly different in version 8.

This book is a pretty good start, but readers should be aware that the author did not do a good job including new features of version 8. For this reason, I strongly disagree with the other reviews. If this book is your only reference for Oracle 8 tuning, chances are you'll not take advantage of new, rich features.

I was very impressed with the content of this book. The material is presented in a clear fashion, and the examples were very helpful. Overall, and excellent text for both the beginner and the expert.

This book has been very helpful to me when getting started with tuning Oracle. There are lot's of useful scripts that showed me what was going on and easy explainations of how to find the problem areas. I own the other tuning books, and many of them are far too complicated and confusing.

It is an excellent book for those interested in the internals of sql. The knowledge of the author about the matter is excellent, and his style to write, clear, simple and funny.

I have a very complex system with lots of subqueries, and I was unable to find good tuning information until I tried the techniques in this book.

The book is simple to understand and explains the internals of complex Oracle SQL operations.

I have been very heppy with the results from my tuning, and I am thankful to find this textbook.

I bought a copy of this book in hopes of tuning the SQL in my Oracle8i database and I was not disappointed. When using the techniques in the book, I was able to quickly identify and tune the most resource intensive SQL statements in my system. The book is clear and easy to understand.

The material covered in the book is great and valuable for any DBA concerned about tuning aspects. I would rate this book 5 stars, if:
1. It wouldn't include information about Oracle 8. This is 9i book; and if I needed 8i advices I would buy a book on 8i (there is one). This way it could be twice as thin (and cheaper ???).
2. Scripts that accompany this book were more acurate, i.e. they are written for 8i and do not cover 9i changes, therefore statistics returned by these scripts is inacurate.
I wish that publisher and the author paid more attention to the quality.

The book is pretty good, it covers some basic topics on implementing STATSPACK and using it for monitoring Oracle. However, it was a little misleading and not too much organized sometimes.

The best:
- Straight, practical and full of scripts/examples
- Gives some tips and explains some Oracle performance issues
- Covers not only database, but network and OS common performance problems (directed to Unix)
- Covers not only 9i, but previous versions too.
- Gives a good guideline on proactive tuning.

The worst:
- It's misleading sometimes. The book covers different Oracle versions, but not always we know if an example applies only to 9i or previous versions. May cause confusion on beginners/intermediate DBA's who hadn't contact with previous Oracle versions
- Some typos and errors on the scripts and the text (9i uses PCTFREE even on Automatic segment management)
- I was expecting a deeper explanation on STATSPACK tables. The book relies only on a few (the most important, ok, but it's not everything). I missed a better approach on other performance issues like checkpointing, log switches, latches and waits in general.

Finally, it is a very good book and worthy buying, but could be even better.

This book is somewhat mis-titled as a STATSPACK book. Instead the book is a superb overall view of Oracle tuning using STATSPACK.

The concepts are presented clearly and elegantly, and the supplemental scripts are very useful. This is a great book to add to your collection that you will actually use.