First, I have to say that I'm a long running fan of Rudy Rucker, and have read every book he's written, fiction and non-fiction. To this day, Software, Wetware, and Freeware reign as three of my favorite books. I read (though struggled would be a better word) through this book, forever keeping an open mind, hoping that it would get better, but could only come to the conclusion that this is a bad book. It's vaguely interesting at points, and Edgar Allan Poe being one of the main characters is kind of fun, but overall, it's a childish, boring, and uninteresting pile of trash. Seriously. If you see it, burn it. If you have already read this book, please don't let it deter you from his other works, such as "Software", "Wetware", "Freeware", and "Hacker and the ants". It pains me to think that Mr. Rucker wrote a book as bad as this.

Like the reviewer below, I've read almost all of Rucker's work, including his short-story output, which is excellent. Unlike him, I really enjoyed this book. Poe fans and lit majors will get a kick out of it, and casual readers of SF will enjoy it as well. Perhaps not as good as the Software/Wetware/Freeware novels, but very enjoyable, and on a par with White Light and Secret of Life.

The author has got to be the most unsympathetic character I have ever met. I honestly couldn't finish the book, even though I wanted to know what happened to the ship he was on. I hope someone else who was on one of the seagoing tugs during WWII has written their story.

Theodore Mason was a deckplate sailor in WWII. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor he was assigned to the USS Pawnee, a fleet tug based in the Pacific Islands. As a sailor in the modern day Navy I was enthralled by his account of life in a Navy torn between traditions and fighting a war. His account finds the mark as he relates the life of an enlisted sailor. His observations about his shipmates, the war, and the chain of command above him are shrewed and correct. This book is an excellent read for those interested in the lives of those who actually fought the war; the enlisted men and women of every service.

When I read the first five pages I knew I was in trouble. The writing throughout the book was very flat. Keeping track of all the characters was a monumental feat that left you wondering WHY they were actually written into this novel. About the only completely "fleshed" out character was Scott - The main character's lover who happened to be a Baseball athlete. Sprinkled adorations of this character created many stalls to the story line that I began to NOT care for Tom or Scott. I also found myself cringing at all the location descriptions given to the reader about Chicago. Again, this intricate location detail created a stall to my reading. Hasn't this writer figured out that less is more? Yet, I continued through the 182 pages HOPING to get some real writing style that would drive me to the entertainment value I get when reading a Joseph Hansen novel. How sad I was to see this book finish flat. Time to cleanse my brain with a Dave Brandstetter detective read. Oy....

This has to be one of the dullest mysteries I have read. I felt like the whole book was a mere excuse for the author to express his venom against the Catholic Church. Characters have less personality than dry bread, they are nothing but extreme stereotypes with name labels. The events are almost non-events; things seem to happen but no real progress is made. When the murderer is finally revealed, a reader couldn't care less because it is difficult to remember who is who! And the writing style - after a while, I began to wonder if it was that flat and mundane on purpose!

I liked one thing about this book, though. My copy was only 182 pages long.

I knew this book had to be good when I read the two reviews prior to mine on amazon.com. As a member of the gay community and a recovering Roman Catholic (who thoroughly enjoys the spiritually fulfilling practice of Catholicism I find in the Episcopal Church), not only was I not offended by anything in this book, I actually enjoyed it.

Like the movie "Priest," there are a number of Roman zealots of the "one true church" ilk who are out to write negative reviews of anything that tells it like it is where the Roman Church is concerned whether they've read it or not.

Mr. Zubro is to be congratulated for an engrossing mystery that will surprise its gay and lesbian readers in a positive way, a respectable entry in his "Tom and Scott" series of whodunits.

More power to him!

Having had the opportunity to serve in a number of U.S. Army and Air Force Special Operations Forces(SOF) units during my dual-service career--and therefore having some sensitivity to security concerns in this field--I approach with skepticism anyone making such flashy "I had a license to kill" claims. Beyond the outright wannabes, there is another group that has learned enough of the SOF lingo and lore to give their tales a seeming touch of reality when delivered to those who have never served in the clannish & closed Special Operations community. And as an author myself of three non-fiction SOF books, I find it unsettling when an author claims "writer's license" (Foreword, p. vii) with such apparent ease in writing what he himself admits is a composite picture of his adventures. Who can know what anecdotes actually happened? For all I know Peter Mason is everything he claims and more. But unfortunately what comes across in this book is someone needing to make some money after his military pension was "impounded" as the author reports.

While I don't doubt the author's credentials as a special forces operator and small arms expert, it seems to me that he has taken too many fictional liberties in an attempt to make the book more readable. In the book he tells one (not quite believeable) story of how he killed the nazi war criminal Ortgies, while on the tv documentary about his exploits a completely different version is told. This could have been a major exposé in the tradition of "Spycatcher" and "By Way of Deception", but unfortunately the book is written like a cheap spy novel. However, if the author had found a good ghost writer, I'm sure the book would have been an international bestseller like the two above mentioned books.

I found this book - a few interesting bits heavily padded with material intended to provide color but which failed to engage my interest - to be the literary equivalent of a hamburger sandwich that is long of bun and short of beef.

The author makes some interesting points about where a Mason's true allegiance lies. Sadly, he is wrong. The Masonic belief is (in order) God, Family, Country, and Lodge. How this can be possibly construed to mean that they are at odds with christians, or catholics, is both unfounded and a misrepresentation of fact. Any reader interested in learning more about the Fraternity would be better served starting with one of the hundreds of books available on Masonry. My sense is the author has some other agenda at work here.

Enjoyed reading this book, though it was very top surface. It does an excellent job in showing the out-right conflict between Free Masonry and Christanity. After reading this book, no true born again believer should want anything to do with Masons or Eastern Star orginazations.
For more indept reading on this matter buy the book called:
Cult Watch
by John Ankerberg & John Weldon

God Bless

I had expected this book to contain more practical implementations than it does. It's a confusing book primarily because it doesn't seem to know who its target audience is. As written, the book is going to be too basic for anyone with a programming background, and too complex for corpus linguists unfamiliar with programming concepts. It claims to be suitable for both, but programmers will find much better references to stemming and corpus creation in other sources (e.g. the Jurafsky/Martin book) and corpus linguists would be better advised to pick up a basic book on programming if that's what they're interested in learning.

Not for those who already know Java, this book gives non-Java
programmers with an interest in corpus linguistics an overview of what Java has to offer.

Its not a useful book for non-programmers or those who don't know anything about corpus linguistics either.

This could be used as a companion book for an undergraduate class in corpus linguistics.

I refer to it occasionally when I need to do something in Java.

This book claims in its introduction, to be superior to other baby names because of its accuracy but clearly it it poorly edited, with names with no meanings and meanings with no names. The bulk of the book does not define if names are masculine, feminine or unisex, and in the one section that does, there are clearly feminine meanings in the male name section. In addition, the title of the book led me to be believe that it would be ALL African names but instead, there are entire pages with no African names, but rather Eurocentric names that some African Americans have used for their children in the past. Worst of all is that some of the "African names" are not names at all. Who would name their child "Ugly woman", "evil" or after a particular "market place". My husband and I thought there were some nice choices for girls names, but you really have to read carefully.

I was dismayed by all the misinformation in this book. Most of the breastfeeding information is about 10 years out of date. I have the 1987 edition and was surprised by how little they revised the book when they re-released it.

On top of that, the theme of the book seems to be that breastfeeding and working is hard, you probably won't be able to really do it so don't try very hard and don't feel guilty when you fail. I don't need to read a book to get that attitude; I can just talk to my relatives!

The one helpful part of the book was the case studies of how different women handled different work situations especially unusual situation. It's a shame the rest of the book goes out of it's way to emphasize the negative and downplay anything positive about the choice to continue to breastfeed after going back to work.

"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.