"One mans junk is another mans treasure." The Eye of Horus is a perfect example of this very true saying. I personally thought this book was very very dull. The past was loaded down with way too many unnecesary details and the characters were dull and flat. The characters in the present were just plain boring! I didn't even finish the book because I wasn't willing to waste my time on a novel that had me dozing within the first 100+ pages. I am just very glad that this was a library loan and I didn't waste my money buying this book!

This book is written with alternating sections set in ancient Egypt and the present. It's very hard to keep track of the Egyptian characters because you don't constantly read about them and they call each other by nicknames. (Too much work.) Also, it's pretty hard to care about the female character in the past when it's obvious by her mummy in the present that she dies a gruesome death--you know this by page 75 or so! So immediately you distance yourself from her because you know she's going to be killed. (Too much work.) It also bothered me that the author decided Nefertiti was a horrible person. I eventually gave up and just read the "present" chapters about the medical illustrator and the doctor... and was still frustrated, because they missed a lot of obvious things. The only interesting part was the actual archaeological practices. If you like Lynda S. Robinson and Laura Haney, stick with them and give this a miss.

This book truly has something for everyone's tastes. Whether you like romance stories, mysteries, or whatever else. Carol Thurston does a wonderful job at tying in all the forensics needed to make the story work, without laying them down too heavily. This book also paints a wonderful piture as to what life in ancient Egypt was like. IF you are just looking for a smooth, exciting, read, or you like ancient Egypt like I do, then this I definitely recommend this book to you!

This book, while exciting, definetly shows the inner sphere bias of all the recent books. The battle is laughable in the stupidity of the Clan commander. I mean, the Comguards can be excused for not having anyting resembling tactics, but the clans have been fighting Warship battles for centuries. Still, it's got some good action, and also points out the weakness of the inner sphere to treachery, something that has been neglected recently. A far better book than freebirth, but not as good as it should have been. Skip freebirth and read this.

Well I can't give this 5 stars, despite the fact that it is a relativly good book. Unlike other books, we do have to go on for a while withouut real combat, but training HAS to happen sometime Quaff? Anyway, the first naval battle in 300 years for the inner sphere go's on a bit long, but is fairly easy to follow, and the reaction of the clanners to see none less then a CAMERON class battle cruiser charging towards you...well... Biast towards the inner sphere to an extent, however it leaves you hanging with the trechary at the end and makes you wonder if all these house units who were trying to kill each other a while ago will be able to come together. At any rate, a good read, especialy for the Naval battle, but loses a star due to the books pace.

I liked this one in the Twilight of the Clans series. The cover's the best part of the book, with it's beautifully rendered Raven crashing through the woods.

The story moves along well, though drags out a bit in the emotions of the characters who don't die. At the risk of sounding sexist, I'd almost think this one was written for the fairer sex, rather than we bloodthirsty mechwarriors!

The dying begins in this novel, but there's not nearly enough, and it's disappointingly handled as well. This one's a good read, and a must read, but Gressman could have done better.

This is the novelization of the TV episode of "Gun on Ice Planet Zero." It faithfully recreates the story of the daring raid by the Galactica crew to destroy the massive Ravishol Pulsar weapon that is about to destroy the Colonial fleet. Glen Larson and Robert Thurston do a good job in fleshing out the characters and adding in a few twists to the plot of this original 2-part tv episode. The character of Croft, the leader of the criminal demolitions team, really gets the treatment in this book. He comes across as an inidividual who has real depth and emotion. In fact, much of the book is told from his point of view. Of course, fans of the show will recognize what happens in the story except for a few little things that are changed, of course. The biggest thing is the ending, with Croft hanging from a wire attached to a stolen Cylon raider trying to rescue Boxey who is a stowaway in a remote-controlled Cylon ship!!! Unbelievable!!! But it still makes a good read for all of us who knew and loved this late '70's sci-fi show. If you like Battlestar Galactica, get all of these novels and relive the show like you never have before. Great fun.

The book is always better than the movie or the episode

Well very intertaining. I couldn't keep my nose out of it, I found it in the thrift shop, a rare find indeed. Starbuck and Apollo at their best, and of course the normal action of the series. When my Dad saw me reading this book, he said that sometimes he'd watch it on the T.V, and he didn't turn it off. Which means the series were good, because it doesn't take alot for my dad to turn the switch. The plot was entertaining, and the humor was good. Read it, you wont regret it.

So far the English translations of Harari's work on Lacan have shown themselves to be substandard and superficial from both the perspective of psychoanalytical practice and Lacanian scholarship. Perhaps this is because they are transcriptions of seminars he gave, rather than written texts carefully worked over and developed. In short, Harari's work would benefit from some careful editorial work, integrating more concrete textual references-- for instance, actually quoting text relevant text --and spending more time developing a context for the arguments he's articulating. Harari simply lacks the speaking skills that Lacan himself possessed. Harari often contents himself with simply restating what Lacan [presumably] says in seminar X and XXIII, giving little or no commentary or conceptual analysis. This point should have already been evident in Harari's reading of seminar X which required a seventy page introduction by Shepherdson in order to situate Harari's work. Such a lengthy introduction suggests that the work itself is not doing its job, and this point is demonstrated by a reading of the text, which, while replete with Lacanian diagrams, has very little of interest to say about them that couldn't already be gathered from other seminars. When Harari does engage in commentary his points are often trite, focusing on irrelevant trivia-- and sometimes hero worship? --rather carefully developing Lacanian concepts in light of the greater body of his thought. This annoying tendency is especially clear in his analysis of seminar XXIII, which spends more time rambling on in a rather romantic way about Joyce, rather than focusing on the novel new concepts that Lacan there develops. Harari's text would be defensible if it provided us with a brilliant and novel reading of Joyce in Lacanian terms, but it does not even manage that in that it restricts itself to the most superficial observations of Joycian texts... Observations that are immediately evident to anyone who has even the most rudimentary knowledge of contemporary literary theory. All of this produces a rather comic effect when Harari tells us that he is attempting to correct the rampant misreadings of Lacan promulgated by the Millerian school. How can you correct a misreading if you barely offer a reading yourself? It is likely that those curious about Lacan's unpublished seminars will continue to buy his work; but such people would do better to save their money and either read these texts in the French themselves or await their translations.

Congratulations to Roberto Harari (and Luke Thurston for his translation)! This is a must reading for those interested in coming to an understanding of Lacan's late work on le sinthome in relation to James Joyce. It is one of the clearest explanations in the literature on this very complex relationship.
Le sinthome was a late development of Lacan during a period where he was attempting to represent the subject in terms of three interconnected rings, the Borromean knots. Each ring represented one of the three main orders (Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real). Many of the key concepts he had developed in the 50s and 60s now reappeared within various configurations of knots. It was Lacan's ongoing interest in James Joyce that sparked the idea that Joyce's writings were applicable to an understanding of a fourth order, le sinthome, which sustained consistancy in the psychic apparatus. Unfortunately, Lacan's late works of the 1970s were replete with exposition of a variety of knots but with little in terms of clear explanations. Harari's work breaks through this impass. It also encourages the reader to converse with his book, not simply to put it to memory. In fact, I found myself cross-referencing his work with other less accessible works to work out a variety of complex points on the knots and le sinthome. Harari's book was a key to overcoming various impasses.
For many of us interested in understanding this material we have had to spend much time in studying literature that not only is equally as challenging as Lacan's, but not necessarily clarifying at all. Harari breaks through this barrier. And he adds his own spin on important ideas presented by Lacan. Some may disagree with his spin, but it is a refreshing elucidation of otherwise inaccessible material.
Sure, there are dogmatic Lacanians who insist on singular readings of Lacan; but this is fiction. And there are factional disputes over the "correct" reading; but let us get beyond this and engage important scholarly work that provides insights into one of the truly great discoveries in psychoanalysis: le sinthome. Lacan's late work still awaits the scholarly field to genuinely engage this material. And there is much to be done!
If we can judge a book by how much it clarifies and encourages further thought on a subject, this book is exceptional.

Had I seen the review a 'Superficial Reading of Lacan, December 11, 2002', prior to reading Harari's book I would not have read it. For me this would have been a mistake. As a PhD candidate working on Joyce and Deleuze, I have found it enormously productive. It has forced me to completely rethink the chapter I have devoted to Lacan, as this originally relied too much on the negative critique contained in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. I now believe that the 'final' Lacan of Seminar 23 onwards, particularly 'Le Séminaire de 20 January 1976, Le sinthome, 1975-76', but also the earlier 'Le Séminaire. Livre XIX. Ou pire, 1971-72', have not received sufficient attention, whether or not they have been officially suppressed. I owe this to Harari and to this book.
It now seems evident to me that the later Deleuze of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, and the 'final' Lacan, through their respective use of mathematical topology, come much closer in their ultimate theorisations than I had previously thought possible. For me it is particularly significant that Lacan used Joyce so productively in order to bring about his own final theoretical advance. His topological approach makes it much more arguable for me to relate Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's more fragmented use of Joyce to a schizoanalytic reading of Finnegans Wake. This will, I believe, prove particularly productive, at least for me and my dissertation.
Clearly my particular perspective is not one which will necessarily encourage others, who have an interest in Lacan or Joyce, to buy this book. I must therefore mention the extremely varied and rich variety of themes which the book contains, including Lacan's reading of Joyce as himself an analyst who brings about not simply Joycean doubles speaking Wakease, but an inventiveness in the analysand/ reader, through poetry and creativity, which changes our very discourse and allow us a new perception of the world. Nevertheless, as this is my review, I will stress one of the themes which is particularly important for me, as this should appeal to other likely purchasers of the book. This is the way in which Harari develops Lacan's thought on the Joycean epiphany, by showing that the Thomist notion of quidditas or 'whatness', which Lacan apparently did not find particularly 'striking', is absolutely decisive in Joyce's thinking and implicitly so in Lacan's development.
Deleuze and Guattari coined the concept of haecceity or 'thisness' to express their key notion of 'becoming' as an essence which did not result in a subjective identity. This I see as a very similar if not identical concept to quidditas. Deleuze implicitly linked haecceity to Joyce's 'epiphanic machine', in his comments on Stephen Hero, by noting that essence itself determines the conditions of its own incarnation. Harari too notes Joyce's privileging of 'whatness' ' through 'the epiphany', in Stephen Hero ' as a fundamental motif of his aesthetic thought which is realised in its fullness in Finnegans Wake. He shows that the occurrence and writing of the lived epiphany for Joyce turns his symptom into the Lacanian sinthome, as a revelation of the Real and its productive possibilities through the Symbolic. The revolutionary development in Lacan's thought at this point in finding the Real no longer 'impossible' but actually productive strongly links his thought, to my mind, to the equation of the Real with reality which had previously separated Deleuze and Guattari's theorisations from those of Lacan.
Harai concludes that Lacan has swept the way clear for a 'post-Joycean psycho-analysis', which is our own. From my perspective this can be no other than Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis. Lacanians will no doubt disagree, and Harari, I must stress, makes no such connection, but to ignore or belittle this book does no service I believe to either Lacan or Joyce, leave alone Deleuze and Guattari.
James Davies, University of Leeds.

I am confused...I look at the star ratings and read the reviews...but they don't even come close to my thoughts. This book was an interesting read. They do show a huge variety of techniques that are used for the stage... but they only give you a small taste of the process...Vacuum forming for example, a wonderful process, but zippo info on whereto/howto/whoto contact to buy or to make one. Read this book to get an overview of some ideas...but know that the technology shown is old and past its prime. I know stagework is seen at a distance..but you will not be impressed with the craftsmanship of the projects. Heads up on some safety issues..they skip right over that. oh my.

This is a great book about making masks. It covers the making of molds, including using alginate for a life-casting. He talks about making masks of different materials -- from hex-a-cel to paper mache to neoprene to leather! There's a really *nice* section on leather masks, and he also talks a little bit about the history of the leather masks and how they were used in Renaissance Italy by the Commedia. This book is filled with plenty of black and white photos illustrating the various steps in each mask-making or mold-making process, and the instructions are very clear. Highly recommended for those with an interest in making their own masks.

Not only is this an excellent technical guide, it also covers the business principles of becoming an ASP. I was skeptical when I received this book as a gift, but I actually learnt from this book.

The configurations are very detailed including the actual commands required. The section on load balancing and content delivery was a great help. The section on QOS is also very good, with excellent practical examples. Even though I work primarily in the enterprise and not as an ASP, I found this to be one of the best books I have.

If you are primarily are a Cisco shop (most configuration examples are based on Cisco products), I would highly recommend this book.

"Attitude!" is great! It gets students thinking about school and why they are there. My students loved it."

California Fault is an excellent and endearing book. Thurston Clark combines elements of geology, sociology, history with a wealth of insight to create the story of the San Andreas fault and the Californians who live above and along it. The author provides an excellent and detailed narrative, and, despite following many entertaining digressions, keeps it all together and focussed by the creative use of different themes - the trail of an ancestor who led men across the Oregon trail, his personal search for an earthquake to experience and someone to forecast it for him, and of course, the pursuit of the California dream. In particular those who like eccentrics will find a selection of the best California has to offer - their stories tied together by the author's skillfully highlighted ironies and ambiguities which are themself such a big part of any true California story.

It doesn't tell you how to contact the dead yourself, but I still enjoyed reading the experiences of others.

Danielle Steel, Thurston House (Dell, 1983)

Over the past quarter-century or so, Danielle Steel has sold more novels than there are people in America. Fifty-three books, with sales (at present, according to Steel's website) of more than four hundred sixty-three million. She's one of a handful of novelists who have not had a single book go out-of-print in decades. Remember those old Slim Whitman late-night TV ads talking about how he'd sold more albums than Elvis and The Beatles? Well, Danielle Steel really HAS. She's the Slim Whitman of the book business. So what is it, I asked myself for years, that makes people read Danielle Steel so obsessively? What is it about her books that makes them so all-fired popular? I must have known I would eventually want to know the answer, because some years back I picked up a worn-out dog-eared copy of Thurston House. And thus my education in mass-market romance begins.

To start with, every bad thing I've ever heard about Danielle Steel novels is absolutely the case. Whoever does her editing needs to be boiled in oil. The grammar is atrocious. Ellipses scurry about the pages like ants on a rich man's corpse. Sentences like "The sun sank slowly into the hills framing the lush green splendor of the Napa Valley." are endemic. (That's the opening sentence of this five-hundred-page epic.) The book itself is so overwritten as to make a Presidential speech sound spare and to the point. Keeping my cynicism in check, I decided that couldn't be the reason for hundreds of millions of books sold, and that her fans were reading in spite of, not because of, these things. And so I dug a bit deeper.

Hypothesis number two: sex. Romance novels have sex, right? (Well, they contain sex. Though most used bookstore owners will swear up and down they have no idea how so many of them got on the shelves, so...) Everyone's familiar with the cliché of the Fabio-fronted bodice ripper. Maybe so, but not in Danielle Steel's novels. Five hundred pages and two sex scenes that are less explicit than anything to be found in Victorian erotica. Ever read Victorian erotica? Nuns read Victorian erotica when they want to take their minds off lustful thoughts. So, okay, it's not the explicit sexual content. Deeper we go.

Could it be, erm, plot? This one centers (as should be obvious from the title) around Thurston House, a mansion built in San Francisco after the Civil War by Jeremiah Thurston. He builds it for his young Georgia wife, Camille. It turns out to be the only thing about being married to Jeremiah that Camille really likes, so she ends up absconding to France with a penniless Count and leaving Jeremiah with the house and a daughter, Sabrina. Sabrina is actually the main character of the book (one remembers, wistfully, Mervyn Peake's words about wanting to write an epic novel wherein the main character is only a few months old after "many thousands of pages," and wonders when Steel read those words), and grows up to be that rarest of things, a career woman at the turn of the century. Complications, etc. As far as plots go, it's actually not all that bad. The book may be overwritten, but Steel does know how to keep the pages turning, and while everything that happens therein is predictable, she at least keeps the reader's ire in check by making sure it doesn't become too predictable until a few pages before whatever large event is coming up happens. While Americans have given up steak tartare for Big Macs, even the most jaded McFreak needs a Whopper once in a while. There has to be something more than that.

Characters? Oh, please. Jeremiah Thurston falls in love with three different women in the book's first twenty-five pages (well, okay, he's been seeing one of them for six years, but he falls in love with the other two within five minutes of meeting them, and he meets them within a week of one another. I mean, come on). Even if everyone else in the novel had been drawn with the precision of the characters in, say, a Don DeLillo novel, and perfect consistency, Jeremiah's antics at the beginning would have been enough to cause aspersions to be cast. Well, let me clarify. It's not just Jeremiah's antics, it's the motives that Steel ascribes to them. I've read more than enough good books where a randy main character goes rutting with multiple women in relatively few pages. Those books, though, don't offer the hope that said randy main character will drop everything and marry whichever one says "yes" first. Life just doesn't work that way. To be fair, Steel lets us know she realizes this. Camille (remember her?) says of her father that he has a mistress in New Orleans, and everyone, including her mother, knows this. She mentions this while asking Jeremiah if he's going to be that way. He, of course, says no, and sticks to it despite shabby treatment from Camille. And, of course, everyone we meet, especially in the supporting roles, is so beautiful it hurts to look at them.

It was at about this point in my ruminations (ed. note: originally typed there: "ruinations." Indeed.) that it dawned on me what it is that Danielle Steel has that so deeply affects tens of millions of fans and causes them to buy hundreds of millions of novels. A few paragraphs back, I mentioned that good old Victorian erotica. You know the type. Men get simultaneously scandalized and titillated by the flash of a bare ankle, and the closest anyone gets to sex is that time-honored sport of "struggling with her corset." While no one would accuse Ms. Steel of being Victorian in her writing style (thankfully), the morality in her books has a distinct air of nineteenth-century Queen about it. We never see anyone having sex unless they're (a) married or (b) getting married. Sex between the unmarried is only hinted at in the most oblique terms. Those who have been married before who are generally good folk and ripe to get married again are either widowed/widowers or were those who were left, not those who did the leaving. (This is an hypothesis on my part; Jeremiah is the only one in this book with a main part who gets left, and he's too married to his work to find a new wife.) Those who do the leaving are vile creatures worthy of contempt by the reader; there's never a situation in which someone could have a good reason for leaving a spouse. Men are perfectly beastly to women at times, and rape is even hinted at, but always with an eye towards plot advancement. No one in the book has a character that is any shade of grey; everyone is either good or evil. (Parties can switch sides, if necessary to advance plot. Besides, every romance novel needs a pair who are originally at each other's throats before falling madly in love.) And, most assuredly (and, one would think, most offensively to female readers) is that, while the heroine may prove herself to be a self-sufficient and capable career woman in a male-dominated society over the objections of all around her, surmounting insurmountable odds in order to do so, the career woman is only a career woman as long as is necessary. The purpose of the woman in the romance novel is to marry and beget children.

Once you've got your head around the particular form of escapism that takes 1900-era morals into account, everything falls into place. Steel is read for the same reasons other romance authors are, but her formula contains a particular set of rules that are stricter than most. I started out wanting to learn why so many people read Danielle Steel. I seem to have done so. The idea that so many millions of people could wholeheartedly embrace such strictures as actual ideals for the way the world should be is cause for intense, painful despair. That's not the fault of the book itself, however. It does what it sets out to do. It creates its own fantasy world (consistent, one assumes, with that of the other fifty-two mega-bestsellers that have flowed from Ms. Steel's pen), populates it, and gives the reader a story within it that conforms to its rules. It is safe and predictable. It would be better were some uppity editor to curtail Steel's overwhelming use of ellipses and adverbs, but must be given some grudging respect for its readability. Still, as much as I try not to fault the book itself for its moral structure, I can't help letting some of that creep in. I've tried Danielle Steel now; I'll stick with Barbara Michaels, Dean "Deanna Dwyer" Koontz, Janis Flores, and other more liberated romance novelists. * ½

Although it's been over 10 years since I first read Thurston House, it was the first Danielle Steel book I had ever read. It was what got me started reading her books, and now I reserve a book as soon as I hear one is about to be published.

As I recall, it is about several generations of a family, and although, if not read carefully, it can get rather confusing and deep with all of the characters.

Compared to some of Danielle Steel's more current books, it had more depth than those of recent times, probably because she wasn't publishing at least two books a year as she now does.

I'm ready to dig into it again!

I have been reading Danielle Steel's books for over 15 years now. Sometimes they do get a bit "all the same" with most of the characters being important, successful, beautiful people who live in "stately homes" and wear "important jewels and furs". Sometimes I think the characters are more about what they have then who they are. Despite this, I always enjoy her books - they are easy to read, romantic and make you forget about everyday life for a couple of hours while engrossed in the book. Personally I think her earlier books are more enjoyable and get more involved in the characters than some of the later books she has written.
This book is one of her best The main characters Jerimiah and Sabrina are well developed and you will fall in love with them both. The story follows a lifetime so you are not left disappointed as you know how it all ends. I wish Danielle Steel's still wrote books like this. A wonderful romance and one that that is highly recommended to anyone new to Danielle Steel - start with this one!