John Bourke writes wonderfully of General George Crook, a legendary Indian fighter in post-Civil War Arizona, Wyoming, and Montanna. Bourke, who for most of the time was Crook's aide-de-camp, is an unabashed admirer of the General, but the book goes far beyond flattery and sycophancy. Bourke makes the reader admire Crook as much as he himself does, for Crook truly did possess unmatched stamina, experience, attention to detail and equal measures of sympathy for the Indians he was fighting and ruthlessness in his ambition to drive them onto the reservations. Bourke too admires the Indians, especially the Apaches. In fact, one of the book's high points is its almost anthropological descriptions of Apache life, the Arizona landscape, life in the frontier Army, and the social milieu of old Tuscon. The descriptions of Crook's campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyenne flag just a little, but only in comparison to Bourke's own rapturous discussions of life in the Southwest. The book that this compares best to is Eugene Ware's "The Indian War of 1864" (which I've also reviewed for Amazon). Ware, like Bourke, was a serving Army officer with a keen, sympathetic eye for all he saw in the old West. Both were involved in more hair-raising episodes than a dozen Hollywood action heroes combined. I too am a serving Army officer, and I can testify that none of my peers today has seen as much or writes so well.

The concept of Manifest Destiny took root during the Mexican American War, and assumed grander proportions following the Civil War. Gen. Crook had been a calvery officer whose services proved to be of considerable value, as much for his ability as for his compassion for the Indians. His job was to protect the settlers and subdue the Indians by locating them on reservations. The author was with Crook during his first and second Southwest campaigns as well as that of the Northern Plains. His love for his commander and appreciation of the Indians made him the perfect writer for the topic. Gen. Crook seems the ideal officer for the job, but was defeated, not by the Indians but Agents assigned, after the army had done its work, to reservations by Washington. The book is a wonderful description of the duty performed by Gen. Crook who, had his system been utilized, would have led to a better life for all. In the end, Bourke feels, Crook died of a broken heart. Important history, and a story too beautifully told to miss.

My 16 month old son is allergic to Milk, Soy & Corn and this book was by far the worst I bought. I bought 8 books hoping to find some info and recipies I couldn't find on the internet but the recipies were very exotic and not appropriate for a toddler and were not truely allergin free. I did better at the Food Allergy Network site and should have only bought their cook book.

Good information on how different grains behave when substituting for wheat. Disappointing for Italian recipes. I am allergic to cow's milk, but tolerate buffalo milk mozzarella, which is what it is made of in Italy (Mozzarella di Bufula). The book makes no mention of this important substitution. Also, Pecorino Romano, like imported Feta, is made from sheeps milk, not cow's milk, as stated in the book. Sheeps milk yogurt was not mentioned either. Unfortunate since many people are turned off by the strong taste of goat milk products. Also, some people will tolerate foods that are cooked as some proteins are denatured or broken down by cooking. The book makes no mention of that. Also, some people might not tolerate tomatoes, but can tolerate a mock tomato sauce by pureeing red roasted peppers with or without artichokes as a sauce base. Most of the tomato sauce recipes contained tomatoes. Still the book is very thorough on grain substitutions.

This book offers so many recipes and substitutes that are near-perfect for those with multiple allergies. I have a child who is allergic to 60 foods - including wheat (and most other grains), sugar, tomatoes, eggs, corn and many more common foods and spices. Other books offer great recipes, but often contain an allergen that I don't know how (or there isn't) a substitute for. If you have only one or two common allergies, you can probably find a book that has great-tasting recipes (and more commonly-found ingredients) that are free of your allergen. But for a child with multiple food allergies - this book has made living with food allergies an easier part of everyday life by offering recipes with similar taste and appearance to what everyone else is eating.

This book explored the War of Souls era, through the everyday peoples eyes. The front cover tells that it is the first volume of a series. That is of course not right. In fact there also were Bertrem's Guide to the Age of Mortals(which was terrible boring, to say the least), but this is much better.
What i think makes it better is that the book consists of journals written by different knights, or Qualinesti rebels, among other things, and in writing journals it makes the book much more interesting than Bertrem's Guide to the Age of Mortals.
It isn't a masterpiece. Some of the stories are very good, and some are still a little boring. John Grubber's part of the book was, after my opinion the most boring, while Jeff Crook's journal of a Qualinesti rebel was very well written and exciting.
It isn't one of the best Dragonlance books, but it is not bad, it is absolutely worth reading, if you love the War of Souls era.

Cambridge has a wonderful reputation. It has the advantage of putting into one book some of the greatest scholars. In this volume E. Rawson, A. Lintott and Crook have themselves along with other scholars written about the last period of the Roman Republic. I feel that a scholar, Eric S. Gruen, has not been given his due in this volume. Gruen in his ground breaking book the Last Generation of the Roman Repubic asserts that the Republic, contrary to common thought, was not showing signs of decay, neglect or sloth. Quite the contrary. He shows a Republic meeting problems with skill and determination. I do not mean to imply that Gruen feels that all was well. He simply annihilates the view that corruption ruled, ignorance prevailed and rot was running riot. He is a very thorough scholar. One may disagree with him. However after his book I do not see how his thesis can be simply ignored. Ignore is what CAH (Last Age...) does. I do not feel that the scholarship in this volume reflects full and fair grappling with the views set forth by Gruen. However, I have found the last chapters on Law, plebs urbana, intellectual growth and religion very helpful and interesting. This book is very much worth reading, if one keeps in mind that certain ideas, for whatever reasons, have not been given their due.

This was my first DeCamp book and I hope it is not representative of the authors' talents. I found this fantasy to be somewhat lacking. It took me almost a week to get through the book, which is only 200 pages in my copy. Not exactly a page turner. There were some moments that I did enjoy, mostly those scenes which did not include Yvette, a character who remained true to her background until the last few pages when she did a 180 (too late for our poor protagonist). The humor was hi-brow. By that I mean it was as if the authors are making fun of the fantasy genre rather than celebrating it. Were they talking down to me, telling me I shouldn't be wasting my time on such nonsense? Oh well, it was on my shelf, and so had to be read. I don't recommend this particular book unless you are a DeCamp purist.

This is an easy-to-read and brief guide on the art of decoupage, great for beginners. You'll find basic techniques and tips on how to cut and glue images, frame your work etc as well as some examples to show you how to define and add layers to your work. In addition the author has also covered briefly on the use of different material to create your own work ( eg your own photos). Busy individuals who would like to explore this art over weekends (or with your very limited leisure time) will love this book because it is brief, to the point and practical. However I would recommend this book more to beginners because intermediates or advance lovers of this art would probably find this book a bit too " basic" for you. I give this book 3 stars not because it is not good (in fact if I am a beginner, I would probably give it 4 stars or more), it's just because I'm an intermediate "student" in this art already so I haven't discovered much new skills for myself from this book.

Pre-ordered this book after reading editorial but was a waste of money.

1. I'm half way through the book and not 1 like of DX code yet

2. Majority of book is screen shots - I counted over 50 pages of screen shots showing the setup wizard for the various tools!

3. Up to page 220 is simple tutorials for using the shareware tools: much better tutorials supplied in online help for the tools themselves.

4. Another load of pages dedicated to showing up how to put together a VB Form.

Don't buy it without previewing some of the content first.

While there is a little less programming than I would have liked, the book is pretty good overall. It teaches a great deal about other things such as modelling and graphics. Maybe a different title would be fitting for 2nd edition.

I normally don't spend time rating books. Getting time to read them is enough of a problem! After reading this over, I decided to list its strong and weak points:

Strong:
1) It's a good overall guide to game development
2) Covers a good range of software
3) Uses DirectX 8
4) Good explanations and you build several programs including a half-life model viewer and 3D shooter

Weak:
1) Wish there was more information included on modeling
2) That's it.

Hoping to see what future versions of this book will hold.

What a sorry mess of a book. This a shallowly researched retelling of the lives of these fighters, based on outdated secondary sources. In fact, it reads like apologia for Crook. It is well known today that only 500-750 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors faced Crook (and his 1300 men) and beat him at the Rosebud, yet Aleshire tries to claim that the two sides were of equal strength. And later, the role of Crook in conspiring with Red Cloud to remove Crazy Horse as a potential rival to Red Cloud (who had no civil authority with the Oglala except that handed to him by Americans) is not even mentioned. Instead, Crook is portrayed as innocent of having anything to do with the death of Crazy Horse. I freely admit to knowing much more about the Lakota than about the Apaches. But if Aleshire can not get these details right, why should I trust anything he has to say about the Apache aspects? Again, this seems like a book designed to gloss over Crook's moral lapses, perhaps as a counter to recent books that expose these sad events.

I am a Phoenix, Arizona native and I Loved This Book! I bought 3 copies to share with family and friends for Christmas.

Although I have lived in Phoenix and the White Mountains of Arizona all of my life and have known of the diverse Native American nations sharing our community, I had never heard the fascinating histories told with such depth and detail. I enjoyed the dual biography format of the book which allowed the reader to see General Crook and Geronimo side by side as men in opposing political environments.

The descriptive, creative language Aleshire uses makes the scenes come to life as if I were there. His story makes the history of the White Mountains, Chirichauas, San Carlos areas rich, deep and vivid with history.

Many thanks to Peter Aleshire from an Arizona native.

Sorry. The predominant view has proven once again to be justified. I'm sorry I let my optimism lead me to purchase this book to find out. It really is a badly edited collection of unexplained and useless gimmicks. If there is a concept presented that has any worth in learning to write your own code, than it is extremely well hidden among the error laden examples.

I have every book on RealBasic available now, and the O'Reilly book is the only one that truly helps one learn the product AND programming. On the other hand, Eric's book is good to build confidence without much lasting programming value. This book cannot claim to teach or build confidence - although I found it an interesting exercise debugging and proofreading the text and code - representing perhaps the only real experience to be gained through the use of this text.

I got something out of this book, but like the other reviewers have said, it wasn't that much. It was good to see examples of how to use the different controls and make little mini-apps. No problem there. But there were a lot of errors. I wonder if someone actually went through and did all the programs before sending this off to the printer. There were inconsistencies with variable names and it got to the point where half the learning from this book came from the debugging. I must really understand what I'm doing if I can figure out how to fix the errors... The thing that's really nice is that you can immediately create stuff, unlike the Neuberg book, which is more thorough but less practical and too heavy for the novice.

When I purchased this book at a B&M, I was somewhat concerned after I read the reviews on this site. I decided to read the book and make my own judgements. Boy, I'm glad I did. The book has many good examples, and aside from the mistake in code for chapter 3 (the only reason it didn't get 5 stars), I think it does a good job of teaching REALbasic.

Would definitely recommend it.

In fact, you might wonder if it's even the book described above by the publisher. 290 pages, not 364, and there's nothing about beer barons, art thieves, or Son of Sam. No yuppie millionaires and no woman from the South Bronx. Much of what's in it could be crime from anywhere, not just New York. Here's an outline of what's there: 14 entries and one of them is fiction (why?). Five of the excerpts are from the late 1800's (including another excerpt from Asbury's Gangs of NY), two are pre-WWII and five are newer (including Bernhard Goetz). The remaining story is simply a detective's catalog of crime from over a hundred years - 87 thumbnails sketches, but these leave you wondering, because here are the crimes of New York: the killing that inspired 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar', the Preppy Murder (Chambers, who was just released), John Lennon and Hinckley. The Brinks robbery. These are the crimes that make New York unique, and in their day they were widely written-up, yet there's only a few lines on each. A book on NY crime without Son of Sam? Instead, the story of Wilby the embezzler, while interesting, could have taken place anywhere, and did, actually - part of the story is in California. The chapter on how sneak thieves worked after the Civil War, again, interesting, but surely they did the same in Cleveland or Chicago - very generic . . . This volume could have been titled simply "Crime", and frankly it was a bit disappointing. A couple of excerpts belonged more aptly in the series volume "Gangs", which was a far better book. Readers of the series will also note that the publisher has stopped using any photographs which used to jazz it up a bit. I own every book of this five-year old series, but if I had to lose one, this would be it.