Expansion Books

Jackson was not a kind and gentle president, but he was effective. Because of his political skill a Civil War was avoided two decades before the real one. The lasting memory of this book is the destructive role slavery played in our history as a nation.The depiction of Jackson's extended family and the role they played in his presidency is new and very interesting.

I am a biography fan and a history buff. The American Lion was written in the style of a gossip column. The author elevated Jackson's social life and the interaction of Jackson's associates, family and friends to a level of importance rendering the book unreadable. Jackson's contributions to the Executive branch, his successes and failures, are buried in social minutia that strangles the reader's view of the larger issues. I had looked forward to reading the American Lion, especially with all of the pre-publication hype that was accorded this work. However, the book was a disappointment to me.

Jon Meacham's new biography of President Jackson is an interesting focus of Jackson in the White House. It is more about the internal politics of 1830's Washington, then about the larger US and world affairs of the time. Meacham looks at how Jackson approached those larger issues and how he fought through the opposition politics to win nearly every battle he set out to win. If you are a student of Jackson, maybe much of this is well known. For those who haven't studied Jackson, it is an eye opening work that demonstrates how Jackson turned the center of power from the legislative branch to the executive branch and made the president the central role in our government. Meacham also lets us look at the other big names of the day including Clay, Calhoun, Webster and Taney.

Meacham takes us through how Jackson's genius both forced the issue of Southern States nullification of federal law and pushed the country to the brink of civil war in order to establish both the unviolability of the constitution and the duty and right of the president to protect the union. Meacham then takes us through the national bank issues again showing how Jackson forced the bank to play it's hand and then disembowled the bank and essentially closed it.

Meacham does a good job of making separate stories out of what were often simultaneous issues, as well as the ongoing infighting within Jackson's own cabinet and family. It does get a bit slow and muddled at times, but these are worth fighting through to get to the central stories of the biography. This is less a complaint about Meacham's style, than just the fact of how difficult it is to write about the multitude of events that occur within the White House.

If, like I, you don't know much about Jackson' s presidency, this is an excellent place to start with the latest information and research in the field. If you are looking for a biography of Jackson that includes his life and career outside of the White House, this is NOT the book you want. Those portions of Jackson's life are only glossed over as they pertain to Jackson's later actions in the White House.

-Mike

This is an extremely well-written book that tells, in detail, the White House years of Andrew Jackson. Granted, his entire life is covered, but before and after his presidency is more cursory since the emphasis, as shown in the title, is his eight years as president. And what eight years they were! The problems with Soth Carolina, an arguement with France, and a constant battle with Congress over which institution has more control of the destiny of the country. It's no exaggeration to say that Andrew Jackson created, to a large extent, the powers of the president vis a vis Congress. Before him presidents tended to defer to Congress when running the country, but Jackson firmly believed that, since he was elected by the people he should be the one to decide what was to be done, even if Congress did not always agree with im. He had a firm belief in the correctness of his actions and would brook no opposition, not even from those members of his own family nearest and dearest to him. As a man of his times, he had a moral blindness when it came to slavery, owning many himself and not freeing them after his death, as did several of his predecessors. He was the first non-aristocrat elected president and thus had a close connection to the common man. This is a book that should be read closely by those interested in knowing how the power of the modern presidency came to be developed.

Andrew Jackson is revealed in the biography. It is an easy read and loaded with interesting factual information. I liked it and recommend it. I give it 4 and one half stars.

Nice book, entertaining as it mixes well-known historical facts with author-guessed facts, to give a nice novel with deep historical insight. Willing to read the second part. Convenient price.

This was a very good book, so don't get too scared away. However, there were two things that really got to me; First of all, it was Alexander's sexual relationships in this book--he seemed to do a little too much womanizing, and they seemed too perfect.

Also, I feel like he focused too much on Alexander himself, to the point where if sort of excluded a lot of other people. For example, Hephaestion's presence and influence really only seemed to be skimmed over. It doesn't seem to show nearly enough of the impact that other people made in his life.

Otherwise, I feel that this was a very well-written book, and is a very interesting read. If you have read and liked other of Manfredi's books, I would certainly recommend it.

Perhaps much was lost in translation, so I shouldn't bash Manfredi too much. However, I simply could not get passed the rabid womanizing of Alexander. I accept that from Philip, after all he did have seven wives, countless romances with women and men, and was killed by an ex-"favorite." I just didn't feel Alexander in this book. In Renault's novels you get a sense of a genius trapped in the body of a child. In Manfredi's book, all I got was petulance, vulgarity, and womanizing. Again, it could all have been lost in the translations. I'd read it, but in the end, stick with Renault.

This is a good and educational read about the early stages of Alexander's life. I trust Manfredi's version because of his extensive background devoted to Alexander.

Valerio Massimo Manfredi captures Alexander's life masterfully throughout this trilogy.

Manfredi is a great writer, capable of maintaining one's interest throughout many many pages. Beside that, you can be sure that he knows his history, mainly the Ancient World, which he teaches at a university in Milan.

Whatever he writes about Greeks, Romans, or anything of the like is a sure thing. You'll enjoy it, without any doubt.

It seems apropriate that this book is included with the Battle Chest - the only person this book would truly help is someone who has never played StarCraft before. "Tips" from the author range from obvious to shaky to wildly erroneous; More often then once the author states that an ability does one thing when it really does something completely different. The maps of single player missions are helpful, but the overly general nature of the "walkthroughs" leaves much of the thinking to you.

While people who are tenatively picking up SC:BW for the first time will appreciate having a book to hold their hand until they acquire a feel for the game, any regular SC player will tell you that the book's suggestions border on laughable. I use this book for the maps, but thats it; its a nice bonues with the Battle Chest, but not worth buying on its own.

this book helped me out alot even though i usaly used its for the cheats it has in it but it tells about baskicaly evreything you need to know about starcraft and brood war

I bought this book with the starcraft battle chest and I must say that this book is not very good. It is okay to use it for campaigns, but for custom games, it's horrible. Either the strategies are to basic, or they don't work. You'll find your self saying "Wow, thank you captin obvious." If you like to play capaigns, then you may want this book because it helps you a little bit. If you're like me and like to play custom games or have little intrests in campaigns, look elsewhere.

I am an experienced SC player. My record is 124-12. This book is a bunch of junk and lies. They make stupid claims about units that aren't even true. The tips they give you, are bogus. They claim that a Terran Wraith is expensive to build. It is only 150 minerals and 100 gas, and for all that it does, that is a bargain! I love Wraiths, and I think they are very cheap to build. I am going through reading the book, and making edits from my experience on the game. I love when they say the Terran Battlecruiser is their most powerful unit. Those things are so worthless! I have never built one in my life, and never plan on doing so. For the price and unit supply they cost, they are not efficent.

I can go on and on about how terrible this book is, but what I am trying to say is, this book isn't worth the paper that it is printed on. If you truly need help in this game, you can e-mail me at Cfjoe068@msn.com and I will glady play online with you and answer any questions you have. I love teaching newbs what units do, and introducing the great world of SC to them the right way.

to buy this excellent book. I know how useful it is to watch replays, learn from friends etc. but this guide will provide a handy walkthrough, that will help you overcome the Single-player missions (that help you master the units and overcome the basics of the strategy) and then the Multy-player intense action. It provides excellent tips on how to beat each race (what strats to use against them) and even extras such as campaign editor and unit stats help. I for one didn't regret buying this examplary product, and I bet neither will you. It's cheap and useful, just what a SC gamer wants.

And I bet most of us are striving for SC perfecction, right? It's one of the most popular games of today, you know, if you don't play it, when you walk on the street people will point at you and say "hey look, there goes that guy that doesn't play SC, whatta case! When my son got all Fs in school, I said, "that's ok, you won the SC tourney and that's all that matters. Screw graduation ;)."."

Jokes and metaphor aside, I can assure you that if you really want to improve your SC skill, buy this book, it's well worth it and so much more... I know you probably play SC just for fun and not to be a progamer and travel to Korea etc. (neither do I), but it's more fun to squish others then get owned, you are happy instead of frustrated with just a little diligence and this game is a fine choice if you want to spend those endless-sleepless nights in front of the Computer ;).

Good information. Too bad Larry doesn't do more non-fiction because this is very good.

Larry McMurtry, who used to develop his characters in such elaborate ways, seems to have gone to outling his books in the last number of years. "Oh what a Slaughter" is another one of those "is this really a book or a magazine article?" books. Indeed, a collection of his random thoughts on random subjects would, together, make for a rather interesting book. As it is, I wait and buy these later works of his off the sale racks where they are priced more towards their real value. I do so because I still like reading McMurtry; even as often as he's disappointed me lately. However, I did enjoy his observations about massacres in US History.

McMurtry is short on facts and longer on thoughts (nothing really qualifies as "long" in this book). He has discerned a number of traits common to massacres and he shares them with us as they repeat themselves and ignores them when they don't. His thumbnail sketches of 6 particular historic massacres would be helpful to many a student cramming for a test on the subject. Even so, enough trivial facts worked their way into the book to satisfy my need for something more than what I already knew. In fact, I was amazed that the next book I read '"Walker" and "The Ghost Dance"' (by Derek Walcott) had, as one of its' main characters, a person whom I believe I met for the first time in "Oh what a Slaighter". I even knew ahead of time that her son would die and what the cause of death was. For that, and a few other kernels of knowlege, I am glad I read this book. McMurtry and I don't always see eye to eye (I'm sure he's found a way to live with that sad fact) but I guess the only editing I would have done on "Oh what a Slaughter" would have been to remove the word "unfortunate" when he made reference to a particular current group of combatants. This book is so lean on words that there aren't anymore to spare.

Mr. McMurtry has written an extended essay/reflection on "pre-emptive stikes", the moral code we live by as a nation, and then tied it briefly to our current policies in IRAQ and the aftermath of 9/11. His subject is several famous, and not so famous massacres in western lore, and his primary purpose is to draw moral conclusions that connect us to today's events. He doesn't really go into any real explaination of the massacres, so you will need to have know about them from other sources in order to understand his message. I read this book just after completing Hampton Sides' "Blood and Thunder", which gave me the background of most of the massacres mentioned. Had I read these books in reverse order, I wouldn't have understood what Mr. McMurty was trying to say at all.

Genocide in the Old West

Most have heard the expression "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". Some have heard "you must get the nits if you want to get the lice" the policy used to justify they massacre of women and children. Few may realize the extent to which the United States practiced and encouraged genocide against Native Americans during the 19th century and how closely our current conflict in Iraq parallels United States policy during the Indian Wars.

This book is no historical treatise but it is a powerful illustration of the conflict between cultures and the consequences of might making right based upon the six largest massacres in the American West. We learn that the killing of Native Americans was not a crime until 1824 and then was only made a crime because politicians feared the unfettered massacre of Indians by whites, much as one my shoot coyotes or whites, might incite an uprising of Native Americans which the government could not control.

McMurtry succinctly sets the tone and feeling of the settlers, ranchers, Indian Agents, Military and Native Americans in this timeless tragedy. He notes white perpetrators of massacres were not brought to justice. He also notes the insanity of inflicting death and destruction on a group because one or two members may have misbehaved.

Historians of this subject will find his reports simplistic and shallow. But the overview and analysis he provides of the motivating forces, political justifications and sheer horror of that period provide an invaluable insight to the dangers of inflicting our form of government and morals on a people used to living in a different way.

The book contains an excellent Bibliography and intriguing references to historical literature that all of us would love to read. This book is well worth reading for anyone interested in Native Americans, American Foreign Policy as implemented by force, or the American West.

Some have argued about the length of this book. I think fine writing is fine writing whether we are talking about a poem of 4 lines or a novel of 1,000 pages.

I am really enjoying this book, and would have been happy to read 500 more pages if they were of the quality of this short book. However, in the summer, I appreciate the brevity of this book since I might not have tackled it if it were long.

What do I like? I find many insightful comments although as McMurtry clearly points out: we will never truly find out exactly what happened in these massacres but who could really know the truth about a massacre since each one is terribly messy and each one causes intense, complicated emotional responses in the people who were massacred and the people who did the butchering.

If he talks about spin, how the winners tried to appear heroic and downplay the nastiness of their deeds, we should not be surprised because recent history is being besieged by spin doctors.

Just as he says and as we can see if we think of the Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc., no massacre stands in isolation but is a part of a history of animosity between the two groups. A book which attempted to give the history of the struggles and misunderstandings which led up to these massacres and which later followed as consequences flowing from reactions to these massacres would be very long indeed.

Two other things in this book which I enjoyed were the wonderful photos and the interesting little-known details about some of the colorful characters involved in these little histories.

Who will forget the portrait of Kit Carson as a horribly efficient Indian-killing machine who felt very sad at the end of his life since he understood the Indians better than anyone else? Also, I find the whole history of the quick extermination of the Indians which lived in California (including the very-little-known Maidu, Wintu and Yana Tribes) to be revealing.

I liked the characters in the book, but I thought the city lacked flavor. I purchased this book because of Waterdeep. It is my favorite city in the Forgotten Realms. I feel that more detail should have been devoted to the city. Good read.

I'm mostly positive about this book, but much of the positive comes from nostalgia for the setting.

The characterization, like many D&D novels is just on this side of flat, the bad guys are evil for no reason, the good guys angst but erode the enamel on your teeth with their actions and internal monologue.

I applaud the author for avoiding more Elminster deus ex machina, but the overall effect is of hapless low-level antics. If they have magic, why don't they use it? Don't they know any clerics? Forcing drama by ignoring possible solutions is always a problem for intelligent audiences.

The details and Waterdeep references are nice, and the whole book is an easy read. It's probably worth having only if you were going to buy it in the first place.

Im actually surprised by some of the more negative reviews, i found this arguably one of the best d&d based novels i've read, and i have read no small number.

Its a quick fun story with several characters i really enjoyed, the depiction of khelben arunsun in the beginning was better written and painted a more interesting character then the entire blackstaff novel did, though this book does not focus on him. The main characters were amusing and interesting. All in all if your interested in waterdeep, or a fan of the forgotten realms it is worth a read, as mentioned before its become one of my favorite d&d novels.

As for its downside, the primary enemy to me was actually less interesting then the misadventures of the main group, whom manage to in my opinion make up for it, the ending was not my favorite either.

In the end its better then average realms fare, but lacking the epic scope of some of the more famous d&d series, still for a single shot story its fun and provides a interesting look in to the city of splendors.

I was hoping for something great. Ed Greenwood and Elaine Cunningham together... Well, the prologue was awesome and I bought the book.
Chapter after chapter, I was hoping for the story to get interesting... at last... to no avail.
Not everything was bad. I learned some interesting things about the city and got the feel of some places at least.
I will try to forget this book and fondly remember others I enjoyed so much.

being a loyal forgotten realms fan, i was disappointed with greenwood's take on waterdeep. the story line never drew me in and the characters were one dimensional and largely uninteresting. would definitely not recommend this book - thank goodness he didn't write a trilogy.

I am giving copies of this book for Christmas.

Cerami may not offer the latest scholarship or the most incisive observations, but he brings you on board with information that is clearly presented. He is not always right, but he is right enough, and for under three-hundred pages, you will be ready to pursue in greater detail the roles of James Madison, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, Talleyrand, Napoleon or the other American and French politicians and diplomats involved in the Louisiana Purchase.

Jefferson's Great Gamble reminds me of biographies by Jeffrey Meyers (Stephen Crane, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and more): clear, pleasant, useful, but not the most complete book on the subject.

This book was a great and fluid read all the way thru. It's a great overview of Jefferson's gamble on Madison, Livingston, Marbois, Talleyrand. Jefferson's Gamble on people. On the nation. And on the future.
Great read!

Jefferson`s great gamble ? He is hardly mentioned. Perhaps it should have been called "Livingston`s Crying Towel."
A boreing history of an ex New York Governor who was the US Ambassador in Paris during the Louisianna purchase but who had no idea what was going on.
This man, Cerami, is not an author..he may be a a marketing expert. He knew how to put a Title on the book that is compeletly false in order to fool customers into buying it.
Perhaps he could write the ad copy on cigarette packages..
Please.. never again.

This is a very interesting subject and the book does cover quite a bit of what happened. But the final decision to sell was made by Napolean - and he is barely mentioned. It's like he is off in a side room and a couple of times one of the French negotiators would go talk to him off camera.

It also does not discuss much the context in America that lead to Jefferson being pushed to try to gain New Orleans and that also made him think it would be ok to buy all of Louisiana.

So, lots of interesting stuff, and it is well written. But a lot of the context is missing.

After recently finishing "Founding Brothers" by Joseph J. Ellis, which essentially covered various major events in post-revolutionary American history through the 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, I was interested in continuing my reading through the next several years of Jefferson's administration. The Louisiana Purchase was an obvious next step - and arguably the next event of any significance after Jefferson's election - in a reading of early American history.

I was disappointed by the narrative, though I think the subject matter was generally interesting. In the hands of a more accomplished author/historian, the story could have had the pop, the suspense and the intrigue of a historical novel. It didn't. Cerami's narrative was plodding and often dull. He backtracked and zig-zagged to provide context to his principal narrative to such an extent that there was no real "story" to follow.

There's so much history available to read and so much good scholarship from original source material that narrative skills separates the mediocre works from the great ones. I would put this book in the former category.

This is still the classic on the Santa Fe Trail. Dary is full of facts and information it would take a lifetime to ferret out from other sources. Unfortunately, he misses the point entirely. Traders flocked to the trail to get rich. How? What goods went to Santa Fe? What goods returned to Missouri?

New Mexico prior to the arrival of the railroads had a subsistance economy. It was metal poor. The tins that came down the Trail sparked an industry; the New Mexicans valued the empty cans and turned them into art. Poor in metal they lacked table utensils and even iron plows. They lacked basic metal tools to build furniture and so sat on adobe bancos. What wealth did the New Mexicans have to buy from the Missouri traders and make the traders rich?

The truth is out there. Try Commerce of the Prairies.

I found this book to be very rewarding and interesting, but not without fault. I found the lack of maps (or the absence of a map with more of the placenames mentioned) in the book to be very annoying - and I confess I got geographically lost at some points. I found the book very well researched and some of the stories and anecdotes very entertaining. In fact, I wished that there could have been room for more traveller's stories within the book. I must say that I got a bit disorientated in the middel of the book but it came together well. The additon of many photographs (rare in a book of this type) was a fantasic bonus and really added to the enjoyment of the book. Overall a highly entertaining and educational book but would have been so much better with the addition of more detailed maps.

Life on the Santa Fe Trail was no doubt dramatic and colorful, but you would not know it from this book. More than 300 pages of stitched together factual recitations and short anecdotes, the narrative lacks any central characters, themes, or ideas. None of the individuals featured in the book survives more than a few pages, and just as a story starts to draw in the reader, it ends, only to be followed by another quite similar episode, and another and another. Great events dominate the times, but the book seems to separate life on the trail from those events, making the trail itself seem to be almost boring, which it surely was not. The largest contribution this book can hope to make is to point another writer to promising source material with which to bring the story of this trail to life.

An absorbing, compelling and very readable account on the history of the Sante Fe Trail. From the early beginnings of 1500's Spanish exploration and the founding of Sante Fe by Juan de Onate in 1610, Dary takes the reader through five centuries of the magic and mystique of the Trail. Relationships, many times hostile, between the Spanish, Indians and Americans are very well documented in this descriptive chronology along with tensions between Mexico and the U.S., influences of the Civil War and the railroads, etc. all having significant ramifications on commerce between the two nations. An excellent book and very well researched.

Francisco Coronado. Juan de Onate. William Becknell. Kit Carson. Jedediah Smith. Bent's Old Fort. Fort Union. Fort Larned. Fort Dodge. Raton Pass. Glorieta Pass.

Names resounding with history, lore, enterprise, bravery and honor; conjuring up images of treks and trading posts, stagecoaches and scouts, gunfights and gold seekers, cowboys and cavallery regiments, blizzards and buffalo herds, Indians armed to their teeth, army forts, dust, mud, heat, and just about every other cliche in the book of Western storytelling. And, of course, the name that connects them one and all: that of the Santa Fe Trail, the 900 mile-long famous trade route linking Missouri and Kansas with the West until the advent of the railroad in 1880.

Already used by Indian traders long before the white man's arrival, the trail was traveled by 16th century Spanish conquistadors Coronado and Onate during their northward advance from Mexico, searching in vain for the famed golden cities of Cibola. But regular trade relationships with the lands further to the east didn't develop until 200 years later, when the French began to send commercial travelers towards what was then known as "New Spain." This took a great deal of courage on the part of the envoys, not only because of the perils of a voyage into largely uncharted territory but also because the Spanish - seeing a threat to their territorial claims and their fiercely maintained trade monopoly in their territory's northern provinces - often imprisoned French and American parties caught south of the Arkansas River, since 1819 the boundary between the United States and New Spain and, as of 1821, the newly-independent Mexico. But Santa Fe merchants welcomed and secretly promoted trade with the U.S., which they saw as a way to get out of the Spanish government's stranglehold on the economy; and after 1821, the new Mexican government actively promoted trade with the U.S. American suppliers of whiskey, food, medicine, textiles and hardware soon gained profits up to 500 percent in the newly-opened market. After the Unites States' substantial territorial gains resulting from the 1846 - 48 Mexican War, which also included New Mexico, the U.S. Army built a number of forts along the trail to secure it against increasingly fierce Native American raids, which however only stopped with the forced migration of the Indian nations to government-assigned reservations in the 1870s, shortly before the trail's history itself came to an end with the arrival of a railroad locomotive in Santa Fe in early 1880. In 1987 - a little more than a century later - Congress designated the Santa Fe Trail a national historic trail.

Over the course of its history, the Santa Fe Trail saw some of the most prominent faces of the old West; from William Becknell, whose 1821 trip made the city of Franklin, MO, its first major eastern terminus, to Kit Carson, barely sixteen years old when he started working as a wagon train teamster in 1826, and Jedidiah Smith, who reportedly killed no less than thirteen Comanches before succumbing to their lances near Cimarron Spring in southwestern Kansas in 1831. Events such as the 1862 battle at Glorieta Pass, where Union troops crushed Confederate hopes of taking over New Mexico as a major Civil War prize, and the 1864 Kiowa raid of Fort Larned's entire herd of 172 horses, further fueled the danger-shrouded, mythical status of the trail, its travelers, and the events surrounding both.

David Dary's fascinating "Santa Fe Trail" condenses the trail's history into a little over 300 pages, leaving ample room, however, for the dramatic stories, achievements and failures on which the fame of the "great western highway" is built. Despite its richness in detail, Dary's prose is engaging and easily holds the reader's attention (not surprising, given the subject matter). While it certainly helps to have at least a minimal understanding of the described events' general historic context, the author's narration makes up for any bits and pieces that may have slipped the reader's recollection and also adds numerous lesser-known pieces of information, without neglecting to establish the relevant larger historic framework, such as the development of money trade in North America and the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their respective impact on the development of a trade route into Santa Fe. To a substantial extent, the book draws on primary sources: travel accounts and journals, trade invoices, contracts, newspaper articles, government documents, and more; many of them from Dary's own library - the number of illustrations alone bearing the note "Author's Collection" will be hard-pressed to find their equals elsewhere. (No small wonder: Dary reveals in the introduction that his interest in the trail's history goes all the way back to his childhood.) While a few larger maps might have been desirable - those that are provided are somewhat difficult to read - this is no serious shortcoming; the author's considerable descriptive gifts largely make up for the lack of easily decipherable cartographic devices, and the photographs, drawings, sketches, and paintings supplied throughout the book provide ample food for the reader's imagination in fleshing out the stories' narrative core and visualizing their protagonists. Although not reveling in the often bloody details of the trail's history, Dary pulls no punches, neither in his own summary of the events nor in the selected quotes. For example, he concludes the history of the whites' interactions with Indian tribes along the trail with an excerpt from Charles E. Campbell's "Down among the Red Men" (1928), beginning with the unequivocal statement that "[t]he origin of nearly every war with Indians can be traced to some offense on the part of the white man."

The book ends with a detailed glossary, annotations by chapter, as well as a fourteen-page bibliography: for the serious enthusiast, these alone should make its acquisition a virtual no-brainer. But even a first-time visitor to Santa Fe or any of the cities along the famous trail - heck, even an armchair traveler - will find plenty to marvel, agonize over and enjoy here.

Also recommended:
On the Santa Fe Trail
New Mexico: An Illustrated History (Illustrated Histories)
Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California
Four Corners: History, Land, and People of the Desert Southwest
The New Encyclopedia of the American West

I love the character creation portion of this CD-ROM. It lets you roll your base stats as many times as you want to sit there. Thus you don't have to settle for that character with a 3 str if you don't want to, but then again some of us are up for the challenge.

The library of books is the right collection of all the necessary core books that an adventureres would need.

The map generator is ok. I wanted something more but this functions for most new adventures. The tool(s) are better for creating wilderness adventures and take a lot more patience when trying to create a town or city. I actually used it to help me run a Palladium:Rifts adventure...a town or wilderness is a town or wilderness. The map is a functional tool.

For those that don't want to bother with 3rd edition and get back to some using 2nd edition, this CD-ROM has all the necessary materials. It is especially useful if you have a laptop because you can bring the laptop to the gaming session vs. have to lug 12+ books with you. Much lighter. :)

I would check on ebay for the best deals on this software. But it is worth getting if just to have.

I cannot imagine playing without CR2. I was skeptical when I ordered it, but once I transferred my characters into the program, updating and adjusting them is a snap. No more re-writing character sheets when the eraser burns through the HP area.

Also, I am in the middle of re-drawing my campaign world with MapMaker. It is great for keeping all information at hand.

The biggest praise I have is the books. There is over $100 worth of books in just CR2, and the Expansion at least doubles that. A snap to type in the name of the spell, and it pop up almost instantly with all relevant info. Saves us about 1 hr a night worth of playtime each night.

AD&D Core Rules 2.0 on CD-ROM is a great tool package for serious AD&D enthusiasts, players and DMs alike. The high quality of this new release is a great relief after the poor showing of the first version.

Program tools include complete text of nine key rule books, a character generator, improved dungeon, city and wilderness mapmakers, dice roller software, and a DM's toolkit with programs for automatically generating encounters, treasure troves, spells, NPCs, and more.

Mapping is provided through two different programs, the Map Maker and the Campaign Mapper. The former quickly creates City, Dungeon, and Overland maps, with neatly detailed symbols and some randomized variety in repetitive, placed features such as trees, houses, and mountains. The Campaign Mapper is much more complex, and will be very familiar to users of ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer. In this program, maps are built in multiple layers and encounter data can be linked to the maps. Grids toggle on and off in either program; printing is available in both black-and-white and color. Both programs are miles beyond the original Core Rules map generator and an invaluable aid to the DM tired-to-death of graph paper and smudges.

The highly-detailed character generator can be set for either Core or "Player's Option" rules, and quickly creates fully-equipped PCs and any level of NPCs complete with spells, skills, and, if desired, random names (some strange but interesting results, a feature probably of more use to the DM). Twelve methods of characteristic generation are provided, from straight "you're-stuck-with-these-stats" to the manual entry of numbers. An optional "city" interface provides "buildings" to visit for creating all of the character's various skills and items.

Nine on-line books are included: Monstrous Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, Arms & Equipment Guide, Tome of Magic, Dungeon Master Option: High Level Campaigns, and the three Player's Option books: Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers, and Spells & Magic. No pictures, all text, but quite a treasure trove for the price of the program, considering the price of acquiring physical copies of all of the books.

Encounters and monsters (lair and wandering), treasures, and NPCs are quickly set up by the DM toolkit. The installed database is customizable for house rules, letting DMs add their own monsters, character races, equipment, skills/proficiencies, magic items, racial abilities, powers, and spells, a flexibility sorely lacking in the previous version.

The value of this CD-ROM for the DM is enormous. Several of the various areas of the program can be run simultaneously, a great convenience for writing an adventure (the cyber equivalent of spreading out your books). For a pressing game deadline, reference sheets can be quickly printed, fast dice "rolled," and NPCs and encounters swiftly generated, with the creation of maps probably taking the most time. With all this, all the DM needs is a good idea!

--Sharon Daugherty for Skirmisher Online Gaming Magazine

I don't give this three stars because it's a particularly bad product. I give it three stars because I should not have had to buy it. What this product gives you is the ability to create characters with the complete handbook kits. It also supplies the handbooks in computerized form. However, the complete handbook and its kits should have been included in the core rules! Just another example of me getting bent over by TSR\WotC, of well. I won't let their greed stop me from having fun. If you do use kits get this product; creating the kits on your own with the core rules is a nightmare. Also get it if you don't have the complete handbooks (I already had them all) that is if you don't mind viewing them on the computer with no pictures.

Another note: Specialty Priests are not included, but this is not a surprise. The core rules\expansion is designed for generic 2nd ed AD&D and to make specialty priests would have meant being game world specific. Maybe TSR\WotC will make a patch for specialty priests for the realms and greyhawk. This will only happen if we pester them endlessly until they summit.

isn't there a spell for this. Hmmmm... Hobbs's Endless Irritator... Hmmm

There are major holes in this software if your doing any of the TSR campaign setting. It doesn't cover gods and the kits can be a pain to fit in. The software has limits on how well things are linked up. If your running "Plane Scape" or "Ravenloft" don't waist your time here. You can add the races and classes for these settings but the time it would take you to add these races isn't worth the effort. Crack the books open.

With that said here are the good parts. You can make new monsters, races and classes. You can do some mapping and you have all the core books. I don't know about a lot of you but I'm not looking forward to 3rd edition. This product gives you the core books on disk so if you want to play 2nd edition you have them forever. We all know how well the TSR books are made. Any one remember "Unearthed Arcana" I do.

This book provides an extensively researched and excellently plotted proof that no man can handle the burden of being a god. The book details the tragic fall of an overly ambitious man whose intense meglomania and his succumbing to flattery led Alexander the Great to cause suffering to many thousands of his own soldiers, to say the least of the native population of the areas he conquered and pillaged and destroyed. The book gives a persuasive and serious knock on those who would idolize Alexander the Great as a hero of the enlightened Greek culture and provides a compelling narrative of a man who tried to gain the whole world and lost his soul (and caused a lot of damage while he was at it), proving himself to be a vain and ugly bully. This book is definitely a good read for those who wish to see the darker side of Alexander the Great's conquests and their repercussions on Central Asia.

While some might tire of reading about Alexander, John Prevas, who clearly admires much about Alexander, also brings out many things about Alexander in Persia and beyond that are not as familiar as they should be to those who peruse the ample ancient accounts. The dark side of Alexander ought to be examined as Prevas has. Diodorus, Quintius Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Arrian and Diogenes Laertius are among those ancient writers who wrote about Alexander from differing viewpoints and for various reasons, some more credible than others. I'm impressed by how Prevas has mined new insights in light of modern psychological study of megalomania and the manifest deterioration of Alexander's character. For example, Plutarch ends on the possibility of Alexander's death by poison, and while Plutarch tries to reassure his readers this wasn't the case, Prevas is right to historically examine possible motives for poisoning more closely. This very readable book deserves a good read for how it balances the scales by showing Alexander's less glorious moments.

Before reading this book I was hoping to find a fresh take on the life of Alexander the Great and in this pursuit I was not disappointed. The style, however, made trudging through this book one of the most frustrating reading experiences I have had. Many things are unnecessarily repeated and I found myself saying, "just get on with it already." This book contained some good content but it was stretched far beyond what it was capable of. Overall, there are some fresh ideas presented but they are rarely backed up with historical evidence. This is probably not the book you are hoping for.

This book is not a historical narrative of the last seven years of Alexander's life; it is a highly selective argument, the purpose of which is clearly to demonstrate Lord Acton's dictum that power corrupts--and that no one was more absolutely powerful or more absolutely corrupt than Alexander. To be sure, Alexander comes across badly enough (by most modern, Western standards) in any well researched, balanced and fair assessment; but for Prevas, being fair apparently means accepting all the ancient sources as equally credible--and then favoring those narratives that best support his viewpoint. This is evident, for example, in his extensive and uncritical use of Curtius Rufus, a Roman historian writing centuries after Alexander and with his own polemical ax to grind in his description of the Macedonian. It is obvious also in the amount of space Prevas devotes to the various episodes, including the sack of Persepolis and the conspiracies involving Philotas and Callisthenes.

Prevas is best in relating his personal observations from traversing the country Alexander passed through, and this gives the book some merit. Better maps and a diagram of Persepolis to complement his narrative description would have been welcome improvements.

On the other hand, his writing is repetitive, as has been noted in other reviews, and also clumsy in places: for example, "they had eaten and drank together (p 101)" and "he was equally as eager to show his loyalty" (p 104).

Overall, this book falls far short of passing scholarly muster. Prevas is clearly familiar with the ancient sources and some (how much?) modern scholarship, but he does not show the critical judgment with respect to them that would inspire confidence in his interpretation. This book is essentially no better than the testimony of a witness for the prosecution, and should be read accordingly. But if you choose to read only one book on Alexander, it should NOT be this one.

The author seems to have a strong agenda-- he harps on every failure of Alexander, invents a few more, and skips entirely over anything that could be seen as a victory or positive step. I'm no expert, but some of his information even seems pretty flawed; for example, if you flip over to the glossary section and look up Hephaestion, the entry reads, "Alexander's close friend and lover. Died of gluttony and alcoholism 324 b.c." This is the only mention of this I've ever heard, and unless you're morbidly obese, it's pretty hard to die of gluttony. In the text, the author doesn't give any evidence for his supposed gluttony or supposed alcoholism-- he only states the well-known information that Hephaestion was ill, he ate and drank, and then he died.

I read this book immediately after reading "The Nature of Alexander," by Renault. I admit that Renault has an idolatry for the man (she seems about ready to believe that Zeus was his father), but Prevas goes way over the other border of good scholarship. The text is full of statements like, "Alexander was fair [of complexion] with a temperament that was often a volatile mixture of self-centered adolescent exuberance and feminine hysteria." I learned some things from this book, but mostly I was too irritated by Prevas' derisiveness to really glean much information.

The American West was a mess of disorganized, bad writing, full of typos, no source citations, and odd facts listed without any explanation or citations. The book jumps over thousands of miles and many decades, and is often repetetive. It is extremely superficial. I recommend in its place One Vast Winter Count by Calloway, which looks in-depth at Native American history. For all its faults, The American West was nevertheless entertaining, and a very quick read, likely to satisfy readers of Louis L'Amour--but not anyone looking for a scholarly account.

This book is compiled from separate photohistory books Brown and a photoeditor wrote about Indians, cowboys, and settlers. The cowboy and settler parts of the book (there is no attempt to integrate the three threads) would have been a "worth my time" on their own. The Indian part reads too much like an over-condensed version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. There are too many names with too little description and it is written at such a high level that it doesn't make much sense. Best bet: before or after reading this, go to Wounded Knee.

Still, as I read this on a two-week sojourn through the great American Northwest, the history was timely and interesting, especially when it matched up with the locales of the trip.

Should have read this BEFORE our trip throught the West this past summer. Puts a lot of the sites we visited in context.

Dee Brown's The American West is the poor consolidation of three distinct books. The resulting consolidation reflects differing types of organization and style.

It is a series of disjointed, non sequential often unrelated vignettes that ramble across the Western American landscape. Focusing primarily on the West that occurred after the Civil War, it addresses a period of continual evolution, of transition between Native Peoples and their non native counterparts, between law and lawlessness and from one ecological state, wilderness, to farming, ranching and settlement.

But for all its lack of organization, continuity and sometimes poor writing quality, it is a book that manages to entertain and inform. Be prepared for some serious Native American bias. It appears that Mr. Brown feels the West should have never been developed to become the amazing part of America that it has become, but rather should have been left to Stone Age peoples in perpetuity.

It is a very quick read with lots of simple sentences and even simpler logic that in a very direct way can evoke a reasonable amount of sympathy for the author's agenda. This bias can and does effectively cloud what really happened.

This book is really a good of short articles and stories (I am assuming here) pulled from other publications. Because of this there is not a consistent theme that runs through the full book other then all the articles do have something to do with the American West - from ranch hands, cattle drivers and Indian's this book has it all. What I found with this lack of consistent theme is that many of the articles just wet you appetite for more information on the given subject.

The book does provide a good overall view of the American west during the settlement days. The book is well written and is easy to get through. If you have just a general interested in the topic or want a refresher course this is probably the book for you. If you are looking for something more in depth you will probably come away disappointed.