MDA

The Object Constraint Language Second Edition written by Anneke Kleppe and Jos Warmer, explains in no time, how to complete your Platform Independent Models, with business and query language.
The UML2.0 renewed emphasis on the Object Constraint Language extends the functionality needed to model more, and to program less.

This book focuses on the Business Rules implementation in MDA, and brings the details needed.
Step by step the book explains the OCL language and provides the reader with the knowledge to use OCL from a MDA point of view using transformation examples translating OCL to Java business rules.

This book can be considered as "Added value", also when readers are already familiar with the book 'MDA Explained The Model Driven Architect Practice and Promise book written by Anneke Kleppe, Jos Warmer and Wim Bast'.
The overlap is small.

Using the theory from the books, I succeeded in writing a bridge from Uniface to UML using XMI and visa versa.
In MDA terminology we transform a Platform Independent Model (PIM) to a Platform Specific Model (PSM).
We translate an Object Oriented Model to a Entity Relationship Model, including the OCL translation to simple business rules.

Have fun reading

This books thru explanations, clear and concrete examples and a concise case study shows the reader how to take your software engineering skills to the next level. It shows practical uses and examples of the concepts that you leaned while studying Object Oriented concepts in school. For the Computer Scientists, this book is one smile after another of how some things that you always thought was great in concept have showed up in the real world. For a book that's less than 300 pages long, it sure compacts lots of information in there.

This was my encounter with the Object Constraint Language, or OCL. I have been using UML for work for a number of years now, but I never gave OCL a second thought other than a "nice-to-have-conpcept-that-makes-your-life-harder-than-its-worth" type of technology. This book was an eye opener. I am really glad that I took the time to real this book.

The book has three major parts:
1)User manual
2)Reference Manual
3)Appendices

By looking at the TOC, one is not really impressed. User manual? Reference Manual? I thought I am going to be bored to no end while reading this book. The TOC does not do justice to the book. The author in chapter 1 introduces MDA and its benefits (Portability, Productivity, Cross-platform interoperability, and easier maintenance and documentation). The author then introduces the concept of Modeling Maturity Levels (MML), which is very similar to the CMM levels for Software Engineering. MML has five levels and is used as an indication of, "...what role models play in your software development process, and the direction you need to take to improve this process."

i)Level 0: No Specification. Add-hoc development
ii)Level 1: Textual. Specs written in one or more natural language documents
iii)Level 2: Text with Diagrams. Several high-level diagrams are added to explain the over-all architecture
iv)Level 3: Models with Text. Models with a very specific and well-defined meaning, forms the specification of the software
v)Level 4: Precise Models. "A Model, meaning a consistent and coherent set of texts and/or diagrams with a very specific and well-defined meaning, specifies the software"
vi)Level 5: Models only. There will only be models and that is all.

Level 4, which is where MDA is targeted towards, is enabled only thru the use of a language such as OCL. I have never heard or seen anything on MML, but I certainly hope that people start using it more b/c it clearly explains an organization's software development process maturity.

In the rest of the chapters of part 1, the author goes thru extensive set of examples showing how to use OCL. Chapter 2, titled "OCL By Example" is a case study of what is referred to as a "Royal & Loyal" application in which there are tons of short, long, beginner, advanced, and everything in the middle types of examples.

One example of a concept that you would love to apply in the real world is the concept of "Design by Contract" (Chapter 3, page 43). There are a couple of books written on this topic (Meyer, McKim, etc...), but they all focus on Eiffel. OCL being language independent abstracts some of the limitations that some of the programming languages have and enables the developer to apply the idea of contracts thru preconditions and post-conditions. One still has to worry about the "under the hood" implementation of these concepts, but it is very nice to see that there are tools out there that are heading towards that direction. The author spends the rest of chapter 3 of the book applying OCL to various aspects of UML such a state charts, class diagrams, activity diagrams, component diagrams and Use-case diagrams.

A somewhat complete and good example of how OCL maps in to a programming language such a Java is shown in Chapter 4. It's a good reference, but at the beginning of the chapter, the author gives the URL of a web site that is dedicated to providing OCL implementation in various languages (http://www.klasse.nl/ocl/).

In part 2 of the book, various aspects of OCL such the context of an OCL expression are explained. The examples that were drawn in part 1 are used in go deeper into the heart of OCL and show the reader what is actually going on.
Chapters 7 thru 9, which are my favorite chapters in this book, are used to explain the elements of OCL. What makes up OCL? Data structures, user defined types, predefined types, and built-in operations. These chapters are truly reference manuals of OCL, but with tables, examples, and very short but sweet explanation of each topic. Each topic takes one-half or three-quarters of a page and is followed by a couple of examples. Chapter 9 on data structures that make up OCL (Bag, Set. OrderedSet, and Sequence) is probably the most important chapter of all three, since manipulation of collections is very common in almost any application.

All and all, the author did a great job showing the value and the promise of OCL as a technology that can take software engineering to its next level with the help of MDA.

I haven't painted for years but this book was just great to get me started again. The author has great pictures showing step by step how to hold the paint brush and do blending and shading. Her instructions are clear and concise and she demonstrates a great variety of flowers, even a bubble bee. I am using this book to learn how to paint with acrylics even though her instructions are for oil. I'd recommend this book to a beginner or an experienced painter. A great reference book also.

This book is a pleasure to look at. It has 50 step by step examples of flowers. I don't work in oils but I can easily apply the use of other mediums from the examples in this book. Usually I'm very disappointed in these step-by-step books but this time I was pleasantly surprised.

In sensuous, intensely visual language, author Mda depicts the life of Niki, a black South African, showing her day-to-day struggles to survive under apartheid and raise her children, but he also depicts Fr. Frans Claerhout's idealized vision of her in his paintings--as a colorful Madonna figure, the mother of children who will eventually change the world. Niki has posed for many of Fr. Claerhout's paintings, a job which has helped her to feed her black son and her half-white daughter, even though she has often had to walk thirty-five kilometers to his studio in order to pose. Niki's story, from her teen years to old age, becomes the story of South Africa itself during the last half of the 20th century, a novel told from the perspective of a black author, and quite unlike the novels of Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee, though they cover the same time period.

Excelsior, the township in which Niki lives, is almost entirely black, yet all power in government and business rests in white hands. Without resorting to melodrama or clichés, the author shows in incident after incident, how black women are regarded as chattel, regularly harassed and even raped by their white bosses, town officials, judges, and even clergymen. Yet Niki never yields to self-pity, even when she and eighteen other women and the men who have used them are put on trial for violating the Immorality Act, a violation which has produced Niki's daughter Popi. Imperfect, sometimes angry, and often calculating, Niki comes alive as a woman determined to hang on to her pride, using the only power she has, her sexual power, to control those who would control her.

Vivid scenes of South African life from the 1970s to the present bring Niki and her children to life. As the children grow and become deeply involved in political movements, Mda gives us a clear-eyed picture of South Africa's transition from a restrictive, white-ruled government to a democratically elected government with room for both races. The black people here are real, not idealized, people with hopes, dreams, and strategies for survival, and they evoke enormous sympathy from the reader, especially as their personal limitations and faults become clear. Concentrating less on the national violence and battles for survival, and more on the individual conflicts of people in Excelsior, many of whom the reader has come to like and respect, he presents complex issues in a clear, uncomplicated narrative which throbs with life and offers both hope and caution for the future. Mary Whipple

The publishing of his second novel, The Madonna of Excelsior : A Novel, establishes Zakes Mda as a bright new star of international literature. This novel, like his first, deals with African society's attempts to deal with the struggle between tradition and modernity in contemporary Africa.

The basis of the novel is an actual event. In 1971 19 citizens of a village in Orange Free State were arrested for violating the Immorality Act in South Africa. Their crime? Interracial sex.

The book is a fictional accounting of the subsequent lives of those caught up in this incident.

The focus of the story, the "Madonna" of the title is Popi, a young lady who represents the issue of one of these sexual encounters. She is called "colored" by polite society and far ruder things by most others. Her life transverses the crossover from white apartheid rule to black native African rule and she fit in neither world, being "to black for the apartheid regime and to white for the African regime".

Most of the figures in this novel emerge as people deserving, if not of sympathy, at least of understanding. It is one of the strengths of the book that Mda's politics-if he has any-are entirely absent from the narrative. This is a book about people and their experiences, not a vehicle for political rhetoric. Not that the tragedies of the political situation in South Africa don't emerge-they most surely do. They do so within the context of the story, however.

In the end the villains in contemporary South Africa are not the apartheid enforcers who instigate the action with their contemptible raid, nor those caught up in it, or even those who discriminate against these people. The villains are those, former opposition leaders resisting the injustice and corruption of apartheid, who now are the legislators, town councilors and such, who allocate jobs, housing, favors and the like to themselves, their wives, girlfriends, family and cronies. All of those who, assuring that everything would change under a regime, instead ensured that nothing in fact would be any different for those without power.

In the end this is a book about people, stuck in an uncomfortable middle, despised by the old guard in their time, despised by the new guard in the present, trying as best they can to come to terms with their pasts, present and futures. It is a singularly insightful and moving tale.

The Madonna of Excelsior is one of the best books I've read in years. It's definitely a "must read" book.

In this beautifully illustrated book Deanne Fortnam teaches you to paint in very clear steps simple naive style roses and more complicated realistic roses incorporated into lovely projects. A good book for beginners as well as more advanced students of decorative painting. The teaching techniques are clearly explained and easy to follow and the color illustrations are exquisite. I recommend this bok highly for all who love decorative painting.

I am an avid reader of African literature, both fiction and non-fiction (especially memoirs). I am always searching for contemporary non-white writers (the white writers are good, but it is not unreasonable to want other perspectives), so I was happy to learn about Zakes Mda from a recent New York Times book review column, and I ordered his two books immediately.

'Ways of Dying' is not about post-apartheid South Africa, though the blurb suggests that. I estimate it to be set in the late 1980s, shortly before the end of the old regime was drawing near.

It's a short book, but it's well written, and paints a vivid picture of life in South Africa. And yes, the 'black perspective' is different, and very interesting, and most welcome.

WAYS OF DYING is one of the most fascinating novels that I have read in years. The book is set in South Africa during a period that seems to span the end of the apartheid regime and focuses exclusively on the lives (and deaths) of poor South African Blacks in rural villages and urban shanty towns near what I suspect is Durban. Fans of Marquez will feel very much at home here in a world of "magical realism", yet while Mda may have been influenced by novels like 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE he has a voice that is uniquely his own, and one that I sense is profoundly rooted in Africa. Mda's "hero" is a self-declared Professional Mourner, who ekes out an existence at the edge of society. Some aspects of his life are almost grotesque in form, and the deaths that surround him are often truly horrifying, yet somehow I found this a profoundly optimistic and human book. In spite of the worst that the world can throw at him the Professional Mourner is able to transcend mere existence & by the end I was shamelessly rooting for him. I should add that I used this book in a course on the Turn of the Century, and one of my toughest-case students, whom I had failed to excite with anything else, came into my office today saying "I just LOVE Mda" You will too,

Like all recent South African fiction I have read, this one is full of horrible violence. But it is a love story, and much more optimistic than Coetzee or Brink.

I read this book after reading MDA Explained by Anneke Kleppe and found it wandering into many areas but not deep enough in any one of them. While this book is a decent attempt to bring forth the impact of MDA in enterprise computing, a reader looking to understand "what" MDA is and "how it" works would be thoroughly disappointed. MDA Explained is a far more useful (and thinner) book that is not only more readable but also lucid in explanation.

First off, if this book deserves 5 stars just as a recognition of the depth of the accomplishment (given the breadth of the undertaking) in getting it written, and written extremely well. In an industry where the most successful authors are hacks that put out paper thin salvos to ride whatever the new gauche rave is, this book represents the far opposite end of the spectrum. Clearly, the long history of CASE and modeling and code generation is well in hand as the author pushes through a detailed elaboration of where MDA stands and where it's going. And the news is balanced and delivered honestly, this is not a call to Kool Aid coming from a deluded cult leader. There are open issues, but the general direction of MDA is so overdue and important it's silly. [For a good means of achieving parallax on this issue, consider looking at Cheeseman and Daniels' excellent UML Components, which makes a strong argument for a level of indirection between logical and physical models. If MDA delivers no more than that in the short term, it will still be a huge contribution.]

The reversibility of those models and the degree to which synchronization and editing can be simultaneously supported is perhaps the key issue that remains. Unfortunately, it is something of a deep bind because there is no doubt that the dream of complete reversibility of code and model, which has been hyped a lot over the past 5 years, is a shallow dream (reducing the 'model' to a mere visualization), and yet the idea of not being able to touch what was generated has a similarly stultifying unappeal to it.

As the development world is becoming more polarized between those who would model solutions and the band of hackers who claim to be able to do anything with a scripting language and a database, MDA is a key focal point for the former that is long overdue. Way too much attention has been spent developing tools that make it easy to lay out user interfaces while very few places have achieved even a basic ability to keep a serious domain logical model in tact through a single version, let alone a number of generations. Hopefully the tremendous consensus that has crystallized around MDA is an indication that that balance will soon start to change.

I have had the pleasure of working with David Frankel for a number of years on Object Management Group efforts, so I expected a lot from this book. I wasn't disappointed.

Dave has written a clear, pragmatic guide to what MDA is and, more importantly, what really can (and cannot) be practically accomplished with MDA today. He unerringly focuses on the highest payoff areas for most projects, such as the generation of code from data models. He also brings his years of experience in developing enterprise systems to bear, clearly describing the specific issues involved in applying MDA in this difficult area.

The book gives a thorough presentation of the concepts behind MDA -- including the clearest discussion I have seen anywhere of OMG's Meta Object Facility, a perennial topic of confusion. Nevertheless, I don't really consider this a book on "MDA" as such. It is, indeed, a book on APPLYING MDA, as the title states.

If you are looking for a more theoretical presentation or a grand vision of how MDA will work someday, you may be disappointed. But if you are looking for techniques you can start applying the week after you finish the book, this is the book you want to be finishing.

I am currently Chief Architect at a company that is in the process of making the cultural and technical shift to model-driven development. I found this book so relevant to where we are and the next steps we need to take toward MDA, that I had the company buy copies for all our architects, plus a few extras to circulate among the developers. I even had my boss (the company president) read Part One, which provided just the right level of overview for him (plus Michael Guttman's forward, which is a fun read in itself).

If you are in a similar situation where you work, I couldn't suggest a better book as a helpful change agent. And if you simply want to know how to start applying MDA techniques for enterprise development, this is where to find out.

"Enterprise Patterns and MDA" is not an MDA book. In fact, the most significant focus of the book is actually patterns, specifically business patterns and archetypes.

The authors start the journey by introducing concepts and techniques such as archetypes (universal, recurring "things") and archetype patterns, and Model Driven Architecture. Furthermore, the authors have dedicated one chapter for describing a technique called Literate modeling (combining traditional visual modeling with an accessible business context provided via a narrative text, for example).

Up to this point (vicinity of page 116), the authors' writing style has been flawless, in my opinion, and easy to read. From chapter 4 onwards, the authors have provided a huge pattern catalog for archetype patterns. The catalog has been divided into chapters around archetypes such as Party, Order, Customer, and so on. Each archetype pattern introduces a business context, a high-level overview model, and descriptions of the related archetypes, their properties and related activities.

I didn't go through even nearly all patterns in the catalog. However, I feel confident that I will dive into the catalog looking for insight when moving to a new problem domain on a new project. Enterprise Patterns and MDA is a nice resource to have on your bookshelf.

The MDA in the title of this book probably overstates the amount of MDA related content in the book. This isn't an MDA reference. There is one small, but well written chapter on it.

But that's a minor quibble. The real value of this book, and the bulk of the book, is in the third part which gives in depth models for the common enterprise application requirements. They start with an excellent object model for a 'Party' (as in a contact database), and continue on at the same level of depth for other common entities and processes, such as orders, payments, purchase orders, business rules, monetary values.

These patterns are probably too in-depth for a small business application, but they serve as an excellent starting point that you can trim to create a model that has the right level of complexity for your application. Don't let the big title of the book fool you. You can find books on how to write SQL, and generally how to model a database for a given problem domain, and other books on how query the database and make transactions. The value of this book is in giving you recipes for models for the basics of your application.

If you are interested in Model Driven Architecture (MDA) but you don't have a clear grasp of what it is or where the designers of MDA see it heading then you might want to pick up this brief, well-written description written by three authors who are well acquainted with MDA.

MDA is the concept of using models developed using a modeling language (UML) to generate real applications. This book can be seen as a high level overview of MDA and at 150 pages it is a fairly easy and quick read. The authors show both what is available today (not too much) and what might be available in the future (perhaps all applications will be generated from models). The authors do try to make the book practical by showing how you can use modeling tools to at least build skeletons of code that can be the start of code development. MDA brings a new set of acronyms but this book explains each of them without too much pain.

So how much of what is discussed here is needed by a typical developer or designer? Probably not too much. But if you want to keep your eye on the future of IT then this book is well worth the read. Perhaps one day writing code will be thought of the same way we think of writing machine language. When that happens you will be able to say you knew it was coming.

The authors of this book are either visionaries or unrealistic dreamers, and at this point I am not sure which it is. MDA is an acronym for Model Driven Architecture and it is a framework based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and other standards for representing software designs. Their main premise is that software development will eventually start with a Platform Independent Model (PIM) which represents the design of a solution to a problem. As the name implies, this is a model that does not incorporate anything that is specific to any platform.
After the PIM is created, it is transformed into one or more Platform Specific Models (PSMs), each of which is specific to a particular platform. Each of the PSM's is then acted on by a platform specific conversion tool that will create the coded solution for that platform that conforms to the PSM specifications. They argue that since this step will be electronically executed, the point will eventually be reached where code is no longer written by humans.
The authors are quite correct in pointing out the historical sequence of software development, which started with programming and constructing the computer being simultaneous events. This was followed by the development of assembly language and then the compiler, which raised the level of abstraction and caused a great deal of the code creation process to be automated. They use this background to argue that the MDA is several layers above that and a natural step in the upward movement of abstraction.
While I certainly agree that the movement in programming has been to higher levels of abstraction and more code being automatically generated, I did not find their arguments convincing. They use several examples of automatic code generation that can proceed from a model, one of which is the generation of setter and getter functions. The problem as I see it is that creating setter and getter functions for private instance variables is the easiest programming task of all. In my opinion, going from this to creating code to solve complex tasks is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.
Granted, the authors admit that the MDA is still in the preliminary stages, but all of us have heard stories about how tools such as web page creators continue to fail in many ways. Abstraction and automation of software have allowed developers to write programs with millions of lines of code, but there is every reason to believe that there is a limit as to how high the level of abstraction can go before it exceeds the capacity of humans to understand. Furthermore, if the tools that go from the MDA to the code do not create the precise solution, it is quite likely that the level of detail that one can write into the MDA will not be fine enough to represent all possible desired alterations from the automatically generated code. One simply cannot write all of what could be an enormous number of options into any conversion tool.
Finally, if there are errors in the code generated from the MDA, debugging it would probably be impossible. The software development community finds it very difficult to write bug-free software, even when it is written by hand and meticulously examined. Since the conversion tools would be software that would most likely contain errors, then anyone debugging the code from an MDA would be looking through software that was automatically generated from a model that may be flawed by a program that is most certainly flawed.
To conclude, I did find the book interesting and believe that some of what the authors envision will come true. However, at this time, it is clear that most of it will not happen in the near future. Our understanding of the software process is still too primitive to have the entire project successfully generated electronically from a model. There is also reason to believe that it is impossible.

There have been many talks about MDA, but none as "complete" as this book. Granted that MDA is still under development and who knows what will actually happen to it when it is actually released, the authors of this book do an extraordinary job explaining what MDA is at its current stage and what areas might still change for the better before its final release.
MDA is here to stay. There are many people that are very skeptical about the future of MDA, but the authors thru show and tell, explain why MDA is very much needed by the community and why it is here to stay for a very long time. The book starts by touching on some of the current problems that the software development process is facing these days:
·Productivity problem: Writing code is being productive, and models that do not relate to anything with the code and are just stick figures on papers don't really mean much
·Portability Problem: The need to port applications from one platform to another, or from one technology to another
·Interoperability Problem: The systems need to interoperate and integrate together much more smoothly than they do today
·Maintenance and Documentation Problem: Documents don't really mean much if they are not representative of the current system and can not be used to figure out what the system does.

It is very difficult; as you may have had the pleasure of finding out the hard way, to actually implement true round trip engineering. It is a great concept on paper, but once you start the process of coding who has the time to go back and update the model? Update the use-cases and propagate the changes all the way down stream to the test cases? Specially if your project is under the gun and is already behind the schedule. The truth of the matter is that until today, modeling has been a great concept to kick things off, but many managers, project leads, etc... do not see the value of modeling and how it can improve their software. MDA is the answer to these questions... It's what we like to have if we had it all... It is a promise of something grand and it's being presented in this book as such. This book is the blue print of where things in the software development process will be 3-5 years from now.

The author then goes into the details of the MDA framework and breaks that up to 4 parts:
·The Model
·The language in which the model is written in
·The transformation definition which describes how the model in one language can be transformed into another
·Transformation tool which performs the transformation using a specific transformation definition

Each part of the MDA framework is then broken up into its sub-parts and each are explained. The model, which is what we all are familiar with, is actually broken up to three parts in MDA:

·The Platform Independent Model - PIM
·The Platform Specific Model - PSM
·The Code

The bulk of what MDA is in the transformation tools that transform one model to the other. The author spends a great deal of the book explaining what these transformation tools could look like, and it actually gives three examples of such tools in this book:
·Transformation tool to transform PIM to PSM for a relational database
·Transformation tool to transform PIM to PSM for EJB's
·Transformation tool to transform PIM to PSM for a client front-end written in JSP
Each of these transformation tools is explained in great detail, and the depicted such that it is very easy for reader to follow the path of how the transformation is/should be done. The authors then talks about the transformation tools that take each PSM and transform it to Code. It is at every step of the way, from creating the PIM to Code, the authors spend a great deal of time explaining how MDA is introducing a new way of doing things better, faster and more efficiently.
Metamodels and metalanguages are covered in chapter 8. A Model is written is a Language, which is defined by a Metamodel, which is written in a Metalanguage. MDA follows the same pattern. The metalanguage in which MDA is written is called the MOF. The metamodel for the MDA are written in MOF, and the modeling itself is done via UML. All the standards that are covered under OMG are covered in chapter 11, and is very interesting to see how pieces fit together, and how the "stack" is being built.
All and all, Anneke Kleppe, et. al. did an extraordinary job in putting this book together. MDA is a buzz word that we have been here for sometime now, and it is great to finally have a book such as MDA Explained that clarifies the concepts and sheds some light on what's coming and what to expect.

Speed kills was the 60's logo. Not at all. It does to a great
degree lessen your appetite for life's other buffet. Prepare
youself for complete emersion with little desire to extract
yourself from your "quest". Don't waste time on bannal issues
such as a cozy little nest. Find the funds for R&D and total
time. There very likely will be plenty of time for R&R and free
gymnasium, lodging and repast. Excellent new acquaintences and
education. And sharing exciting experiences with your friends.
Now off with you, my son. And fly low. Be there. Doing that.

How to Manufacture Methamphetamine was very well written and hae explained it so well that I think I could probably do it. However there is no way that I would ever consider doing something like that. It really educated me, though. I feel that we as parents and grandparents need to know all we can about drugs, since it is so rampant now and such a very real threat to our children and grown ups too. I pity the man who wrote his review from prison and told about all the drugs he had manufactured and just wished that he was free, so that he could go back to making and dealing drugs. That's so sad. Methamphetamine is one of the worst drugs that I have ever known anything about. I come from a small town that has just been devasted because the manufacture, dealing and using of meth is so rampant there. Several murders have occured, several people have had car accidents, young people have had heart attacks and strokes, many couples have divorced, several people have either been injured or killed in fires, and droves of them have been in jail and prison more than once, all because of meth. A man and his two sons have been accused of killing a family of four, including a 6 yr. old little boy and an 8 yr. old little girl, because the dad owed them money for some meth. They bludgeoned the mother and the little boy with a tire iron, took the father down to the river, where they slashed his throat, shot him twice, then pushed him into the river, then they took the little girl off with them and took turns raping her before they killed her. They said they only meant to rough them up and scare them, but they were so high on meth that they went to far. My own step-daughter died in a fire day before yesterday, because they were cooking meth. I hope the man who is in prison will read my review, think about it and have a change of heart and change his way of living. It's certainly not a victimless crime. I, truly believe that meth is the devil's favorite weapon. Mr. Prisoner I will be praying for you.

The book is filled with some great info, and after talking with people who actually manufacture Ecstacy, this book is very accurate. A disappointment to some, only because the manufacture of ecstacy is so complex. If you want to make it yourself, this book isn't all you'll need. $20,000 worth of lab equipment and a BS in Chemistry would probably help. The manufacture of illicit durgs is best left to the experts, or, in the case of LSD, the government.

The story intermingles two time frames: Both share the same family and Xhosa location on the shores of the Indian Ocean. One part tells the story of the British war against the native tribe in the mid-19th century - the war now known as the Zulu war. The other part deals with the present time.

Camugu comes from Johannesburg and tries to fit into the somewhat primitive village of Oorloha. He lands in the middle of the fight that has been going on for 150 years. In those days, the teenage prophetess Nongqawuse Told the tribe that all cattle had be killed and the harvest destroyed. Thus the tribe was split between Believers and Unbelievers, each group blaming the other for whatever went wrong. And so the verbal fighting goes back and forth.

Xhosa used to be a real tribe, but nowadays only the language survives as part of the Bantu languages. That accounts for the click sounds that are mentioned. The Zulu war did take place, of course, and the prophesy also happened. The story is interwoven with the local history.

The narrative has won prizes and has been called "brilliant' and loaded with genuine mythic power. Unfortunately, I can't see it that way. The story drags on and on without there being much of a concrete action. The two time periods are so intermingled as to confuse the reader who constantly has to check the names to place it correctly. Untranslated local words and expressions can be used to good effect, but here they are overdone. And the story itself is not new, not exciting, and utterly predictable.

This is one of the most beautiful books I have read in years. Mda skillfullly evokes the tensions in contemporary South Africa for blacks caught between the tug of Western, technological culture and their identity in long-standing traditions. The story is given added substance by Mda's recounting the history of similar tensions from the nineteenth century, thus creating deep emotions that propel the characters. The story mixes family feuds, spats between the sexes, and sober deliberations about community versus individual choices, all told with a level of humor that underscores rather than undermines the importance of these issues for South Africa today.