Open

As one other reviewer has said, this is not a good intro to Sufism. There is no real esoteric teaching here. Nevertheless, it is instructive, but more from the standpoint of style and process than from content.

There was a great deal of polemic against Nietzsche and pop culture, and of idolizing of his shaikh. From a random opening/scanning of the text, I was expecting a concise introduction to the Lata'if, the Sufi framework of subtle centers which are not chakras but something of a different and subtler order. What there was instead was a mention of the lata'if but no real background on their function in the development of the human being.

The polemic was an annoyance after a while. It took up too much bandwidth, even though I'm no particular fan if Nietzsche and tend to agree with the author on the corrosiveness of junk culture and the profanity of the present materialistic society.

The skillful teacher will set an atmosphere of beauty and sacredness into which those present are *invited* by the appeal to the heart and the sacred within oneself. Here, one feels bludgeoned about what is wrong with things (and onself) as the encouragement to undertake a spiritual study.

The tone of many passages discloses a lack of real assimilation of the Teachings and individuation of the true ego. The author has swallowed the Teachings whole and is living them mechanistically instead of from his own developed depth. That is not bad in itself; it is a developmental stage that one has either crossed or not. But one cannot teach in this Way (nor should one be writing books on it) until that process is well-along -- and it had barely started (IMO) when the book was written.

There are many hidden masters, and many of them have only a small handful of students -- or none at all -- because their task in the maintenance of the world is not primarily in teaching. It is necessary for some minds to have the particular devotional relationship to the Teacher than Mr. Bayman shows in his writing about his shaikh, and there is a certain beauty in his ingenuousness. But I would say that he himself is not cooked enough (or traveled enough) to know whether his shaikh is "unique" in the world or really just the only teacher for *him.* One hopes that his devotion to his teacher has not prevented him from finding another mentor after his teacher's passing, or his progress on the Way will likely be slowed unnecessarily.

The Station Of No Station, in essence speaks from the very heart of Islam... the pure Islam, which was practiced by the Prophet Muhammad himself. Henry Bayman, who has a profound understanding of Islamic Sufism spent most of the last quarter of the twentieth century with the great grandfather of Islamic Sufism "Ahmet Kayham". In this contemporary book of authentic wisdom, Mr.Bayman has in a sincere, direct and clear manner, colourfully explained and presented those very pure teachings of Islamic Sufism. This book is without any doubt essential for anyone interested in spirituality, religion, mysticism and love... in the words of the great sufi saint "Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi"... "I follow the religion of love: whatever way love mounts take, that is my religion and my faith".

The Station Of No Station, in essence speaks from the very heart of Islam... The Pure Islam, which was practiced by the Prophet Muhammad himself. Henry Bayman, who has a profound understanding of Islamic Sufism, spent most of the last quarter of the twentieth century, with the great grandfather of Islamic Sufism "Ahmet Kayhan". In this contemporary book of authentic wisdom, Mr.Bayman has in a sincere, direct and clear manner, colourfully explained and presented, those very Pure Teachings of Islamic Sufism. This book is without any doubt, essential for anyone interested in spirituality, religion, mysticism and love... In the words of the great Sufi saint "Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi"... "I follow the religion of love: whatever way loves mounts take, that is my religion and my faith".

First I thought it should be called Wide Range because of all Linda's varied interests but as I looked through it, which took all of l0 minutes to review, I was very disappointed in it. The pictures were too simple and looked like a child's first attempt at photography. I am a staunch Linda McCartney fan of her photography and share in her many interests, but felt let down by this book of simplicity.

I found this book an inspiration. Not surprising since I have always been inspired by Linda's pictures, but I now have a collection of moving moments that she has caught on film. As an amateur photographer I am now inspired to experiment with the medium. I now keep my camera handy where ever I am.

She was, indeed, one of the best photographers of her generation. There is a terrific sense of reverence for the natural world in these photos, in which she demonstrates that nature provides the most satisfying, serene, and dramatic of images, if you look for them. And you need not travel to the Grand Canyon or the redwood forests to see them--looking out your back door, out the plane window, in your garden, across the beach, or through the glass teapot on your table, may yield views as delicate and mysterious as the old masters. Of her photographs of people, John Lennon said "She has an eye for an eye." Of her photos of nature, we can say that she had an eye for the most intense beauty in the most fleeting of moments.

Christians are not that much different than non-Christians when it comes to consumption of popular culture. All but the most legalistic watch many of the same movies, listen to the same music, and watch the same TV shows as everyone else. Romanowski realizes this, and with this book (along with others he has written) he analyzes the culture from a Christian perspective and gives the Christian, who is in the world but (hopefully) not of it, valuable tools for being a cultural critic. I would have rated this book higher, but for me it doesn't break a lot of new ground, and the appendices concerning an analysis of the movie "Titanic" could have been better utilized on a movie with more depth and meaning (even though I do admit that, like everyone else, I cried at the end of the movie). On the other hand, you've got to love a book with a chapter entitled "Christians Who Drink Beer" (even though, personally, I don't). Others who haven't read widely in this field like I have would surely give it a higher rating, because it is a very competent, easy to read book on an important subject.

Romanowski is skillful at paring down his previous work, Pop Culture Wars, and enhancing the practical aspects of interacting with Popular Culture as an evangelical Christian. He Gives the necessary background and history to contextualize his position, while providing the reader with good tools for thinking critically about popular art.

One note of critique would be that, though it is obvious that he has a commanding knowledge of film, it would be beneficial to explore other popular artforms and give current expamples. Along the same lines, the examples that he used to prove some critical comments directed to the evangelical Christian popular art (particularly the Christian Contemporary Music) community were a bit dated.

But overall, this is a book that I have and will continue to use in a classroom and small group setting because it packs a punch in a small space.

Eyes Wide Open: Looking For God In Popular Culture is an easy-to-read, highly engaging guide for interpreting and evaluating popular culture from a Christian perspective and framework. William Romanowski (professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan) offers a practical, analytical, and Christian-based approach to movies, music, and television programs, enabling the reader to engage the media that so saturates modern life. Romanowski's illuminating examples range from Casablanca to Titanic, from The Simpsons to ER, from Bruce Springsteen to Amy Grant. Eyes Wide Open is informative, rewarding, insightful, and strongly recommended reading for parents, pastors, teachers, and teens.

Crane has a delightfully light style of writing that can take the deepest and most sorrowful of situations, and somehow bring them light. His, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets," is a wonderful depiction of life for a 19th century girl in New York. "The Open Boat" puts you on the ship; you can naturally feel the narration and flow with him as he crashes against the waves. A wonderful read for any interested in American or New York literature.

Stephen Crane died at the early age of 29, but in his writing he shows what he'd come through in life. I think his style is mature and hardened up, due to a life spent in difficult times. In "The Blue Hotel", he depicts a brief, brutal and enigmatic moment in the lives of several residents and migrants in Nebraska, a stupid and cruel fight in the midst of a snow blizzard.

The rest of the stories have to do with Civil War episodes and other moments in the US history. My favorite tale is the one that's on the cover of the book: the Open Boat. It is masterfully told, the story is tense, sad and exciting. The reader can feel the up and down movement of the boat, the cold wetness of the clothes, the seasickness the characters suffer, the desolation at every failure to approach the coast, the relationship between the characters, etc. It is a pity that Crane died so young, since in these short stories he shows himself as a talented, gifted and mature writer.

Crane proves to be an early American master of the short story. I found "Courage" to be plodding and obvious, but Crane's short stories rescue his literary reputation for me.

The stories are well paced with vivid characters and little epiphany by story's end.

Penny Lee Dean writes like a coach, which she is. You can almost see her writing chapter titles and outlines with a magic marker on a board, with a group of swimmers taking notes. The book is as clear as water, and about as interesting. If you really want to swim long open-water swims, like the English Channel or across some big lake, this is clearly the book for you. She has excellent training tips, instructions for dealing with obstacles and injuries, and motivational ideas. But if you aren't quite so serious about long, excruciating, time-consuming swims, if swimming is only an important and not pivotal part of your life, you will find the book slow going, which, by the way, is how I swim.

Highly recommended, but be prepared to search a bit for some things. Clearly the product of someone who is predominantly right-brained.

This is an excellent book. I am considering training for the English channel swim and found this book excellent as a source of vital information with regards open water swimming. Not only is the book from a world expert but there is great passion in the writing as well as superb technical aspects of swimming in open water. I especially liked the fact that it dealt with very long swims unlike many of the commercially available open water books out there that are catering for triatholon swimming distances as obviously that is where the money is with regards to publishing and selling.It is what most long distace swimmers train for. There are very few books on long distance open water swimming longer than a triatholon swim so this book for me is a must. As for the reviewer that felt she wrote the book like a drill coach, if you want to swim something like the english channel any approach unlike the one in this book will equal failure.

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I am updating this review and giving it an additional star now that I have been through the whole book. It rates 4 stars for it's overall clear writing and completeness. Here follows my original review ...

I am only part way through chapter 3 but I thought it worth writing a short review to warn about the example database in this book.

From one page to the next tables in the example database mysteriously add or drop fields. This would be OK if the book led you through a logical progression where the changes made sense, but the differences seem gratuitous. (Do tapes have a duration or not?) Also, if you try to keep up by adding, removing, creating and droping things as you follow along you start to get into trouble as referential integrity (a great SQL feature supported by PostgreSQL) prevents you from doing the right thing.

The example code is available on a website, but the link given in the book doesn't work. A little hunting around will get you there but it would be nice if the authors kept the link mentioned in the book.

When you do find the sample code on the web site you will notice that it needs to be downloaded in seperate chunks, one for each chapter - a minor annoyance. One isn't sure if it is OK to untar them all in one dierctory or not. (It's not. Here is a shell script to help:)

#!/bin/bash
for f in chapter??.tgz ; do
d=$\{f/.tgz} # please remove the backslash -- I had to put it in to get the rest of the line to display in this review
mkdir -p $d
echo -n "Processing $f ..."
tar -C $d -zxf $f
echo " done"
done

Given that the example in the book keeps morphing from one page to the next it is not surprising that the sample code on the web page doesn't match the examples in the book. It would need several versions to match just the changes within one chapter.

I do give the book good marks for clear writing and for making the concepts understandable. Right now I am just frustrated by the examples.

A large section of the book goes into PL/pgSQL programming. Like Oracle's PL/SQL or SQL Server's T-SQL, PostgreSQL has it's own SQL programming language. The book discusses the basics of using PL/pgSQL in addition to more complex information (including cursors and triggers).

The next section of the book really go into examples of using PostgreSQL in specific development environments. Specifically, chapters are dedicated to the use of PostgreSQL in Java code (examples are provided in which JDBC connections are made), PHP and Perl, and even ODBC (for those of us using non-open source languages). I especially liked these chapters, as they really helped me see exactly how to implement database calls to PostgreSQL.

The last third of the book is really designed for database administrators. In this section, information is provided on doing everything you need to do from a DBA perspective on PostgreSQL. There is information on configuration, security, and internationalization. One section I particularly found useful was on things to watch out for when running PostgreSQL in a Windows environment (specifically during installation).

I really enjoyed the work of Korry and Susan Douglas, opening the world of PostgreSQL to me. I'd not considered the database a viable contender for my needs until I opened this book and saw all of the goodies it had to offer. The book explains the details of PostgreSQL in enough detail to get you going without bogging you down in the details, and I appreciate that, except for one thing:

1. I would have liked more information about installing and using PostgreSQL on Windows. They discuss installing with Cygwin, but don't cover downloading from Postgres' site, or any of the quirks that come from using Postgres on Windows. This is I'm certain an oversight and something they will correct or add to the next edition of the book.

Also, I can do without YASI (yet another SQL intro). I know SQL, I own SQL In A Nutshell from O'Reilly, I'm more than capable of working with databases, and I'd much rather they just explain what's unique and different about PostgreSQL instead of reviewing the SQL syntax with me.

Still, all those being said, I find this book to be informative and worthwile.

I always look forward to the annual Nobel Prize for Literature with the hope that I'll be able to discover a new "diamond in the rough". When I read the descriptions of Fo's avant garde works, I thought it looked too strange for my taste. However, I came across this book on sale so I thought I'd take a look. I was very pleasantly surprised and actually had a hard time putting the book down.

This is a collection of four plays. The first one is rather political in nature and might seem more enjoyable with a better knowledge of contemporary Italian economics. However, the absurdity comes through very clearly. The comedy comes through as well. I came away with a pretty good grasp of the author's view of the Italian economic problems (as well as that of the European Economic Community). However, this leftist view point left me feeling that there is another side to the story. That, of course, is my problem and not the author's shortcoming.

The second play is an interesting and enjoyable look at Queen Elizabeth I done in great comedy and absurdity. There is a main character named Grosslady who steals the show. She speaks a sort of Esperanto slang that is absolutely hilarious. There is an accompanying translation in the back of the play to help the reader understand her "language". I normally dislike anything that detracts from the flow of the book. However, I enjoyed the availability of the translation to help me follow the flow of the book. At the same time, I made sure I read the actual lines that Grosslady has in the play because it is such a brilliant comedic concoction. For example, her word for England is "Angleterror". This was all brilliantly translated by Gillian Hanna.

The last two plays are interesting examinations of human relationships and interdependence. They continue in the comedy of the absurd.

Perhaps the best recommendation I can give this collection is that I am now looking to read more of Dario Fo's works. Give this one a try!

The first time I heard about Dario Fo was when he won the Nobel prize in 1997, and this was the first book of his that I could get my hands on.I wasn't disappointed.His plays are eminently readable and quite hilarious at times.The only drawback was that being not too well versed regarding Italian politics,some of the puns were loston me[in spite of the helpful notes provided at the back].If you enjoy reading plays you'll like this.

DEATH CRUISE, is made up of 22 short mystery stories that, as you would expect, center about cruises. Each story is written by a different author, each using the cruise theme as a common thread to tie the stories together. The styles and entertainment values vary widely, as do the periods in which they were written. These vary from Agatha Christie's story written in 1936, to the bulk of the rest that were evidently written in 1999, the year this collection was copyrighted.

I wish that I could say that they were uniformly good, but I'm afraid that I can't because, at least in my opinion, they're not. In fact, they're all over the place.

Let's start with Agatha Christie's "Problem at Sea." I don't think that it has held up very well with the passage of time. I can't reveal what it is about the key premise of the solution of the murder that bothers me so much, as it would ruin the mystery for the reader, but, in light of what is fairly common knowledge now, it just doesn't work today.

Now for the bright side. As always, I enjoyed John Mortimer's Rumpole and his wife, "She Who Must Be Obeyed," who are on a cruise ship on their second honeymoon. for fans of the "Rumpole of the Bailey" series, it is amusing to even imagine Rumpole aboard a cruise ship where one must dress for dinner and if "She Wo Must . . . " has her way, go dancing in the evenings, drink fine liquers, hob-nob with fellow passengers, etc., etc. This story, "Rumpole at Sea," combines most of the elements that go into a highly entertaining story. As there should be because this is meant to be a mystery, there is a bit of a mystery. There is, however, even more tongue-in-cheek British dry humor. There are people you really care about, and a few that you don't. All in all, it's hard not to be charmed by Mortimer's take on Rumpole, his wife, and a moderately unpleasant judge or two.

In "Honeymoon Cruise," I couldn't find a single character I really cared about, so I just didn't care who was planning to kill whom.

But, on the positive side (again),we have "Mutiny of the Bounty Hunter," which has people that grew on me, and by the end of the story, I really did care about what happened to them. Even in a story this short, the author managed to give us real people who changed as the situation warranted it, not the unidimesnsional ones like those in "Honeymoon Cruise."

In summary: For me, DEATH CRUISE was really a mixed bag, with just enough entertainment value for me that I, like certain movie critics, can give it a "reluctant tumbs up."

I read this collection of short stories right before a caribbean cruise, which may have added to my enjoyment significantly. However, I would recommend it highly to any lover of cruising or of murder mysteries. It provided a wide variety of authors and styles, all exceptionally enjoyable.

Vollmer obviously loves Pittsburgh, and readers familiar with the city will probably enjoy this good-natured book. It works best as a set of sociological, journalistic and personal sketches. It's less successful, though, as book of poetry; the artlessness of her approach, the shapelessness of many of the poems, the frequent clumsiness of line, the congested diction and the predictability of the language, together with an overbeholdenness to several unconcealed and imperfectly assimilated influences, give much of the book a disappointingly slapdash quality. Many of the pieces read like works in progress rather than finished poems. It will be interesting to see whether Vollmer will explore similar material again, but with much more artistic control and without as much overdependence on her models, which puts her at a remove from her subject matter. Overall, VOllmer is a promising writer who may emerge with a voice uniquely her own. The blurb comparing the book to O'Hara is unfortunate and irresponsible; any lover of "The Day Lady Died" or "Second Avenue" is going to be disappointed by this book.

Judith Vollmer is perhaps the greatest Pittsburgh poet that ever lived. Like a character, the city is both memorable within moments and devestatingly ugly at its worse. As a Pittsburgher, I know these places Vollmer writes about, and more importantly, understand what it's like to be surrounded by city. She also touches on many of the things that shaves so close to most Pittsburghers: ethnicicity(perhaps not the safest subject to write about by a white woman in todays academy). Her family and her history rolls along the book like so many of the city's hills. The narrative poetry stretches, swings and challenges readers with its dark music the same way Marina Tsvetaeva managed to do. Vollmer can take me on a tour any day -- I know I will come out both exhausted and revived in the end.

Lots of good general information but I found it required more depth in many areas.

this book saves the student from the hype and promo that the PADI books now have, and is actually a very good basic text for open water. Jeppesen, the original publisher, publishes all the texts that airplane pilots use and carry in those black bags, called 'jep kits'.