Open

Another stupendous effort from a World Champion. Id rather watch Airport 77 with jack lemmon than sift through these mindless opening variations.

This book was an ambitious attempt to describe both a vision of what personal computing could be and to provide a much needed technical overview of Squeak. Although largely successful, the buyer should be warned that some chapters in this book refer to online software that has yet to be written or is not currently available online. In particular, Alan Kay provides an unintended joke with his forward to the book. He states that Squeak is a "dynamic medium for creative thought" and that the foreward to the book should be an online active essay in Squeak. Unfortunately, the essay, "It Should Be Active, But Where (and When) Will It Be?" does not yet exist!

As Squeak continues to evolve rapidly, this book may become obsolete in a few years, but it currently provides some of the best technical overviews of Squeak's Morphic UI, networking, 3D animation, and other fun topics.

Taoism started off as a way of life that was free, scientific, logic and full of Te. However, it was designed for the educated, and enlightened leader sage...not the average man. The Treatise on response & retribution is designed as a religious doctorine to give the average man an instructed guide on how to go about in society...without going corrupt. It sounds very much like the Bible in some places.

The book is divided into two parts: 1)The actual treatise and 2)Moral stories about how people are punished and rewarded for good and bad doings...already they have obscured the tao when they have identified the good & bad.

There is no mention about ruling, leadership, openminded philosophy, calming the mind thru meditation, harmonizing the body and its energies, or anything that taoism preaches. It seams to me like this treatise is 60% Confucian, 20% Buddhist, 15% misc, and 5% Taoist. In fact the text constantly mentions Buddhist gods and patron saints of China...however without mentioning the ancients (Taoist masters and the lot).

It does however give the reader a nice understanding of Chinese culture and what it values the most. However, rituals, religion and societal norms are what obscure the tao (as mention in the Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu)...where is the Te?

The chapter on security might as well be encrypted. The authors constantly use terms before they are defined. They rarely give a comprehensible overview of subjects, they just jump in and bury you with details. These are some very smart guys who don't know how to write a text book.

This book is a mess. It is rife with typos and confusing grammatical errors. Diagrams are cut off and/or poorly laid out.

This would be forgivable if the overall content hit the spot. However, as another reviewer noted, the main focus is on the internals of JBoss, not on how to use it. Ultimately, that's the biggest disappointment.

Good book if you already know JBoss. If you're thinking of re-writing JBoss or just wondering how it works internally then this is good. Absolutely needs step-by-step guide on how to install a bean. Even the JBoss doc.s on the CD are very weak. Having used WebLogic and WebSphere extensively I have still spent 4 hours and not gotten a bean to deploy AFAICT. Oh yeah, no clients/usage are given for the examples; e.g. they show on p70 code and talk about the J2eeDeployer service as being a web service but give no example code or mention of how to use it! Oh yeah, p14 says to drop jar's in the deploy directory and they will be deployed automatically. Well, where are they? Where are the usage examples for the examples provided?

Many writers today find a successful formula and stick to it... over and over. The only thing the same from Martin Cruz Smith's works are their high level of excitement, interesting characters and plot development. Stallion Gate doesn't live up to Smith's past work. What he does best is gives the reader an insiders' view of a setting totally different than what the audience is used to. Whether it be Los Alamos during the development of Man's deadliest weapon in this novel, Cuba in Havana Bay, Japan in December 4th: A Novel, or the Soviet Union in Gorky Park, with his characters on the verge of an exciting adventure for the reader to be a part of.
I enjoy Smith's books. Even Stallion Gate which isn't one of Smith's best efforts, still had more entertainment value than some other writers' best!

John Row

"Stallion Gate" is a character novel, as opposed to the plot-driven suspense thrillers Martin Cruz Smith usually writes. It is also historical fiction, about one of the most extraordinary events precipitated by mankind, concluding with ten of the most important seconds in world history - the countdown for the test of the first nuclear weapon at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The story opens at Los Alamos in December, 1944. U.S. Army Sergeant Joe Pena, a Pueblo Indian who had seen action in the Pacific, was specifically requested by the Project's lead physicist, Robert "Oppy" Oppenheimer, to join the select and top secret group, in New Mexico, as his personal driver and body guard. Oppy had known Joe in his boyhood, when he left New York, for health reasons, to spend the summer in New Mexico. It was one of the happiest times of his life. Young Joe taught him to ride...and years later had still retained Oppy's trust.

All the important historical characters are present at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty, scientist Klaus Fuchs, the Army general in charge of the project, Fermi, etc., are here. Anna Weiss, a fictional German Jewish mathematician, who had fled the Nazis, and been recruited by Oppy, is present. So is Joe's superior officer, Captain Augustino, an insane and bigoted intelligence officer with his own agenda. He believes Fuchs, Weiss and Openheimer are Soviet spies and has blackmailed Joe into informing on them...although Joe resists mightily and successfully, most of the time.

There is little suspense in this novel. After all, we know that the atomic bomb test was successful, as well as we know of the other bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Enola Gay. We know now who was a spy and who was unjustly accused. The storyline, is centered on Joe Pena, a complex, talented and very underestimated man. He disappointed his family, and had been disowned by his now deceased mother. Joe will never be a white man, nor a black man - although his ability to play jazz on the piano and understand the language of music like a native born to the country of chords and riffs, may have made his soul part Afro-American. He is really no longer a Native American either. He has seen and partaken of too much of the world to ever come home again. Pena fought like a hero on Baatan, and has fought heroically in the ring. Boxing was his sport and he was good. Throughout much of the book, he has no hopes for the future - no dreams. He observes everything and everyone, and comments occasionally with his sardonic humor. He thwarts Augustino's paranoid plots and assists a few renegade Indians, who try to work native magic to disrupt the explosion to come. He listens to Oppie who has lost weight and sleep with his anxiety over the Project. At one point Oppenheimer, while waiting for the rain to stop so he can meet the deadline for the test, says, "I am like the king of a rainy country, wealthy but helpless, young and ripe with death." Then, Joe, a lady's man - bedding officer's wives is forever getting him into trouble - falls in love with Anna Weiss. An opportunity to buy the Casa Manana, a nightclub in Santiago, NM, presents itself. Suddenly Pena dreams of owning the best jazz club outside of New York and Chicago...and the possibility of a future with Anna. The suspense does come Big Time, at the end of the novel, when all the forces at play, and the characters with their dillemas and choices, build toward their own personal climaxes - with an explosion that will impact the reader for some time to come.

If you are looking for an Arkady Renko thriller, this is probably not the book for you. There are pages, especially at the beginning, when the story plods along at an excruciating pace. I hung in there because I was caught up in the lyrical beauty of Cruz Smith's writing. His description of Joe on the piano, what and how he plays, is classic. "If blue skies were going to explode on them, they were ready, so he made the melody,'...bluebirds singin' a song' even as he brought the 'Moon' down a chromatic descent, a chord at a time. The tunes merged and split again, accelerating until keyboard and crowd swung between flight and plunge and he cued the horns, who stood and hit Charlie Parker riffs that settled the argument by demanding 'How High The Moon?' as if it were the sun." Can't help it. I'm a sucker for good prose. At one point Joe says, "Which is why I love music. You hit a C and it's a C and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth."

Smith's descriptions of the desert's, (nature's), glory, is ironically juxtaposed with man's destruction and mutilation of the natural environment - so poignant and so gruesome. The radioactivity increasingly seeped into soil and water. Cows had to be checked with geiger counters before they could be slaughtered for consumption. At times, some of the animals' mutations were visible to the naked eye. Wild horses were machine-gunned from "B-29's." The author writes with a paintbrush. "The Hanging Garden got its name from the scarlet gillia, paintbrush and yarrow that had taken root and flourished in the turned soil of the hillside. The wildflowers were a brief, improbable splurge of colors - every shade of red, orange and madder - that turned and waved in any breeze crossing the dun drabness of the mesa."

Lastly, Joe Pena is as strong and developed a character as Arkady Renko. I enjoyed every minute I read about him, and he will stay in my mind as a wonderful anti-hero of his time. J. Kraus

Stallion Gate takes myriad elements- the Native American experience, be-bop jazz, boxing, the Manhattan Project and pottery- and melds them into a story that lives and breathes on its own. The characters are not only at odds with each other, but with themselves. While not Smith's best work, this is a clear example of why he is one of the finest and most versatile writers alive today

It seems odd that this book, with its good intentions, would just be so unsatisfying as a read. You almost get the feeling that the author is on the outside of Hollywood looking in. He seems to be obsessed with Ellen. The book has a certain bitterness to it that doesn't play well.

I couldn't in all honesty recommend purchasing this book. Though if you find it at a public library, might be worth flipping through- but not checking out.

This book is slightly more academic perhaps than most of the Gay Hollywood books are. If you're really interested in the history of Hollywood's treatment of gays ... in front of the camera and behind; closeted and out... then this is a good starting point. Written compactly, it allows us a glimpse of things those of us outside the industry might otherwise not know.

Worth a look.

...nonetheless. This book is not a distasteful one unlike a vast majority of books about gays in Hollywood. It is also quite entertaining and should be regarded only as such: an entertaining book on a summer's day... In this case it does not really matter, whether the material is credible or not. If you do not take what you read TOO SERIOUSLY, then you will enjoy this book. If you want some serious study about gay actors, then look some place else for it.

I understand why Mr. Weisberg felt compelled to write a book debunking case closed because after all, Posner's book is a sham. However, this book seems sloppy and thrown together. Not Weisbergs best effort.

First the down side of Weisberg's book. The editor did a lousy job. A reference to New Orleans District Attorney as "John Garrison" proves that point.

As to the substance. I proudly own every book Weisberg's written. They are often tedious and difficult to read. However to those willing to invest the time, they contain outstanding scholarship and incredible amounts of research effort.

Weisberg attacks the central theme of "the slickster" Gerald Posner in Case Closed. Weisberg wins. Posner could not have done the research he claims in the short time span he's acknowledged.

Weisberg clearly demonstrates that Posner was aided by the CIA by showing how the agency made former soviet spy Nosenko available to him. They don't do that for just anyone. I am of the belief that Posner was a man on a mission and this mission was bought and paid for by the CIA and an establishment willing to kill the Warren critics once and for all.

If the book were edited better I'd give it a 4 or 5 star. However, even at 3 Weisberg kills Posner's slick tome. A good quick read and definately worth the effort.

In "Case Open", Harold Weisberg neatly picks apart Gerald Posner's thesis of Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt in the assassination of J.F.K. In doing so, he also exposes many of Posner's somewhat underhanded misappropriation of others' research; factual distortions; and outright dishonesties (whether intentional or not can be left up to the reader to decide). Though poorly edited, this book singlehandedly debunks the "Lone Gunman Theory" and tells us much about the mainstream media's continuing desire to force the "official" version of the truth on the people, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Though Weisberg's writing style is difficult at times, it is easy to see that he is far more intimately familiar with the facts of the case than Posner. I wouldn't recommend this book for those not familiar with the more complex and minute details surrounding the assassination (Summers' "Conspiracy" or Lane's "Rush To Judgement" would better serve as introductories to the whole affair), but as a total refutation to Posner's much-hailed work, it scores, taking down the Warren Report one more time in the process.

Eyes Wide Open was a suprisingly quick read. There is not much to speak of in these memoirs since Frederic Raphael mostly talked on the phone with Stanley Kubrick and communicated with faxes. I would have expected perhaps some stories from the set of Eyes Wide Shut, but I was very, very wrong.

The book is mostly about how Raphael had to put up with odd requests and deadlines from Kubrick whilst writing the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut. The most eventful part of the book is when he meets the famed director for the first time at his secluded England home. Aside from that, Raphael talks about all of the faxing they did back and forth.

But the thing that bugs me the most is Raphael's tone. He never wants the reader to forget that he is the intellectual giant in this creative duo and that we can all go and read his other stuff if we ever doubted such a thing.

For instance, I recall a passage in which the topic of Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick's 1987 picture about Vietnam, came up in a phone conversation between the two men. 'You've seen the movie, right Freddie?' Kubrick would ask him. 'Yes', Raphael replied. He also managed to inject a comment to Kubrick that because the movie unfolded in an unlinear fashion, that Aristotle would have hated watching it.

Who cares what Aristotle would have thought of Full Metal Jacket?

Despite that Frederic Raphael wrote this to cash in on the opening of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final (and some believe unfinished) film, it's still a guilty pleasure since it affords a point of view absent from the legion of Kubrick books that appeared before and after the director's death.

Maybe it's a sign of respect for the working relationship that some of Kubrick's other collaborators had that they never went ahead and told all, but in the end this book will attract the Kubrick fan who isn't always willing to accept the man as omnipotent myth maker. Eyes Wide Open does become as much about Raphael as Kubrick (if not more) but it still works to paint Kubrick as human, something that reams of analysis, criticism and speculation consistently fail to highlight.

Rather than fawning on Kubrick over the slim length of the book, Raphael continually reminds all that HE himself is an intellectual, blah blah blah, and the tone becomes hard to bear. It's not particularly cohesive or earth shattering, and the conversations that appear in transcript-like form work to put words in the director's mouth. However, it's still valuable in that it offers a rare glimpse into working with the elusive Kubrick. I would take this with a grain of salt, and Kubrick's family did not appreciate this effort in the least, denouncing it on their website.

It may still be of interest to people who want an inside view (albeit skewed) that the many tomes dedicated to breaking down Kubrick's small but mighty canon of films don't bring to the table.

But be warned: with Kubrick gone, it's Raphael who tries to get in the last word...

This book was an interesting account of a collaboration between two talents. In order to fully enjoy the nuances here, one had better know going in that this is not a memoir of Kubrick as the cover suggests but moreso a description of how Raphael hashed out the script to the phenomenal movie with and without Kubrick's help.

Still though, there are insightful tidbits here about Kubrick, gleaned from Raphael's interaction with him. Of course everything Raphael states must be taken with a grain of salt since he obviously wants his piece of the spotlight. Is this a negative aspect of Raphael's personality, or just normal for Hollywood types who demand equal credit?

Either way, an entertaining and quick read that will give readers a better understanding of Kubrick as well as an insightful look into the lesser known world of screenwriting.

Well here we are again with the last installment of a once promising series that lost its way and descended into ennui. Who could forget the fantabulous 2001 or the almost as good 2010. Somehow the literary aspects of the series seem to decline as the plot advances. Gone is the initial sense of wonder and mystery; never present is interesting character development.

This last gasp seems to try but the old spark is gone. Clark again tries to give us his vision of a glorious future rampant with technology and neat doohickies. But the real story is the tale of the monoliths and how we must desperately tell the makers of same that we are not the backwards race they may have originally considered us to be. Otherwise they might do bad things to us.

Which begs the question - why in the world would an intelligent lifeform send the monoliths to uncivilized worlds and expect a progressive civilization of harmony and peace? That question, like many others, is never raised much less answered. All in all, I am glad Clarke wrote the series but a more visionary 2061 and a more literal 3001 would have been a major accomplishment.

As usual for Clarke, the science is pretty good. Unfortunately, there's so much time spent dropping names of famous scientists, events, etc, that it's distracting. By analogy, could we discern between the important people at the end of the 10th century as opposed to those in the 9th or 11th? Of course, not, unless you're a professor of history specialising in that time period. There is such a character in 3001, but it seems tacked on. More interesting is the subplot with the monolith and the contact with Dave/Hal.

Sure, there are incosistencies, as pointed out by others, but none so major as the Saturn/Jupiter shift between 2001 and 2010 (i.e. 2010 is a sequel to 2001 the movie, not 2001 the book), but, like Asimov, Clarke never lets a little thing like continuity get in the way of writing a story the way he thinks it should be written at the time he's writing it. That he's forthcoming and honest about it makes me tend to ignore it.

Looking at the total of the story at the end, you can't help but feel a little nostalgia for this particular little universe Clarke has created. While not up to the standards of 2001 and 2010, I don't think it would suffer a comparison with 2061. It really is time for this storyline to terminate, and I am encouraged that he's called this one the Final Odyssey.

It explained alot and I liked it.

Wow, I bought the book thinking it would be a helpful how-to-guide, it was more like a BAD novel of someone who had spent too much time in the deep under belly of New York. Don't waste your money or time on this one it's not one bit helpful. Amazon[.com] sells better books for a successful restaurant, I know I found one and this one was not it!

I agree with the other review, just mundane chit chat. I wonder if the author has ever been in the back office of a real restaurant.

I found this book got right to the core of starting a restaurant in a logical and easy to understand way. It contains a useful practical approaches to tasks that must be dealt with in a restaurant start-up. It also suggests ways to cope with if not avoid many typical problems, and presents numerous strategies for increasing chances of success. Very good and useful.