Customer Reviews:
Prelude to Revolution........2007-06-04
Many people attribute different things to the French Revolution. Ashley attributes the French Revolution to the unwise decisions of Louis XIV. Louis XIV was a smarter, more devoted King than the two who suceeded him. However, he set up the poor tax system and huge expeditures that all that promised later revolution. The tax system taxed the poor and middle class and gave a pass to the nobles and church. He also had the middle class administering his huge empire. Unwise wars made him a
threat to the other states in Europe.
This is an OK read about the Sun King. At a little over 130 pages, the reader should come away with a knowledge of the absolutist monarchy of France.
Customer Reviews:
divine right of kings.......2007-08-20
Church's collection of essays on Louis 14 is most distinguished. Contributors include Voltaire and Montesquieu. The contributors hail from times much closer to Louis' reign than to ours. While perhaps not quite contemporaneous, they offer lucid assessments of how effective he was, in building the French nation-state. As well as maintaining an absolutist monarchical regime; the envy of other European kings.
Here, largely unchallenged, are accounts of the divine right of kings to rule. Unblemished by dissidents that lay decades and centuries hence. The book is useful, in a meta-analysis fashion. For it is not just the views of its authors per se, that the reader should consider. But the predominant world views of the times in which the authors wrote.
Average customer rating:
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The Greatness of Louis Xiv, (College)
Manufacturer: D C Heath & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Royalty
| Leaders & Notable People
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| France
| Europe
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0669820164 |
Average customer rating:
- Nice pictures
- Not real informative.
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Jeter: Hero in Pinstripes
New York Daily News
Manufacturer: Sports Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Baseball
| Biographies
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Biographies
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Baseball
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
History
| Baseball
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1582613591 |
Book Description
Jeter is a collection of Daily News stories and photos describing Derek Jeter's rise to stardom as a shortstop for the New York Yankees. It features color photos throughout and stories about famous and not-so-famous moments in his career. Moments like playing in his first World Series and having his car stolen. Some of his accomplishments include winning the American League Rookie of the Year Award, receiving the Joan Payson Award for community service, an being named to the All-star team.
Customer Reviews:
Nice pictures.......2001-01-25
This book is full of pictures and stories that are interesting; stories about his signing out of high school; pictures and highlights of outstanding plays in his years with the Yankees who have won three series since he arrived.
Not real informative........2000-08-01
For the first time since reviewing books from Sports Publishing Inc. I was disappointed with the overall writing of a book. This book is a compilation of pictures and quotes of a rising superstar in the world of Major League baseball.
While the book is filled with dozens of photos and some of the chapters are interesting, for the most part the book lacks any real story line. The book does not talk about the career of Derek Jeter nor the authors examine Jeter in comparison with other great shortstops of the past.
The book would make a great gift to a true New York Yankee fan but true baseball purists will find this book sorely lacking any real value. The price is $24.95 and for the money you get very little.
Overall you could and can spend your dollars more wisely on other baseball or sports books. Sports Publishing has a great website and if you spend a few minutes there you will find a whole host of sports treasures.
Customer Reviews:
Reaching Too Hard.......2007-09-21
I have to be the dissenting opinion based on the other posted reviews. Frankly I felt this book was well written and fairly insightful but in many respects the author was reaching too hard for profundity and some of the connections and reference points he used seemed rather arbitrary to me. In addition there are many films that were overlooked that could have added to the analysis and made the book more meaningful to a wider readership.
Courtesy of the greatest living writer of English prose.......2005-01-13
Gob's pic on the book-jacket is the grimmest cautionary tale since Truman Capote shook his booty at Studio 54. Let this be a warning to you all. This is what happens when you spend half your life gawking at Barbara Steele & Silvana Mangano: you turn bald and myopic and you have no-one to blame but yourself. My favorite line: "What did they need a script for if they had enough bad mood to poison the atmosphere for a whole planet?"
Every sentence in this book is a masterpiece. Although there's no need to worry about any Serioso High-Art Heavyosity. Gob eschewed any in-depth discussion of Godard & Bergman & Welles & Antonioni in favor of delineating the Cinecitta aesthetic: "As the sword-and-sandal cycle ran its course they grabbed whatever raw material came to hand, Tacitus and Captain Marvel, Sophocles and the Bible and Mandrake the Magician, Tiresias and the Sibyl, vampires and virgins and an endless horde of raucous men-at-arms. The contents of an old cupboard full of irreplaceable artifacts were being briefly held up to the light--for the delectation of uncomprehending inheritors momentarily amused by gold leaf or a bit of fine carving--before being discarded. All periods of history collapsed into one, enabling Hercules and Ulysses to wash up on the Gaza coast and encounter Samson. It was the final garage sale of Thrace and Carthage and Byzantium."
I read a recent profile of Godard. His unfilmed latter-day scripts are (yes, you guessed it) scripts about film directors. Movies about movies. Gob covers that too: "The ultimate film festival would then have to consist of ghost movies: the low-budget risorgimento period piece that Edward G. Robinson almost finished shooting in TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN, Fritz Lang's ODYSSEY, the Crucifixion movie that Orson Welles was directing in Pasolini's LA RICOTTA, and the movie that (in Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT) the alcoholic actor played by Terence Stamp had flown to Cinecitta to star in: the first Catholic western, 'something between Dreyer and Pasolini with a touch of John Ford, of course'."
Gob even risks the charge of psychological projection when he waxes metaphysical: "A profound underlying boredom was the emotional basis of westerns. They were basically about killing time. They were what there was to do in town, in America, year after year."
My only hope is that Pauline Kael is savoring this book in Schlock Heaven.
It's a cinemascope blockbuster in a book!.......2000-08-29
As a movie lover, I was intrigued with the theme of this book -- how movies have shaped our culture, our thinking -- and was prepared for a heavy, textbook-like reading. As I read, though, I was overwhelmed with O'Briens style, his sterling craftsmanship in describing the feelings and emotions of the movies. I would literally stop after every few lines and shake my head in amazement. As a writer, I am jealous of his skill. As a reader, I am eager to read it again.
Steve Martin said (in L.A. STORY) that "a kiss may not be the truth, but it's what we wish was the truth." I do not know if O'Brien's book is THE truth about movies in the modern mind but, oh, how I hope that it is.
Exceptional.......2000-04-27
Don't be alarmed, just go to the movies. O'Brien, in this unforgettable, beautifully written book, has come up with an idea and a work so original and startling that it is difficult to describe. Essentially, he sees how movies [and he's seen hundreds of all kinds] have helped create the pyschology of the century. In one chapter, for example, he uses the melodramatic chestnut "The Four Feathers" to show how the movies displayed the customs and manners of a class and society different than ourselves, and thus taught us how to live in certain ways. And that's just scratching the surface of a book that seems to have a new and astonishing idea on every page. Neal Gabler published on this topic recently, but to a much inferior extent. Skip that and buy this. You will never, ever go to the movies the same way again.
READ THIS BOOK.......1998-08-24
This book is the most chillingly relevant commentary on our modern society of the spectacle that I have ever read. Although at times slightly alarmist in its portrayal of the totalitarian tendencies of contemporary cinema in forging the substance of our thoughts, these claims can not be taken lightly. O'Brien is convincing by virtue of the fact that he writes mostly in the second person. "You believed....You were shocked....You this...You that"...making the reader truly believe the shocking reality before him: That the overmind of the cinema is becoming the only reality in the 20th century. His memories are its memories and everyone else's too. O'Brien does a great service to point this out even if its too late to change it.
Book Description
Inside the Games You Grew Up with but Never Forgot
With all the whiz, bang, pop, and shimmer of a glowing arcade. The Ultimate History of Video Games reveals everything you ever wanted to know and more about the unforgettable games that changed the world, the visionaries who made them, and the fanatics who played them. From the arcade to television and from the PC to the handheld device, video games have entraced kids at heart for nearly 30 years. And author and gaming historian Steven L. Kent has been there to record the craze from the very beginning.
This engrossing book tells the incredible tale of how this backroom novelty transformed into a cultural phenomenon. Through meticulous research and personal interviews with hundreds of industry luminaries, you'll read firsthand accounts of how yesterday's games like Space Invaders, Centipede, and Pac-Man helped create an arcade culture that defined a generation, and how today's empires like Sony, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts have galvanized a multibillion-dollar industry and a new generation of games. Inside, you'll discover:
·The video game that saved Nintendo from bankruptcy
·The serendipitous story of Pac-Man's design
·The misstep that helped topple Atari's $2 billion-a-year empire
·The coin shortage caused by Space Invaders
·The fascinating reasons behind the rise, fall, and rebirth of Sega
·And much more!
Entertaining, addictive, and as mesmerizing as the games it chronicles, this book is a must-have for anyone who's ever touched a joystick.
Customer Reviews:
Incredible Book.......2007-10-01
This book is absolutely great. The author clearly loves the golden age of the arcade era. Very well written, a lot of neat insights especially regarding Atari. I simply could not put this book down. The best video game/arcade retrospective ever written.
Behind the scenes of the games industry.......2007-08-28
This is a pacy and enjoyable book that takes the reader on a journey from the earliest days of the games industry to the arrival of the Xbox (around 2001). It's mostly written from a business perspective and you get a good sense of the wheeling and dealing that went on behind the scenes. References are made to certain games but really if that's what you're after then you'd be far better of with The Video Games Guide. The writer clearly conducted a lot of interviews to help enliven the history and although he devotes an inordinate number of pages to Nolan Bushnell and Atari some of the anecdotes are priceless (love to hear about the execs who passed on Pole Position).
Starts out strong, then fizzles about halfway through.......2007-07-23
The final impression left on me by "The Ultimate History of Video Games" is that I was actually reading two different books--one on the early history of video games (up to about the time the NES was released) and one on the late 80s to turn of the century era. The first half or so of this book is obviously a labor of love, and though it does have its limitations the narrative is both smooth and engaging. The book is not exceptionally well written, but throughout the pre-video game era and all through the Atari years Kent manages to weave a narrative that is entertaining and reads well.
A host of quotes from firsthand sources is peppered throughout the narrative, and most of them serve to add to rather than detract from the overall quality of the book. Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, and many others provide anecdotes and relate the early history of video games from the point of view of those who made it happen. The pre-video game era, the rise of Atari, the coin-op arcade business, and the advent of home console gaming is all chronicled here.
But then something happens to the narrative. Around the time Nintendo breaks into the console market with the Famicom the details become more sparse. Short blurbs about the Super NES pop up before the NES has even hit American shores, and entire chapters on litigation, with very little narrative and mostly lifted from transcripts, bog the story down. It seemed to me that I could almost feel Kent losing interest in the project, and my own interest tapered and then almost completely left as well.
The quotes are still there, but the overall feel of the book goes from a man telling the story through the eyes of the people who lived it to that of a high school book report. That may seem harsh, but the "and then this happened, and then this happened..." quality of the mid 80s through mid 2001 years left a great deal to be desired. Some of the most significant developments in gaming are glossed over with surprising indifference, and anyone who hoped to relive their glory days of gaming will be disappointed if those days occurred in the days of Nintendo, Sega, or Sony consoles.
It's hard to blame this entirely on Kent, of course, since the industry expanded so much during the late 80s and 90s that it's difficult to imagine being able to cover things with the level of detail and attention given to the 70s and first half of the 80s. Still, many of the omissions are glaring and, in my mind, inexcusable. While Sega's war with Nintendo during the Genesis/Super NES days is covered, very few games for those systems receive any attention whatsoever. Sonic, Mario, and Donkey Kong are covered, of course, but most everything else is either given scant treatment or is omitted entirely. Golden Axe is mentioned in passing, the Final Fantasy series is eventually given a couple pages (but not until he mentioned Squaresoft's defection from Nintendo to Sony). Kent leaves out the fact that there were Zelda games for both the Super NES and the N64 and forgets to mention Super Mario Kart as one of Nintendo's titles for the Super NES (he does mention Mario Kart 64 without pointing out that it was a sequel). Starfox is mentioned in passing or in a caption somewhere, and I think I saw the name 'Megaman' twice.
In addition, "Ultimate History" does not deign to discuss PC gaming with anything but a passing nod in the PC's direction. Myst and 7th Guest are mentioned, and Wolfenstein and later Doom are brought up a few times (mostly in conjunction with video game violence), but that's about it. Fans of such enormously popular franchises such as Civilization, Quake, Command and Conquer, anything made by Blizzard (Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, etc), Age of Empires, or the Star Wars universe will no doubt wonder why their games are not considered part of the 'Ultimate History' of the video game industry, but this question will go unanswered. Online gaming, which was already very popular when this book was published in 2001, is ignored entirely.
In short, "The Ultimate History of Video Games" is anything but ultimate. I realize that the title was the idea of the publisher, but in my mind the author, who is very familiar with the industry, should never have conceded to label the book an 'ultimate history.' In fact, I think Kent should have ended his narrative when the NES console burst onto the scene and billed it as the ultimate history of pre NES video games. To that I would have conceded, and would have given the first part of the book 4 stars if I could have. The second half deserves no more than 2 (and I'm being fairly generous) and in my opinion drags this book down from something worth owning to something barely worth finishing. It's obvious the passion infused in the early part of the book is gone, which is a shame--the first few hundred pages of this book are a great source of video gaming history.
Comprehensive.......2007-07-15
This book is very detailed and well done. It is 600 pages. I think a minor typo (p561) is that Playstation DVD hold 8GB or 17GB dual layer, I believe it is half that (4.7 GB and 9 GB). I also think a fun "fact" that wasn't mentioned in the book is that Donkey Kong Country on the SNES was thought to be the Ultra64 (N64) demo at the show. Otherwise, very in depth, lots of insights into the beginning of pre-pong games, creation of companies like Atari, etc., up to PS2 and Xbox timeframe. This took me a little over 8 hours to read cover-to-cover, but I was always very interested since I grew up playing a lot of arcade games, and enjoy home consoles too.
for real retro fans only.......2007-05-10
Not for the casual retro fan. This book goes deep - deep into the personal ins and outs of the early video game history. Would be better if there are more photos spread over the book. In all, a good read about the people rather than the actual games.
Book Description
Never before has it been so simple to read (and yet still so challenging to solve!) more than 100 puzzles assembled by many of the world's finest cruciverbalists. This large, clear print makes these puzzles easy on the eyes, while the oversized grid squares allow puzzlers to write in each letter with ease. This makes a great gift for senior citizens and anyone else that appreciates larger print.
Book Description
Large-print clues may make these puzzles from the pages of The New York Times easy on the eyes, but they will still challenge the brain. Under Will Shortzs editorship, Large-Print Volume 4 features: 120 easy-to-read crossword puzzles. All levels of difficulty: drawn from the Monday through Friday editions of the Times Author bylines that allow fans to get to know todays top contributors.
Customer Reviews:
New York Times Crossword Puzzle Omnibus.......2007-03-08
Always entertaining, educational, and sometimes frustrating, but that's NOT the fault of the Times!
Great Stuff !!.......2005-11-30
I bought a BUNCH of these large print New York Times Crossword books for my Mom including this one. She was ardent about solving them and felt they helped her in maintaining her mental powers. I would have to agree on that. The large print really IS large and seemed too big to me at first but they were easier for her to savor and work on at her own pace. They also have puzzles you can subscribe to and receive through the mail. I was surprized and delighted during a visit to see that she and a friend worked on them together. They're a terrific resource for an aging parent and well worth the price for the stimulation !!
Book Description
Puzzles so good that they've earned the seal of approval from the NAVH (National Association forVisually Handicapped).
Now, crossword lovers with less than perfect sight can enjoy their favorite pastime without the frustration of trying to read small-size clues and fill in tiny boxes. Each of these puzzles--125 in each book--take up two full pages, and have large word type and generously sized grids with easy-to-see numbering. It's a challenge for the brain, not the eyes, allowing solvers to focus on doing the puzzle, not trying to discern the words. And, of course, the well-constructed crosswords cover a diverse range of topics, avoid "crosswordese," and provide hours of fun.
ABOUT THE NAVH:
The National Association for Visually Handicapped is the only national health agency solely devoted to the "hard of seeing." It's dedicated to the ideal that visual impairment need not lessen one's quality of life. The organization pioneered the development of an accepted standard for large print, and offers education, equipment, and 24-hour assistance to those with limited vision.
Average customer rating:
- Among the best for puzzle fans.
- What's a five-letter word for five stars?
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Large-Print Crosswords Challenge No 4 (Crossword Challenge Puzzlebook , No 4)
Manufacturer: Running Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Crosswords
| Puzzles & Games
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Puzzles & Games
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
Puzzles
| Puzzles & Games
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1561387304 |
Book Description
These 104 challenging crossword puzzles, created by the nations' top constructors, are taken from past editions of the popular Crosswords series by Mel Rosen, a respected cruciverbalist. Designed to meet the standards of the National Association for the Visually Handicapped (NAVH), it features an extra-heavy-duty back cover for comfortable and convenient puzzling.
Customer Reviews:
Among the best for puzzle fans........2002-09-14
Crossword puzzles in this series are some of my mom's favorites.
They are wire-bound, making it easier to lay them flat and get down to business. But she would prefer they be laid out on single pages, and have larger type.
The puzzles are challenging without being overwhelming. These are roughly comparable to those found in the NY Times and LA Times, in both level of difficulty and in their design.
A pretty safe bet for fans, but no 5th star for the reasons above.
What's a five-letter word for five stars?.......2001-06-23
This series is easy to read and laid out conveniently. The puzzles are challenging without being insane. These are my mom's current favorites, and I would recommend them to fans of the crossword puzzles appearing in the NY Times or LA Times.
Book Description
Supervisory Management blends skill-building opportunities and traditional management principles to prepare learners to become supervisors in today's business world. The central theme of Supervisory Management is working through people--developing and empowering them to become better and more efficient in their roles. It closely follows the SCANS requirements for workplace competencies and foundation of skills and personal qualities needed for job performance. The text offers practical insights and advice to address common managerial situations, making it a useful reference for supervisors throughout their careers. In this sixth edition, the authors continue their "hands on" approach with numerous self-checks and skill-building opportunities, even more applications exercises.
Books:
- Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority
- Love & Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin
- Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England
- Maria R: Mary Queen of Scots : The Crucial Years
- Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, V1 & 2
- Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, V1 & 2
- Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince de Joinville
- Mouse Guard: Shadows Within
- Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition
- Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire
Books Index
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Louis XIV
