Tha roman-alphabet renderings of the Khmer words is misleading, but for most aspects of the course only good things can be said. The exercises are well-chosen and paced in a way that makes learning Khmer about as painless as it can be, which is still pretty painful.

This book supposes no prior knowledge of Khmer. The other Khmer book I have seen, by Huffman, is very technical and seems to suppose a level of training in structural linguistics and phonetics that is beyond what most people have.

Phew. Judging by this book, Merton was a much better person than he was a writer. Maybe I went into this book expecting too much, but I finished the book utterly unimpressed with what it had to say. It boils down to a series of very discrete strategies for living one's life in a loving and satisfying way. I can't really ``disagree'' with it--yeah sure, ok, love is good, uh-huh--but that doesn't stop me from wishing Merton were a lot more explicit and rigorous in his prescriptions. As it stands, I don't know how anyone could possibly profit from reading this touchy-feely manifesto.

This very funny movie is also very unbalanced, not that it makes any attempt to be. Moore is good at showing a few of the kooks and local sights that capture the spirit of a rotting town, but when he starts trying to analyze why things went so sour, the film gets unfortunately naive. Don't expect a movie about corporate ruthlessness, because the ruthlessness is taken for granted. What remains is really just a well-made portrait of American small-towners at their most pitiable, which I must admit can be pretty funny.

Pelton's humour and knack for commonsense carry this book. It carries plenty of information packaged in well-organized sections, which makes it great for leisure reading.

I've read it several times over the last year and remain impressed with the humanity and cheer with which he writes. In many ways his friendly, live-with-the-locals style of travel is a perfect antidote to the Lonely Planet syndrome, which has travelers bunking with other backpackers at guesthouses and haggling every last shekel out of the most kindly third-world merchants.

I've been to a couple of these places and found the dangers overstated in the book, but that may be a function of the book's age.

Unfortunately, it appears that some sections of the book are very poorly edited, and by now, the third edition is long out of date. I would never use it as my sole source of information on a place, but it's a wonderful way to get a quick idea of what's happening where, and what you might have to do if you're unlucky enough to find yourself there.

Whoa! I can hardly say anything bad about this book, except that the author must have been at least a little nuts to write it. The passion and honesty with which he writes about his own (self-diagnosed) shortcomings, as well as his obsessive attempts to remedy them, are pleasantly eerie. In an age when physical valour counts for little, and in a discipline--literature--where so many practicioners despise the cultivation one's own flesh, this book is an original. Highly entertaining.

Critics must be easily shocked if they really think this book is as ``shocking'' as its jackets suggest. Buss is a clear writer and does a fine job of explaining a theory of sexuality based on evolutionary psychology, but I don't think his conclusions are that new, or even that shocking. The bulk of what he says can be restated (without the supporting data) in a much slimmer book. I recommend The Evolution of Desire to anyone who hasn't heard basic arguments about evolutionary psychology before. But if you've done any reading at all about evolutionary biology, this is probably not a terribly revealing read.

Linus Pauling's book made me feel as if only a few grams of the right chemicals could make me live forever. It's a wonderful feeling, and I think the psychosomatic effects of megadosing on vitamins boosted my energy levels by 20-25%.

I lack the expertise to criticize the science, but I do know that Pauling's ideas regarding vitamins were controversial at best, and probably just wrong. Too bad. Also, Pauling says little about the very real danger of kidney stones that can result from large doses of ascorbic acid.

As far as I know, most of the advice in the book that does not pertain to megadoses of vitamins is considered quite sound. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.)

In sum: enjoy the book, but try to separate the advice that reflects consensus from the advice that reflects the lesser ideas of an otherwise brilliant mind.

No one writes better profiles than David Remnick, and you can find plenty of them in this book. From his language to his structure to his unfailingly adept choice of detail, he is a master.

My one caveat is that _The Devil Problem_ doesn't always succeed in *making* the subject interesting, at least not in the cases of the most public figures. You need to go into the Reggie Jackson profile with a basic interest in Reggie Jackson. But Remnick's profiles are all comprehensive and eviably well-written. If you want to know what Reggie's up to these days, I doubt you could find a better short profile to satisfy your curiosity.

It's a shame that this book had to be so big, and its excerpts so brief. McCaffery has chosen a good selection of postmodern SF, but the excerpts are too often just a couple pages long. The result is a book a mile wide and an inch deep: it touches on every aspect of postmodern SF without really explaining or clearing up anything at all.

A good way to use this book might be to read through it, choose what strikes your fancy, then buy the complete books attached to those. But I'm afraid if you just read this book, your glimpses of this very exciting genre will be too fleeting for you to get a good picture of it as a whole.

To his credit, McCaffery has chosen an excellent array of writers and subgenres, including many who I did not know were SF or who dealt with SF in ways I hadn't expected. I should also mention that the design of the book is fantastic.

...and far from ok if you don't. Nozick's book has a tendency toward sentimentality, but I do think he is to be applauded for trying to take on these issues. So rarely does a philosopher write about things that really matter to us, like love or death or family or sex. I suppose the price you pay for writing about human issues like these is a sacrifice of rigour and an unfortunate tendency to sound like a self-help book.

Nevertheless, the book is worth reading, if only because it reminds us where philosophy comes from and why we think in the first place. I disagreed with Nozick often and consider some of the chapters puff pieces, but I must admit that it's been a long time since I read a contemporary philosophical work that made me consider changing the way I think and act.