I'll skip the synopsis since every other reviewer has laid out the story.

I have never read the book but the movie is such fun! It seems to be perfectly attuned to the 12 year old mind (like Mad Magazine). Might not be a good choice for kids under 9 because of the violence and complicated story line.

Great performances especially by Weaver, Voigt and Nelson. I enjoyed the music too.

I would have to say that the pace is just a little slow at times.

All I would add to the previous reviews is that I found the chapters on prayer - largely the work of St. Theophan rather than Scupoli - to be especially useful. His approach to prayer is the classical approach of the Eastern Church. These chapters alone are worth the price of the book and justify chosing the Orthodox rewrite over the original.

This is the best Catholic Bible on the market, unfortunately it leaves a lot to be desired.

I understand that Ignatius Press is planning a badly needed update.

The most serious issue is a strong and very dated liberal bias in the underlying scholarship. The messianic prophecies of the OT are translated in such a way as to obscure the NT interpretation - even when the Hebrew text is quite clear. The attitude of the translators seems to be that the Church represents some kind of break with Judaism rather than being the true heir to the faith of Abraham.

The language of the RSV needs to be updated. The use of "thees and thous" to address God even if justified in 1946 is now archaic. There are other corrections and improvements that are commonly conceded to be needed. For example, the corrections in the 1971 RSV (e.g., Matthew 10:8) do not appear in the RSVCE.

I am most impressed with the new English Standard Version and hope that the RSVCE - 2nd edition is as successful. 90% of the time when there is a significant change from the RSV, the change brings the text closer to the neo-vulgate.

Is it too much to hope that Ignatius press and the publishers of the ESV could get together on a Catholic Edition of the ESV?

The ESV is a much needed and highly successful update of the RSV.

The RSV suffers from a strong liberal bias that manifests itself in downplaying messianic prophecies in the OT and translating passages in the NT in a way that distances the NT from the theology of the councils and church fathers.

The strengths of the RSV are that it is generally literal, quite readable and free from protestant bias. Most importantly, the RSV is free from inclusive language.

The ESV does avoid the use of "man" in an inclusive sense when the original languages do not do so. This is consistent with current standard English usage which tends to avoid the inclusive man except when smooth style or content require it. Most readers would never notice this change stylistically and it is never allowed to affect the integrity of the translation.

The RSV is available in a Catholic edition (RSVCE). In many instances the changes required for the RSVCE have been incorporated into the ESV. In other cases the ESV corresponds better to the neo-vulgate than the RSVCE does, because the scholarship is more conservative.

This leads me to hope that the ESV can be published in a Catholic edition as well. This would require the updating of the RSV deuterocanonicals, the addition of a few footnotes and possibly a few alterations in the translation like Psalm 110 and Luke 1:28.

We Catholics desperately need a translation that is accurate, literal, literary, and based on modern scholarship. There is no Catholic Bible on the market that meets all these criteria.

This series is disappointing. I simply did not find the comments from the Fathers very illuminating presented in this context. This was not what I expected.

I would advise anyone who finds modern biblical scholarship unhelpful to immerse himself in the Fathers directly and in the original context. If we then read the scriptures adopting, if only for the moment, their mindset, their presuppositions, and their methods, the scriptures will be openned up to us in a new and fruitful way.

We moderns can find allegorical interpretation, for example, somewhat farfetched. But it is clear to me that some of what the apostles intended to teach cannot be understood from a strictly literal reading of the text. The apostles themselves do not take a concrete, literal approach to interpreting the Old Testament. Imitating the thought processes of the Fathers, who are much closer culturally to the apostles, opens our eyes to more of the New Testament's message.

In the final analysis, it is difficult to fully comprehend the gospel message presented in the scriptures without realizing that the early Church, for which the New Testament was written, believed in baptismal regeneration, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (understood as sacrificial) and the Church as an organic structure put in place by the apostles.

If the authors of this series had fully appreciated this I think they might taken the plunge into the stream instead of dousing themselves with thimblefuls of water.

A final comment on the choice of the RSV. The major defect of this fine translation is the tendency to downplay the messianic implications of Old Testament texts, that is to "recover" some "original" text from the accretions of subsequent interpretations. Many of the texts that are interpreted messianicly in the New Testament are translated in such a way as to obscure rather than highlight this possiblity. A similar problem arises in the New Testament with the choice of "it" rather than "He" for the Holy Spirit. I'm not sure what alternative the editors had for this problem.

I just used this text for a discrete math course. Most of us were computer science majors and many of them struggled with the math and with the text. This is the audience the text is written for and the author tries to explain everything assuming very little about the student's prior knowledge. This math is obviously hard for non-math majors. If they need to learn it, I haven't seen any Discrete Math text that does a better job for this group.

The book is too simple and wordy for math majors, very strong computer science students and future math teachers. A better approach might be a book like D. Smith's A Transition to Advanced Mathematics for logic, sets, counting, mathematical induction, relations, and functions, combined with Chartrand's Introductory Graph Theory.

One could use this book at the high school level for a senior level discrete math course for strong students preparing for computer science as an alternative to taking pre-calculus.

A better title for this book would be "Advanced Topics in Geometry". The chapters are pretty much self-contained.

This book presumes a thorough, rigorous knowledge of high school geometry such as you might get in a college geometry course designed for future teachers along with considerable mathematical maturity.

This book is rambling, incoherent, repetitive, intellectually dishonest and manipulative. It presents a extreme, one-sided interpretation of the 1989 NCTM math standards as universally recognized, research-based "best practice."

I would recommend that anyone choosing texts for a math methods course use the 2000 NCTM standards themselves and, if necessary, a generic teaching methods text.

The 2000 Standards document is economical, beautifully done and, most importantly, far closer to a consensus of teachers, teacher educators, mathematicians and psychologists on what constitutes best practice than the 1989 document which inspires this text.

This book is rambling, incoherent, repetitive, intellectually dishonest and manipulative. It presents a extreme, one-sided interpretation of the 1989 NCTM math standards as universally recognized, research-based "best practice."

I would recommend that anyone choosing texts for a math methods course use the 2000 NCTM standards themselves and, if necessary, a generic teaching methods text.

The 2000 Standards document is economical, beautifully done and, most importantly, far closer to a consensus of teachers, teacher educators, mathematicians and psychologists on what constitutes best practice than the 1989 document which inspires this text.

This book is appropriate for highly motivated middle school students whe have studied algebra in the seventh grade. The text uses a guided exploration approach to discovering the facts of geometry. For students who take any pleasure in math, this book can be fun. It is attuned to the 13 year old mind. Proof is introduced in a systematic way in the last two chapters.

The teacher must compensate for the fact that the book is not self-contained and is not useful as a reference (no glossary for example). Students must develop a notebook to organize what they learn and for future reference. Students who are left on their own to "construct" their knowledge of geometry through group activities and reflection could find it very tedious. The teacher has to be both a "sage on the stage" as well as a "guide on the side".

The book would not be appropriate at the high school level unless aggressively supplemented with a systematic treatment of Euclidean synthetic geometry. Some high school students would find its comic book style childish and unappealing.

I would recommend the book to math teachers and those studying to teach math as a rich source of ideas, activities and problems.