This book is another interesting and informative, but narrow subject history book of the type this author prefers to write. In some sections it poses as a cookbook. I was irritated by the amount of text actually devoted to Codfish recipes, when what I purchased was a historical type book . The author has a very good writing style. The book covers the early history of some cultures that took advantage of this bottom dwelling fish prized for its unique white meat. The Codfish affected these early cultures as it still does today, where regional and national economies are suffering from the impact of worldwide diminishing Codfish stocks in spite of some sporadic conservation measures.
This reader recommends ignoring the all too frequent codfish recipes interspersed with the good historical information. This book makes for a fine compact interesting history of man's relationship with the Codfish. Ignore the historical section and I suppose it would be a passable Codfish cookbook.

This book as well as this author's other book, "COD", contain a wealth of information about cooking recipes, and it does not mix well with the historical section. This author has to decide if he wants to write a cookbook or a history book. It makes this reader hesitant to take on another book by this author entitled "Salt" , because a history of salt may bring an overwhelming list of recipes. If the reader can ignore the history v.s. cookbook controversy, then the historical section is good writing, very interesting and informative. It seems civilizations, and conquerors may come and go, but the Basques remain, always attempting to remain true to their laws and traditions. A small fringe Basque group employs violent terrorist tactics with the aim of forming a separate Basque nation. The author conveys historical sympathy with majority of peaceful Basque people against the failed policies of the central Spanish government. His view is that they are often portrayed as scapegoats. I thought this sympathy may be a case of the author becoming a little too close to his subject matter and losing his objectivity, until the recent spate of train bombings in Spain. The Spanish government's first suspect was announced to be the Basque separatist movement, but later it was discovered to be Islamic extremists. All in all, it was a very worthwhile book dealing to inform oneself about the Basques and Basque history.

This book's main point which it drives home continuously from almost all the contributory authors was the flawed decision making process to site the nation's HLNW (high level nuclear waste) at Yucca Mountain. Because of number of contributors, the information is a little repetitious and each author strayed a little into the other's subject area. What should have been a decision based on science and economics became heavily weighted down with political considerations. The facts show it was a flawed decision making process. Some of the contributing authors seem to say that the optimum place for Nuclear storage was not found, that the Yucca Mountain site was a political decision. If there had been a free exchange of knowledge and facts, then the correct site would have been chosen. The public furor is the result of a bad decision making process, totally ignoring the strongest sentiment that drives the public with projects of this nature, "Not In My Backyard", no matter what the scientific facts may show. Can science and some theoretical hand waving be relied upon to safely judge one site better than another for the duration of the next 10,000 years?
The book's chapter on how other countries are dealing with their nuclear waste was the most beneficial part of the book and also very succinct. The authors lead the reader to topics about Carbon 14 leakage, other country's storage systems, and "engineered barriers", but after leading the reader to these terms little or no explanation is given. This is good book to get a slice of information about the Yucca Mountain decision process. This reader believes the subject matter is too narrow to really inform most readers about the process of storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for the home gageteer. The author Jan Axelson is a rare example of someone that knows her stuff, explains it well to novices, and provides excellent generic examples of code. The examples provided cover situations such as; exporting data bits out thru the parallel port, reading info from the data port, searching for data ports and addresses, and using the parallel port to communicate pc to pc. Seldom do you find a "can-do" person that provides excellent instruction at a beginner's level. The fascination of this book is that as home computers become more powerful, they are still limited in their effect on the external environment, except through dedicated peripherals, such as printers, scanners, etc. With this book, a pc port relay kit (purchased off the internet), and maybe a semester of Visual Basic instruction and " you da man ". Once you can open and close a relay connected to your parallel port from a visual basic program you are off and running. Most electrical devices in you home become fair game. This book needs an update, except for a Tour-de Force in the beginning chapters of code segments in Pascal, Assembler And Quick-Basic, the remainder of the book is in Visual basic 4.0. This reader had no problem importing the examples provided on the enclosed floppy disk into Visual Basic 5.0 . This author has also written a sister book "The Complete Serial Port ", and it is on my "must read " list.

This book should really contain the name of the city (Worcester, Massachusetts ) in the subtitle. This reader believes an intimate knowledge of the city of Worcester is central to appreciating this book, otherwise the locations mentioned within the text will just appear as an unconnected litany of place names.. The book painstakingly plots the spread of the Irish immigrant community across the city landscape, parish by parish. It explains the political tightrope walk the Irish-American and the American-Irish developed with the host culture and with the newer immigrant cultures also attempting to assimilate. The author has done his homework. Quotes from leading figures, Irish community newspapers and political speeches are exhaustive. One interesting point that agrees with Andrew Greely's book on Irish-Americans is that the Irish outside of New York City and the Boston area. assimilated quickly into the melting pot, but the ethnic identity and more mature, less vibrant, industrial economies of the Northeast cities made the immigrant battle for a "piece of pie" more difficult, than in cities to the West. .The book shows that the history of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Worcester is a pretty effective barometer that highlighted the conflicts within the Irish-American community. The author is to be commended on the research, but any purchaser of this book should know that a knowledge of the city of Worcester and its institutions would be especially helpful to appreciate this book fully. I gave it a three star rating because the quotes and research became a little too tedious in some sections.

This book and its companion book The White Nile are both some of the more enjoyable and interesting history books available. They will not disappoint anyone looking for an interesting story of equatorial exploration, in the days when the interior of African was still the "great unknown " to the world at large. One should read both the Blue and White Nile books by this author to really get a feel for the history that concentrates on the era of European involvemnt into the Nile area and of course the discovery of the source of the Nile. It also gives a good background into the roots of modern history of Egypt and Ethiopia with respect to the European powers in light of todays events.

This book and its companion book "The Blue Nile" will not disappoint anyone looking for an interesting story of equatorial exploration, in the days when the interior of Africa was still the "great unknown " to the world at large. This book has fallen into or is teetering on the brink of political incorrectness in some circles, but it is amazing that that is what is drawn from this book. It is one of the best accounts of the exploration for the source of the Nile river. The source was not known by the world at large until a series of explorations and conquests took place. Taking an overall view, armies still clashed with the native inhabitants, explorers still faced hardships and ordeals. A portion of World History took place in this area,.in what was probably the last equatorial "Man against Nature exploration struggles The book is extremely well written. A very entertaining style. I rate the Blue and White Nile together. The White Nile led me to the Blue Nile book and a plan for some follow-up reading on the explorer, Richard Francis Burton. The main point is the shocking realization that that source of one of the world most historic
rivers was not common knowledge until fairly recent times.

A very interesting book. The Author shows how mindsets, philosophies and cultures had to change to enable the Zero to be accepted. The West overlooked then resisted the idea of zero.
When the zero idea took hold and was finally accepted it affected everything from Aristoteloism, to commerce, to Art. Even the biblical creation stories took on a different light.
Art in the West during the Renaissance gained a major improvement
as the sense of perspective was developed. This vanishing point within a painting is the equivalnt of the introduction of Zero into the art world .
I would read other books by this author, interesting history, The book moves right along, I like the Author's style, plenty of background, but always stayed the coure. I believe an audio book
is probably not the correct format for this information. I would have liked to have seen the test portraying some of the
equtions.

A very wordy, but interesting book. The author intertwines the subject matter around a very well developed background, in fact a little too well developed. The main story is about the human mind's inability to contemplate infinity . The author points out that there are warnings in the Kabbalah, the Jewish book of mysticism, about peering into this aspect of mathematics. The famous mathematician Georg Cantor is credited with discovering and pioneering this area of mathematics. Mysteriously every time Cantor attempted to seriously delve into infinity theory he experienced a mental breakdown. Kurt Goebel another famous mathematician was also mentally affected by working in this area. The very basics of what they were considering was performing mathematical operations on magnitudes of infinities. Infinities of different sizes. It is a strange concept but something akin to asking, "what set has more members, a set of all the integers or the set of odd integers "? Once infinities are ordered then they may be ranked and considered eligible for mathematical operations. This is the second book I have read by Mr. Aczel. I believe the title of this book should have lead to the "meat" of the story, but the background history and the biography of Georg Cantor is given the same weight as the "mystery of the Aleph". The same was true of another book by Mr.Aczel, "God's Equation" the background material overshadowed the story. I would prefer a little more in-depth text about the heart of the matter.

No book that mentions the dawning of Darwin's theory of evolution is complete without a story of the debate between Thomas Huxley and William Wilberforce. Thomas Huxley used a devastating one liner to Wilberforce's detriment and so it seems Darwin's theory of evolution was unleashed to become a commonly accepted fact or so these books seem to suggest. When I saw this book I just had to read it. I discovered that William Wilberforce had a long political career as a MP in England. Mr. Wilberforce devoted most of his political career, over 40 years to abolishing slavery. Wilberforce was almost single-handedly responsible for England's repudiation of slavery within its empire and forbidding British ships to engage in the slave trade. He is also credited with creating a religious revival in British society as a result of his policies based upon a high moral code. Wilberforce's life ends with a Hollywood flair, receiving news of his political success within hours before his death. But what about the debate? Darwinism, evolutionism, and the Thomas Huxley debate? It was not mentioned at all. I was a little disapppointd that the debate was not mentioned, but on second thought in the perspective of Wilberforce's life it probably does not rate mentioning. This book is well written, compact; it is this reader's type of book, short and to the point. The author explained Wilberforce's accomplishments and his guiding principals. More importanltly the Author in outline form sums up Wilberforce's life achievements in the last chapter, a very good technique that more authors should use to help instill the major points of a text. The appendix consists of the a chapter of a book that Wilberforce's wrote. This book had a great effect upon the British upper class and gives the reader a chance to sample the personal style of Wilberforce himself, in case the reader wants to read some of his original works. Very well done.