This is a good place to start if you're looking for a very general introduction to deepwater exploration and production (E&P). Almost nothing gets a lot of detail, but almost nothing is omitted. The chapters cover the following topics:

1 - history of offshore drilling
2 - the move into deeper and deeper water in the eighties
3 - exploration
4 - drilling and completion
5 - development systems
6 - fixed structures -- compliant towers, concrete, etc.
7 - floating systems -- TLPs, FPSOs, spars, and so on
8 - subsea systems
9 - topsides
10 - piplines, flowlines, and risers
11 - technology and the future

The writing is sound, and there are plenty of decent graphics -- pictures of the gigantic Bullwinkle platform; photographs and schematics of equipment and layouts; and a couple of colour plates showing seismic analysis displays. The chapters are really just overviews -- although there's a fair amount of detail in some areas, particularly in platform construction and assembly, there is so much to say that they can't do more than scratch the surface.

The book does give you quite a lot of vocabulary to work with, which is valuable. There are a multitude of online oil and gas glossaries that you might want to search for via the web, but the narrative form that this book provides is a pretty good way to understand them too.

If you are new to E&P and would like a good overview, this is a pretty good place to start, but it won't take you very far in any one direction.

Thomas Goltz spent six years as a reporter in and around Azerbaijan, starting in 1991. He saw the collapse of the USSR and the start of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and filed many war-zone reports. The result is fascinating, though a little uneven in places: Goltz is a fine war reporter, but not the best historiographer in the world.

Despite the title, the book is not quite a diary, although there is a good detail of day-to-day detail about life in Azerbaijan (he spent most of his time in Baku). The book's two main foci are the political history of Azerbaijan during this period, and the conflict with Armenia. The political history is done very well -- Goltz introduces a large cast, keeps them fairly distinct, and through his personal acquaintance with almost all of them brings them to life. It's clear that Goltz acquired a good deal of affection for the Azerbaijanis, and he is enraged by the corruption and indifference of many of the Azerbaijan political class. When, in the end, the old Soviet-era fox Heydar Aliyev wins power and actually gets the Caspian oil (and concomitant money) to flow via deals with international oil companies, Goltz is grudgingly respectful -- Aliyev may be lying about his democratic credentials, but he did achieve some benefit to Azerbaijan, which is more than most of his predecessors did.

As I said, Goltz is fond of the Azerbaijanis, and this does come through in his reporting of the war, which as a result feels a little less even-handed. There's no doubt about the accuracy of his central complaint, often-repeated: that the Armenians, apparently with Russian help, were directly involved in the Karabakh conflict, despite all their claims that it was mere "volunteerism"; and that the media has generally been much kinder to the Armenians than they deserve. He is also scathing about the Azerbaijan military's incompetence and corruption; and he finds the time to make positive comments about Armenia, though he spent relatively little time there. Still, he is pro-Azeri, and it occasionally shows.

The blurb urges you to read this for the adventure if you're not interested in the politics or history, and there are certainly some scary moments as Goltz barely makes it out of some of the more dangerous places alive. But I can't recommend it for that alone. If you like politics and history, this is a great source on Azerbaijan in the 90's; it's not great writing but it's interesting and has details you won't find anywhere else.

Seward has taken five key players in the Wars of the Roses and told their stories. The result is entertaining and full of good factual information, but as a story it is so lopsided as to be useless if you're not already familiar with the history of the period.

Seward writes well enough, though his style's not as entertaining as Alison Weir's (whose history of this period is a much better place to start). The problem is not his style, though; there are simply too many threads in the story for this to be a good way of telling it. Seward tries hard to make the historical sequence mesh with the stories of his five protagonists; he cuts the story into chapters which are in chronological order and each of which revolves primarily around one of the five. However, the points at which the book flows most smoothly as history are exactly the points where he focuses least on his protagonists.

If you don't think of this as a history of the Wars of the Roses, though, and instead think of it as five interlaced biographical sketches, this is a very worthwhile book. Because of the focus Seward has chosen, there is a lot more detail about these individuals than you will find in most of the histories. The men in particular stand out: the Earl of Oxford, William Hasting, and John Morton. The women (Margaret Beaufort and Jane Shore) are less memorable, sadly; mainly because there is so little actual information about them, and they were perforce only indirect players in much of the political manoeuvering of the age.

Recommended; but read something else first -- this is better as background material than as an overview of the period.

This set consists of six maps, each of which folds out to about 22" by 16", and a booklet. The maps don't cover all of Middle Earth -- instead they are regional maps that cover all the main action of "The Lord of the Rings".

The six maps are as follows, in more or less the order in which the characters in "The Lord of the Rings" encounter them.
1. The Shire. Includes all of the Shire, and goes beyond to include Lake Evendim in the north, the beginning of the Gulf of Lune in the west, and Bree on the far eastern edge. Hence it also includes the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs.
2. Eregion. From Lothlorien in the southeast to Bree in the northwest; includes the Misty Mountains from just north of Fangorn up to the southern edge of the Ettenmoors. This one is at 30 miles to the inch; the others are all at 20 miles to the inch.
3. Rohan. Includes Isengard at the western edge of the map; all of Fangorn forest, north as far the field of Celebrant at the southern edge of Mirkwood, and east to the east shore of the Anduin, including the Emyn Muil.
4. West Gondor. The Lefnui river runs down the west edge of this map, which covers Pinnath Gelin, the Blackroot Vale, and Dol Amroth in the southeast.
5. East Gondor. Belfalas in the southwest, with Dol Amroth just off the map; the mouths of the Anduin and east as far as south Ithilien and the foothills of the Mountains of Shadow. Minas Tirith is there, of course, and Osgiliath, but Minas Morgul is off the eastern edge of the map. Cair Andros is right at the north edge.
6. Mordor. Mordor is a nice rectangular shape for a map, and the map covers it more or less exactly, with the addition of Ithilien as far as Osgiliath down the west edge.

The maps are not colourful--click on the image of the box on the Amazon page and you'll see an enlarged view that shows the legend areas of all six maps; the colouring there is just as it is on the maps themselves, so that should give you an idea. However, despite the lack of strong colour, the calligraphy and cartography are beautiful.

Reeve does not appear to have taken any liberties that I can see with the topography as described by Tolkien, either by inventing extra names to fill in blank spaces or changing anything. I was a bit surprised to see how large the Shire was, though; it's the same land area as Rohan, which simply astonished me -- I thought of it as a tiny place, perhaps sixty or so miles across, but Reese makes it over 250 miles from west to east, including Westmarch and Buckland. I went back to the original maps at the back of "The Return of the King", and realized that Tolkien had in fact drawn it at least 150 miles across--the scale is so small it's hard to be precise--but it's still surprising.

The booklet includes information about all the major regions of Middle Earth, whether or not they are on the map. On the back cover is a map of all of Middle Earth. Sadly, there's no overall poster to go with it--I'm still looking for a good one. The booklet is informative and moderately detailed; I would guess it's a handbook for a role-playing game, since a game is mentioned in the cover, but there are no more details.

Overall, this is an attractive set of maps for a good price. The weak points are the lack of colour, and the fact that only parts of Middle Earth are mapped.

This is a very high quality collegiate dictionary. I am a member of a word puzzle organization ... and this is our standard reference, along with the unabridged version, "Webster's Third New International Dictionary". Many very obscure words show up in puzzles, but it is relatively rare I find I have to go to the unabridged dictionary to look them up.

In addition to being thorough (with excellent sections such as biography, geographical names, and foreign words and phrases (such as "en plein jour" or "inshallah") it includes compressed but informative etymological data. For example, the entry on "spacious" has this - ME, fr. AF spacioux, fr. L spatiosus, fr. spatium: space, room (14c)"; in a little over a single line you get a long lineage; though I should mention that this has been slightly corrected since the tenth edition of this dictionary. You may have to learn some of the abbreviations (Middle English, Anglo-French, 14th century) but I found them generally intuitive and didn't need to look them up much at all.

In addition, there are excellent usage paragraphs scattered throughout. These are of two types. One type compares the usage of different words with very similar meanings. For example, the entry on "satiate" provides a usage paragraph that compares "satiate", "sate", "surfeit", "cloy", "pall", "glut" and "gorge", identifying the precise differences of usage between them. The paragraph is cross-referenced at each of the other six words, so you don't have to just stumble across satiate to find it.

The other kind of usage paragraph discusses correctness. A good example is "hopefully", which in its sense "I hope that" is controversial. The dictionary asserts the validity of this controversial use, which is sure to annoy some purists, but it does acknowledge the debate and cite grammatical arguments for its position.

There are quite a few new words (my favourite is "dead-cat bounce") and edits to all sections. The only major change, though, is that the abbreviations section has been eliminated; abbreviations are now included in the main body of the dictionary.

The dictionary is available online at m-w.com, and I strongly recommend you take a look at it. There is a CD-ROM for sale too, which is worth getting as it adds some fancy search features, though if you're like me you'll want the paper version to keep by the bed. Note that if you have the unabridged MW CD too (the third edition of their New International Dictionary) then the same interface allows you to choose which dictionary to search -- a very nice feature. Purchase of the dictionary also gives you a complimentary year's subscription to the m-w website, which is worth having -- though be warned that it will automatically renew in a year for $ unless you choose to auto-cancel.<I> --This text refers to an edition which conatins a CD-ROM. Not all editions of this item contain a CD. Please check the item desription for further information.--</I>

India has five thousand years of history that we have enough evidence to write about. Any book that can simply be coherent and readable while covering so much ground is an achievement. John Keay's "India: A History" is more than that, though; it is superbly-written and powerfully narrated.

Keay notes in the introduction that he has deliberately avoided focusing more on recent history than on ancient: "a history which reserves half its narrative for the 19th and 20th centuries may seem more relevant, but it can scarcely do justice to India's extraordinary antiquity." Naturally the availability of more historical sources does increase the attention paid to recent events, but still the Raj does not appear till nearly three quarters of the way through, and the 20th century and the real start of the struggle for independence is close to the end of the book. The result is a long, thoughtful and detailed telling of many of the dynasties and civilization that flourished in India -- though, as Keay also says in the introduction, only the highlights are mentioned, since "with perhaps 20 to 40 dynasties co-existing within the subcontinent at any one time, it would be [. . .] sado-masochism [to include them all]". So even at this extra level of detail there has been substantial editing. And there could have been more; the book's only fault is that Keay mentions just too many of the endless dynastic dramas. The essence of a one-volume history is selective editing, and the book could have been shorter and a little less dry in places.

However, the picture of India that emerges is deep, complex and fascinating, from the earliest Harappan archaeological relics through to the Gandhis. The Raj is of course particularly interesting: although technologically and industrially the British clearly surpassed them greatly at the time of the Raj, some of the diplomatic exchanges that Keay retails show the Indians as being more sophisticated, more civilized, and in many ways just smarter than the British. It was inevitable that the yoke would be thrown off; the only question was what India would be able to do with its independence.

Keay's prose is also a great pleasure; he has a wonderfully dry sense of humour, and he conveys exciting events with panache but also with precision and clarity.

Recommended.

"Like Hidden Fire" is another of Hopkirk's wonderful books about central Asia. He begins in the 19th century with some political backstory, but this is essentially a book about a subplot of the First World War. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany wanted to find a way to destabilize the British holdings in south and central Asia, and had lost no opportunity over the previous twenty years to win the friendship of Islamic nations, particularly Turkey,the core of the tattered Ottoman Empire. When war broke out, the Germans set plans in motion to incite revolts in India and Afghanistan, and to take over control of Persia, nominally neutral but in fact a battleground for the great powers.

Over the four years of the war, the consequences of this German plan played out in individual dramas of espionage, diplomacy and military action. Hopkirk covers both sides of the story, and does a better job than in his "The Great Game" of keeping a fairly even-handed tone. Some of the German exploits were astonishing -- particularly those of Captain Niedermayer, who by a horrifying series of forced marches penetrated the Persia-Afghanistan border with a diplomatic mission to the Emir of Afghanistan. The British heroes are covered too: Ranald McDonell, Edward Noel, and most interestingly, Reginald Teague-Jones, who disappeared at the end of the war in mysterious circumstances. Hopkirk did a good deal of work and ultimately did manage to trace Teague-Jones. I won't spoil the surprise by telling you what he found, but there are clearly still mysteries waiting to be revealed when the UK goverment opens up the 100 year old files in a few more years time.

Political events of the time had an impact on the story too, most notably the Bolshevik revolution, which changed the course of Russian involvement and hence the balance of power in south Asia. One event is covered in detail -- the massacre of the commissars in Baku in 1919. Once an icon of Soviet political mythology, the vast memorial built there was torn down in 1990 after the collapse of the USSR.

If you are new to Hopkirk, I'd recommend reading "The Great Game" first, because as well as being immensely entertaining it will give you a broad and thorough grounding in the political background to imperial politics in Asia. But after that, this is a great follow-up.

In the mid-thirties Fitzroy Maclean was a junior diplomat at the British embassy in Paris. Bored with the pleasant but undemanding routine, he requested a posting to Moscow, and "Eastern Approaches" opens with Maclean on a train, pulling out of Paris. Most of this first section of the book covers his repeated attempts to explore Soviet central Asia. He reached Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and many other places, and though there are sadly few pictures it is a riveting story -- fighting Soviet bureaucracy; being trailed by the NKVD; negotiating with locals for food and a place to sleep. At one point he manages with difficulty to persuade the Soviets to let him cross into Afghanistan: communicating primarily in sign language he manages to obtain an escort to Mazar-i-Sharif, through a lawless area with a cholera outbreak.

Maclean was in Moscow until late 1939, and so was present during the great Stalinist purges. One long chapter is devoted to one of the largest of these, in which Bukharin, Yagoda and other stalwarts of the Stalinist regime were accused (and of course convicted) of heinous crimes. The details of the trial, and the responses of the accused, are utterly fascinating; Maclean's analysis equally so.

When war broke out, Maclean was prevented from enlisting at first because of his position as a diplomat. He eventually managed to sign up by a subterfuge, and in North Africa Maclean distinguished himself in the early actions of the newly formed SAS. He rose from private to officer rank, and Churchill personally chose him to lead a liaison mission to central Yugoslavia, where Tito and his partisans were emerging as a major irritant to the German control of the Balkans. The last third of the book recounts how over eighteen months Maclean built Allied/Partisan cooperation from nothing to a key element in the last phases of the war. By the end, Maclean was a Major-General, and a friend of Tito's.

Maclean is a fine writer, with the British gift for understatement and wry humour. His exploits are said to have formed the basis for the character of James Bond, though Maclean would never confirm or deny this. The sequence when he personally kidnaps a Persian general who is collaborating with the Germans is certainly straight out of a Bond film. The book is spectacularly entertaining: if you have any taste for history, adventure, travel writing or war-time memoirs, this is as good as it gets.

There are a lot of good things to say about this wonderful movie, but the songs have to be at the top of any list. Almost every song is among Disney's very best. The only exception, "Human Again", is one that was re-inserted for this edition, having been cut for theatrical release -- it's not a bad song; it's just not up to the amazing standard of the others. The arrangements are operatic in their complexity and the lyrics are flawless: by turns witty, moving and engaging. "Be Our Guest" has got to be most dazzling single performance in a Disney picture; the title song won an Oscar; and "Gaston" would have been the best song in almost any other movie.

The story is one of the good old fairy tales, going back beyond Perrault to the 16th century and probably before. Belle's father is trapped in an enchanted castle by a monstrous beast, who is really a handsome prince cursed by a good sorceress because of his evil temper. Belle offers herself in her father's place, and you can guess the rest. The story is well-done; the cast is uniformly excellent, though Angela Lansbury stands out with a terrific characterization of Mrs. Potts, the teapot. The reproduction is beautiful.

There is also a set of extra features on the second DVD. My seven-year-old daughter went through the "Mrs. Potts' Personality Test" in a few minutes and was delighted to discover she resembles Belle more than she does Mrs. Potts or the maid. She also enjoyed a musical memory game with Chip, the teacup. There's another game, though, which was a bit of a failure -- "Maurice's Invention Workshop Game". You have to get a code from a game on disk 1, which isn't that hard to do, though it took a bit of fiddling around. Then we got into the game and got up to a point where we had to dodge candlesticks, and found that no matter what we did, we bumped into a candlestick and lost.

Oh, well. But the movie was so good we hardly cared. Highly recommended.

You know how a dressing gown hanging on the back of your door can look like someone standing there? Or how a noise in the night sounds like a monster tip-toeing down the hall? Kids get scared and call in their parents: there's something in the closet, Daddy! But what if there really were?

"Monsters, Inc." is a look at the other side of the closet door, in Pixar's finest animation. What you'll find through that door is a whole civilization of monsters, who scare children for a living; and one particular monster, James P. Sullivan, brilliantly voiced by John Goodman, who has a run-in with a little girl. Billy Crystal plays Mike Wazowski, the comic sidekick -- the guy who looks like a one-eyed green soccer ball with arms and legs on the DVD cover; Sullivan is the purplish hairy thing behind him. They work in a scream factory -- hey, what do you think monsters do all day? The girl is a toddler, barely verbal, and cute as a bug, and she's the center of some of the funniest action scenes in the movie.

There's not a lot to say about the plot, except that it supports some great action and some pretty good comedy work. Crystal does a fine job, but Goodman's deadpan delivery is even better -- his "slumber party" line was my favourite of the movie. The slapstick is up to the standard you'd expect, and there are even a couple of lines aimed at the adults that the kids may not quite catch.

In many ways the movie is designed to appeal to a Daddy/daughter combination more than anything else; there's a definite tinge of "what will I do when my little girl grows up and leaves me?" to the movie. I don't want to give anything away, but Dads should watch this with their six year old girls snuggled up next to them.

The only reason I haven't given it five stars is that although it's fun, beautifully-animated, and very well voiced, I don't think it quite has that spark that makes an animated feature a long-term classic, the way some of the best Disney movies are. It's not a musical, by the way -- there's not a song in it. But if it isn't the best Disney have ever produced, it does have panache, style, and a sense of humour. You'll enjoy it, and so will your kid.