Kevin Thurston

Terrible!, Aug 4 2003

Once again I wish I could give a book a negative number of stars due to the poor quality of the book.

Lisa G. from UT and the book's promotional material try to lead you to believe that the transition from the Twain text and the Nelson text is seamless, when the truth is that the change is so abrupt and annoying that I could hardly finish reading the book. Twain starts the book as another narrative written by Huck Finn. When Nelson takes over, the voice of Huck Finn disappears to be replaced by some sort of stilted, sportscaster style of reporting events as they unfold. While Twain would have Huck write something similar to "I warn't cornsarned about how far he would get. He lit on… Read more

Jethro Tull Sheet Music for Flute, Sep 26 2001

I bought this book when it first came out (which was about 1978) which was also about the time I started playing the flute in an efort to emulate my musical hero, Ian Anderson. The fact that it is still available is testimony to it's value.

This book contains some brief instructions on how to do some of the special techniques Ian uses. It also decodes how those special techniques are indicated in the sheet music. Since this came out in 1978, there are no pieces in it that were produced later than that date. This means the most recent material in it comes from Songs From the Woods. This includes the easy Fire at Midnight, the somewhat more difficult Cup of Wonder and the more difficult… Read more

Not What I Expected, Sep 14 2001

The first disappointment was that this book is not really very well written (there are many grammatical errors) and not organized very well either. For example; on pages 127-128 we are given a big build-up about Shermer's debate with Duane Gish on March, 10 1995, but then we don't get anything about what actually happened that night. We get a tearing down of a strawman of creationism.

It is with creationism that Shermer saves his greatest vitriol, apparently having believed it himself previously, he feels betrayed by that belief and now has to save the rest of the world from his error. This is also evident in his treatment of Ayn Rand. As his passions become evident in the book, we have… Read more