Bentley Reviews

Though personally, I find him much sounder on the Mercedes or BMW, but that's just me. Also check out Soren Kierkegaard's masterful explication of the inner workings of the Volvo, and Haruki Murakami's recent works on Toyotas; he is especially enlightening on the interaction of enviromentalism and modern urbanism as represented by the Prius.

The book is not a guide but it goives a lot of useful Information. It is a pity it is so difficult to obtain. Extracts from the book can be found under the travel section of the "Telegraph Online" a newspaper in London that has over 45 web pages devoted to the pilgrimage along with a complet FAQ. Search alta Vista or Yahoo for this newspaper.

As a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital with both in-patient and residental units, this book has been immensely helpful as a resource in providing spirituality groups for our patients and residents. I highly recommend it to anyone leading groups on spiritual themes. It can be adapted to many different settings.

Being a teacher developing a new Video Production course at our school, this book has proven itself to be very beneficial. It takes the video process and breaks it down into steps that the students understand. It really makes the video process easy!

Of all the children's books I have borrowed/read, this has to be one of the best bedtime stories. I was yawning by page two, and I wasn't even tired. My daughter was looking around the room & sighing while I read it. Do the Caldecott judges keep children in mind when they award these books?

While I can appreciate the idea of living your dream, no matter the cost, the "tale" itsself was drawn out, boring and choppy. The story could have been told & illustrated with *much* more whimsy, for such an interesting fellow/life. I can imagine what a great book this could have been.

...I chose Snowflake Bentley for my Caldecott Presentation in Childrens Literature. This book gives children a rich history lesson in a personal and meaningful way. It helps children to become better acquainted with a important person and learn the reasoning behind what he was interested in. The book also gives little facts on the sides of every page which are interesting to look over. I recommend this book for children and parents to read to their children.

The inspiring true story of photographer and self-made scientist Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley proves that anyone can achieve their dream. Born of humble means on a Vermont farm in 1865, Bentley was fascinated with weather and devoted his life to studying snow crystals. With the aid of his parents, who sacrificed their life's savings so he could buy the proper equipment, Bentley created photographs that provided the world with invaluable insight into snow crystals.

Mary Azarian illustrates this charmer with warm, hand-colored woodcuts that create an appropriately old-fashioned feel. The simple main text of this 1999 Caldecott Medal winner flows well with the charming illustrations. Sidebars on each page add additional details that maintain interest for older readers and allow the main text to remain focused on the story.

I found this very inspirational and a joy to read. My only complaint is the dearth of actual photographs by Bentley. The entire book builds interest in the photographs, but only three tiny copies of the actual photographs are shown on the last page.

I didn't know what to expect from this book because it doesn't fit neatly into any genre. It's a romance, it's a thriller, it's the story of a woman's struggle for self-aceptance.

Helms is a master at putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The plot is intense but plausible, and the climax kept me on the edge of my seat for several pages. You may read this book in one sitting, but you'll not soon forget it.

You could read this book in one sitting. But after the first page, you probably won't be able to, since you'll be making sure the doors are locked and the curtains are drawn. FOGS IN AUGUST is at once a suspense-thriller in the "stalker" genre and a romance with fully realized and likeable characters, including the one who turns out to be stalking the main character, Sarah. Ms. Helms delivers up several delectable dishes, including beautiful and handsome characters, laugh-out-loud or heart-thumping descriptive phrases, and a twisting and turning plot. Her descriptions and similes are so fresh, it's like having a salad in the garden on a warm spring morning. But it's the story itself that gives the reader a lot to chew on, from the odd and touching goings on at the senior center where the main character, Sarah, is the director, to the remodeling she's doing at her family farm, to the delightful characters that populate this book. Gordon, Sarah's best friend, is a gay man who provides a sounding board for Sarah and a shoulder to sometimes cry on. Linda is the beautiful and enigmatic roommate, who propels Sarah into eye-opening introspection. A retired school teacher at the center, who was one of Sarah's teachers, provides unexpected and challenging guidance when Sarah is at her wits end. The very best thing is you don't know who the true villains are because, in this small Southern town, everything is dripping with that Southern charm and overt friendliness, so you don't know who to fear until it's too late!----Ronald L. Donaghe...

I loved this book: the way it's written, the story (not really a fairy tale and not the usual happy end),the characters and... the suspense! I couldn't put it down. Since I really had a good time reading this book, I hope this author will come soon with more...

I only have 2 years of programming experience. I read an awful lot of programming texts. Right now I have 10 books just on C itself. Not to mention all the java and C++ books... My point to saying this is, if you've already read as many books as I have, this book will do nothing for you. I read this book over the weekend and was just astonished with how simple minded it all was. I constantly said "Duh..." throughout the entire book. The pseudo code in this book was the worst I've ever seen. I have never returned a book before except for "Linux Socket Programming". I returned this one today.

The reason I did give this book 3 stars was because I can see it being extremely great for uneducated newbies. It will teach them a great deal and have them think about efficiency and general good programming practices.

I was amazed at all of the great reviews I saw with this book. Everyone that gave a review must of been new to computer programming. I was personally expecting a few more advanced topics such as real C and C++ code. Not the .... pseudo code that this author insisted on using.

Overall, this is a great book for neophytes. If you're new to programming, get this book and give it a good once over. Don't pay attention to his style though... As he stated in the book, it's due to the constraints on space and the fact he didn't want to write a 1200 page book. However, if you have gotten to the point where you've studied advanced data structures and algorithms and know what a linked list is and a binary tree and you understand the concepts behind a heap, priority queues and such, I'd go for another book that is going to advance your knowledge, not bring it back a step.

I consider this book a classic. Written in 1986, Bentley engages in some of the best deconstruction and explanation of programming problems that I have ever seen. While it is true that the constraints he discusses are in the distant past, his methods of finding solutions will forever remain part of the programmer's toolbox.
Programmers who have been raised on larger memory units and faster processors tend to ignore concepts such as frugal memory usage and efficient code. When I was a commercial coder, some of the newbies were encountering a bug they could not find. The memory bounds were being exceeded and they simply could not comprehend that they were running out of memory. Forced to fit the data within bounds, it took a great deal of effort to teach them some of the "old-style" techniques of memory management and program efficiency. To prepare for my explanations, I went back and consulted this book to brush up on some of the ideas.
The topics covered are: finding efficient algorithms by solving general problems rather than specific instances, how to verify the correctness of programs, using "back of the envelope calculations" to quickly verify the effectiveness of code, how to squeeze space and some examples of programs. Bentley also refers to the book ,"How To Solve It" by George Polya, a book that should be required reading for all developing programmers.
Bentley is a very good explanatory writer and I can understand why he has received awards for excellence in teaching. Until we develop intelligent robots that will write code for us, the ideas in this book will continue to be useful.

This slender volume is one of the all-time classics for programmers. Each chapter is an essay from Bentley's wide-ranging programming column dealing with an algorithm, an engineering principle or some more general technique of reasoning. Beginners and experienced professionals alike will be delighted. This is one of the few books for serious programmers which can also be read with pleasure by the non-expert, even by the non-programmer. You'll find the techniques of thinking explained in this book popping up again and again whether you are coding or reading the newspaper. I have owned and loaned I don't know how many copies; nobody ever returns it.

"Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, is a really remarkable work of drama. The English version by Eric Bentley is published as a Signet Classic. The translator's introduction notes that the play premiered in Rome in 1921.

In "Six Characters," a dysfunctional family confronts a theater director and his whole company. They challenge the director to turn their story into a play--a "painful drama."

This richly ironic play deals with many issues: the relationship between life and literature; the limitation of words as tools of communication; sexual transgression; authority and art; secrecy and shame; the fractured, shifting nature of personal identity; the relationship between an author and the characters he/she creates; and more.

This is truly a play of ideas; it's a constantly shifting intellectual house of mirrors. But Pirandello never loses sight of the emotional issues of human shame, pain, and interpersonal alienation. The play is full of great lines; my favorite is spoken by the director: "There's no author here at all."

It's amazing to think that (at the time of this review) this play is more than 80 years old. When I look at the contours of popular culture in the decades since this play premiered in Rome, it seems that Pirandello was as much a cultural prophet as he was a literary genius. "Six Characters" seems to prefigure such phenomena as reality TV shows (like "An American Family" or MTV's "The Real World") and films which explore the shadowy line between fiction and reality (like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Scream 3"). After all these decades, "Six Characters" remains a fresh, compelling, and relevant theatrical masterpiece.

There are actors preparing for a Pirandello play, when they get interrupted but six characters. Leading the six characters, the father steps up to inform them they are looking for an author and explains that the author hasn't fully brought them to life yet. The manager tries to kick them out when he is intrigued in the story they start describing.

The play starts to take its twists when the father encourages his wife to leave him for his secretary because he has gotten bored with her over the years. The mother leaves the father with the eldest son. The mother starts a new family with the man, having three children. The father starts to miss her, and seeks out the children in order to reach her. The other man eventually moves away from the city with the family and the father loses track of them. After, the other man dies the mother returns to the city with the children. She gets a job in Madame Pace's dress shop, unaware that Madame Pace is more interested in using her daughter as a prostitute. The father arrives at the dress shop and that's where it starts to get good...

The sense of tragedy and disillusion showed through in his work because of his personal experiences. In 1894, at the age of 27, he married a young woman who he never met. His parents arranged the marriage, Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of his father's business partner. Antonietta's mother had died in childbirth because of her father's insane jealousy that wouldn't allow a doctor in during the birth. Antonietta suffered a mental breakdown and became so violent that she should have been institutionalized. Pirandello kept her at home for seventeen years, terrorizing him and his three children. Their daughter was so troubled by her mother's illness that she tried to commit suicide. She failed when the old revolver failed to fire. His wife's illness played a great role in his work, contributing to the theme of madness, illusion, and isolation.

I highly enjoyed reading this story because of its turns and twists. It kept me intent because of it's abrupt turns. When the whole prostitution scene came in, I was caught off gaurd and it made the book so much more entertaining. Also, Pirandello's style of naturalism is creative but a little odd.. Luigi had a strange upbringing and a crazy wife, but his work is so warped and disillusioned that you find it very entertaining. To better understand the sporadic behavior of the characters and the novel itself, you need to read about Luigi Pirandello himself. I am one of those people who don't like to read a thousand-paged books-containing 30+pages in a chapter. This novel is short and sweet, but so good that I wanted to keep reading. For, the past year I haven't found to many novels that I've cared for, but I highly recommend reading this book. Preferably recommending to people that are open to new and random things, and if you have a bit of a twisted or normal sense of humor I guarantee you'll love it! I'm always open to any kind of novel and this one caught my attention and I actually enjoyed reading something for one!

Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author" premiered in Rome in 1921 to audience shouts of "Maricomio!" ("Madhouse!"). Perhaps few of the theatregoers realized that the "madhouse" they had witnessed was a watershed in the history of drama. While many of the innovations of "Six Characters" may now seem commonplace, Pirandello's innovative, iconoclastic masterpiece marked a break from traditional dramatic structures and stage settings, a break which enabled twentieth century drama to develop along self-reflective imaginative lines much different than its predecessors. As Eric Bentley, the play's translator, notes in his introduction to this edition, "this was the first play ever written in which the boards of the theatre did not symbolize and represent some other place, some other reality."

"Six Characters" is set in a theatre where a director, his stage manager and a group of actors are about to rehearse another of Pirandello's plays, "The Rules of the Game". The curtain is up, the stage is empty of props and background, and the lights illuminate the bare wall at the back of the stage. It is an austere setting, a kind of theatrical analogue to the blank sheet of paper an author faces each day he sits down to write.

Suddenly, this austerity, this mundane theatrical rehearsal, is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of six characters--a father, a mother, a son, a stepdaughter, a boy, and a little girl. They are six characters who have lives, who have stories to tell, but whose dramatic text has not been written. They need an author. As Pirandello says in his 1925 introduction to the play: "Every creature of fantasy and art, in order to exist, must have his drama, that is, a drama in which he may be a character and for which he is a character. This drama is the character's raison d'etre, his vital function, necessary for his existence."

The play proceeds, with the six characters relating fragmentary scenes of incidents in their lives, scenes which are accompanied by commentary, quarrels, dialogue, and interaction among the characters and between the characters and the actors. A kind of theatrical hall of mirrors, the actors who view these characters become, in effect, an audience. The actors are also, however, the actors who will be called upon to play the parts of the six characters in the dramatic text which is being created in their presence. For these actors and these characters, the stage becomes more real than the world.

"Six Characters in Search of an Author" is a remarkable work of imagination, both in its structure and its dialogue. It is comic and absurd, tragic and ponderous. The play is a work of original genius; the text (like its characters) is open to multiple interpretations and meanings. As one character says, in an appropriate Pirandellian bit of dialogue: "[t]herein lies the drama . . . in my awareness that each of us thinks of himself as one but that, well, it's not true, each of us is many, oh so many, according to the possibilities that are in us."

Alright, I love this series and I have all the books in it but some people need to get the facts right! Towsend Pride is not one of Wonder's foal's, he is her sire! Also, Townsend Prince is not Townsend Pride's sire, he is Townsend Pride's son! Also Cindy is just too fake! No 13 year old can control a full-grown racehorse, I have ridden a few retired thoroughbred racehorses myself and I know that they are not a piece of cake! Else the book is pretty good except for the fact that no horse can be as fast as Glory, and everyone looses a few! Well, I wish someone would change the facts in this book!

This was a really original book. No other books in the series was ever like this one. I loved how Cindy went to great lengths to protect her beloved horse. Who the person was that was injecting Glory with lethal shots was even better! It was really unique and I will always read this book over and over again.

I really loved this book because I love horses and mysteries. But, it seems that Joanna Campbell has changed her writing style. I like it, though. I have read all the books in this series and I just ordered this one. It was fantastic!
This book was about how Glory, a wonderful horse that Cindy McLean calls her own, is on a race winning streak. But, after he wins a race by an impressive 10 lentghs, people start getting suspicious. Then Glory tests positive for drugs and when Cindy and her friend Max stay in his stall one night Cindy AND Glory almost lose their lives. This was book and great book about the very special bond between Cindy and Glory.

This book managed to teach me a great deal about my car that I was clueless on before. I highly recommend this book to anyone, from the beginner looking to understand how their car works to an intermediate grease monkey like myself.

The book is lacking a couple key areas, though. One is the drawings. The sketch drawings of a certain items/views are not very useful for identifying things (if you're just trying to get the lay of the land under the hood, the Bentley is little help when it comes to smaller components). These desperately need to be upgraded to photos, color, if possible. There's not a whole lot on the vacuum system except a schematic, ditto for a portion of the electrical system and also the A/C/vent system.

Some suggestions to improve the book: a complete breakdown of the car (seems some smaller items are left as an exercise for the reader, as was investigating a broken door latch on my 900), lots more photos, and COLOR!

The pros far outweigh the cons, though, and coupled with a good online help community like the Saab Network bulletin boards, there's very little you can't repair on your own with this book. A must have for anyone who wants to keep their 900's running.

My saab was running great - then not so much. The idle speed was running very high most of the time, around 2,000 rpm. When I touched the accelerator it dropped down to around 1,200 rpm, still about 300 rpm above normal. It also (just once) alarmingly lost then regained power, quickly, so I was kangaroo-ing down the road looking like a first-time driver not able to handle the clutch.

Upon receiving the book I started to diagnose the problem. Within thirty minutes I was confident it was one of two things, both easy to check using the information in this book. It turned out not to be the air mass meter, but instead was the throttle position sensor. The car was fixed within an hour and is running (touch wood) wonderfully now. Using this book saved me money. A big thanks for Bentley publishers !

If you have one of these cars and need to understand how to fix it you need this manual.