Title: An Oblique Approach
Author: Eric Flint & David Drake
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 1998
ISBN: 0671878654
Pages: 480
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 18-21 July, 2007

Title: In the Heart of Darkness
Author: Eric Flint & David Drake
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 1998
ISBN: 0671878859
Pages: 480
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 22-24 July, 2007

Title: Destiny's Shield
Author: Eric Flint & David Drake
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 0671578723
Pages: 576
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 25-27 July, 2007

Title: Fortune's Stroke
Author: Eric Flint & David Drake
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0671319981
Pages: 512
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 28 July, 2007

Title: The Tide of Victory
Author: Eric Flint & David Drake
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0743435656
Pages: 576
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 29-30 July, 2007

Title: The Dance of Victory
Author: Eric Flint & David Drake
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 1416521372
Pages: 512
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 31 July, 2007

Contrary to my usual practice, I read the entire Belisarius Series back to back. Blame Emma: she keeps getting Eric Flint books out of the library and slinging them my way.

Belisarius was a real-life sixth-century Roman general based in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

In the far, far future, two races descended from mankind fight a proxy war to change the past. The 'New Gods', repulsed by the mongrel offshoots of the human race, bet on the Malwa empire of India, with its rigid caste system. At ruinous expense, they send a cyborg named Link back to the sixth century. With gunpowder technology, the Malwas quickly conquer the rest of India and start eyeing the Persian and Roman empires.

A crystalline race send one of their number, Aide, back in time to help Rome's greatest general, Belisarius, fight the Malwa, and keep Earth's history, as much as possible, on its previous trajectory. Aide's vast knowledge of our history and technology augment Belisarius's native cunning and immense grasp of strategy and tactics, and eventually overcome Link and the Malwa.

The books juggle multiple viewpoint characters, weaving together a complex tapestry of plots, spread over six books. The action flows from Constantinople to Persia, Alexandria, the Axumite (Ethiopian) empire, Arabia, and most of all, to India. The characters are for the most part likeable and larger than life. Most, but by no means all, of the Malwa and their allies are repellent. The battles are many and the carnage vast, as the authors get to cherrypick the tactics of Earth's greatest generals.

In the end, Link's fatal flaw is its lack of understanding of humanity, that only the soul matters, of the importance of love and redemption.

I had a NameValueCollection embedded inside a larger object. I needed to serialize the larger object into XML and back. Unfortunately, NameValueCollection is not XML serializable. Why I do not know.

A blog comment from Tim Erwin got me started in the right direction. Implement IXmlSerializable and do the work by hand in ReadXml and WriteXml.

Tim's implementation turned out to be overly simple. It didn't handle an empty collection well, nor did it leave the XmlReader in a good state.

I used SGen to examine the deserialization of a List<String> to figure out what else needed to be done.

The following ReadXml seems to work. If I expected to receive XML from untrusted sources, I would make this more robust.

 public void ReadXml(XmlReader reader)
 {
     if (reader.IsEmptyElement)
         return;

     while (reader.Read()
         && reader.NodeType != XmlNodeType.EndElement
         && reader.NodeType != XmlNodeType.None)
     {
         if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && reader.LocalName == "Header")
         {
             reader.MoveToAttribute("name");
             string name = reader.Value;
             reader.MoveToAttribute("value");
             string value = reader.Value;
             Add(name, value);
         }
     }
     reader.ReadEndElement();
 }

 public void WriteXml(XmlWriter writer)
 {
    foreach (string name in nvc.Keys)
    {
        writer.WriteStartElement("Header");
        string value = nvc[name];
        writer.WriteAttributeString("name",  name);
        writer.WriteAttributeString("value", value);
        writer.WriteEndElement();
    }
 }

 public XmlSchema GetSchema( )
 {
    return null;
 }

I also found that I needed to implement custom Equals and GetHashCode, as the NameValueCollection implementations didn't seem to do what I wanted.

 // Have to override GetHashCode() as two apparently identical NameValueCollections
 // will have different hash codes.
 public override int GetHashCode()
 {
     int hash = nvc.Count;

     foreach (string name in nvc)
     {
         hash = 757 * hash  +  101 * nvc[name].GetHashCode()  +  name.GetHashCode();
     }

     return hash;
 }

 public bool Equals(HeadersCollection that)
 {
     if (ReferenceEquals(that, null))
         return false;

     if (ReferenceEquals(this, that))
         return true;

     // Have to explicitly compare the contents of the collections
     // as NameValueCollection.Equals doesn't seem to do what we want.
     // Note: this is independent of order.
     if (nvc.Count != that.nvc.Count)
         return false;

     foreach (string name in nvc)
     {
         if (nvc[name] != that.nvc.Get(name))
             return false;
     }

     return true;
 }

 public static bool Equals(HeadersCollection headersA, HeadersCollection headersB)
 {
     if (headersA == null)
         return (headersB == null);

     if (ReferenceEquals(headersA, headersB))
         return true;

     return headersA.Equals(headersB);
 }

 public override bool Equals(object obj)
 {
     if (obj is HeadersCollection)
         return Equals((HeadersCollection) obj);

     return false;
 }

Title: The Order of the Phoenix
Author: J.K. Rowling
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Scholastic
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 043935806X
Pages: 870
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 14-15 July, 2007

Having just seen the new Harry Potter movie, I decided to reread this book and the Half-Blood Prince before the release of the final book, next weekend.

The movie omits vast swathes of plot, of course, but delivers a competent retelling of the book.

Voldemort came back to life at the end of the previous book, but only Harry Potter has seen him and few, apart from Dumbledore and the reconstituted Order of the Phoenix, believe him. A tinpot dictator from the Ministry of Magic, Dolores Umbridge, is sent to Hogwarts to clamp down on troublemakers. Harry goes through his fifth year, studying for the OWL examinations, fighting with Umbridge, and being increasingly troubled by dreams linking him to Voldemort.

The book is entertaining and moves the Harry Potter saga along, but it's too long. Rowling, like Stephen King, is too much of a publishing phenomenon for editors to have a strict hand with her.

Harry is in full-blown, awkward adolescence: sulky, misunderstood, clumsy around girls, and rebellious. He fights with all of his well-meaning friends, Ron, Hermione, and Sirius.

In the movie, particularly, I thought that Harry was ill-used by Dumbledore as a pawn in the struggle against Voldemort. The book allows for more nuance. A lot of grief and misunderstanding could have been avoided if only Dumbledore had been forthcoming much earlier. Of course, that would have ruined most of the plot.

Title: The Accusers
Author: Lindsey Davis
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0446693294
Pages: 369
Keywords: historical mystery
Reading period: 5-11 July, 2007

The Accusers is one of the more recent titles in Lindsey Davis's long-running series about Marcus Didius Falco, an informer (private detective) in ancient Rome. Davis's prose is slyly witty with an occasional leavening of snark.

Falco and Associates look into the death of a senator who committed suicide after being convicted of corruption. Was it really suicide? A complicated courtroom drama ensues.

On a par with other books in the series. Entertaining, amusing, and plenty of plot twists.

Title: Dead I Well May Be
Author: Adrian McKinty
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Pocket Books
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0743470567
Pages: 367
Keywords: crime
Reading period: 4 July, 2007

Michael Forsythe is an illegal immigrant from Northern Ireland, working for a crime boss in Harlem in 1992. When he sleeps with his boss's girlfriend, he and three others are set up to take the fall for a drug bust in Mexico. He breaks out of a hellhole prison, losing a foot and his friends along the way, and makes his way back to New York to exact revenge.

McKinty writes lush, atmospheric prose, with a good turn in dialog. Forsythe grows from a bright, feckless teenager, with a future ahead of him in crime, into a hardened, vengeful survivor.

Title: Ally
Author: Karen Traviss
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Eos
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0060882328
Pages: 388
Keywords: SF
Reading period: 30 June-3 July, 2007

This is the sequel to Matriarch, one of the very first books I reviewed, back in December 2006.

As with its predecessor, this book does not admit of an easy summary and it too should be read in sequence.

The themes include alien contact, ecocide, genocide, the undesirable consequences of immortality, and the clash of personalities. The plot is character-driven and fast-paced, with multiple twists.

Title: Pyramid Scheme
Author: Dave Freer, Eric Flint
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 067131839X
Pages: 418
Keywords: SF, humor
Reading period: 27-29 June, 2007

Pyramid Scheme is another humorous science fiction novel from the authors of Rats, Bats, and Vats and The Rats, The Bats, & The Ugly.

An alien probe, in the shape of a pyramid, lands in Chicago and starts growing rapidly. It captures some of the people in the vicinity and sends them into an alternate universe, where most of them die within hours. A handful survive and start to thrive. The new universe contains the Greek and Egyptian gods and characters from Greek mythology, including the ever-untrustworthy Odysseus.

The plot is too silly to explain further, but it's an enjoyable romp, as the core characters triumph over the odds.

Title: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Author: John le Carré
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Scribner
Copyright: 1974
ISBN: 0743457900
Pages: 317
Keywords: spy, thriller
Reading period: 23-26 June, 2007

After panning Prior Bad Acts and Adept, I needed to read a good book. I found it in John le Carré's classic cold war spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

George Smiley, quiet, unassuming, pudgy, and easily overlooked, is recently retired from the Service (MI6, the British intelligence agency). He is secretly tasked with finding a mole in the highest reaches of the Service, run by Karla, a KGB spymaster. The mole can only be one of the four most senior men. Smiley begins piecing together the evidence from stolen files, interrogating former colleagues, and re-examining his own past.

This is not at all the typical spy novel, full of fast-paced car chases and shootouts. The book is subtle, cerebral, and character-driven, with little action. Smiley may not be capable of running across the street, but he can certainly run a sting operation.

Le Carré masterfully weaves a web of deceit and intrigue, which enmeshes the reader. He depicts a world of moral ambiguity, painted in shades of gray, where motives are murky.

Highly recommended.

Title: Adept
Author: Robert Finn
Rating: 1 stars out of 5
Publisher: Snowbooks
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 1905005571
Pages: 446
Keywords: occult thriller
Reading period: 18-22 June, 2007

A ninja with improbable abilities steals an ancient Tibetan artifact in London. David Braun, hunky insurance investigator cum martial artist, sets out to recover it with the aid of Susan Milton, an American researcher. I can tell you no more, because I could't bring myself to finish it.

It is rare that I abandon a book halfway through once begun, though perhaps I should more often. Adept is ludicrous and clumsily written. I found it impossible to suspend my belief.

Title: Prior Bad Acts
Author: Tami Hoag
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 9780553583595
Pages: 525
Keywords: crime
Reading period: 16-17 June, 2007

Karl Dahl is about to go on trial for the obscene murders of a woman and her two young children, and everyone wants to lynch him. Judge Carey Moore rules that Dahl's prior criminal record is inadmissible. Hours later, she's beaten up in the courthouse parking garage. Is it (a) an enraged member of the public, (b) the family of the murder victims, (c) a hit man sent by her estranged husband, or (d) the sidelined detective driven out of his mind by the horrors of the case? Then Karl Dahl escapes....

The whole book is like this: one over-the-top plot device laid on top of the next. It is fairly effective at keeping the adrenaline flowing, but otherwise has little to recommend it. Empty literary calories. It would have been a better book if most of the plot had been left out.

Title: Hearse of a Different Color
Author: Tim Cockey
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Hyperion
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0786889632
Pages: 382
Keywords: mystery, humor
Reading period: 13-16 June, 2007

Hitchcock Sewell is an undertaker who finds the murdered body of a waitress on the front door of his funeral parlor, one winter's evening during a wake. Hitch and his weatherwoman girlfriend, Bonnie, become obsessed with finding out who killed the waitress.

This is a fairly amusing comic mystery, with a semi-plausible but twisted plot. Hitch is a sympathetic character, albeit one who drinks too much and whose eye wanders.

Title: Proven Guilty
Author: Jim Butcher
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Roc
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0451461037
Pages: 479
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 9-12 June, 2007

Ninth book in the Dresden Files series of urban fantasys.

Harry Dresden is a wizard who consults with the Chicago Police on weird crimes. Molly, the rebellious teenaged daughter of an old friend, leads him to a horror fiction convention where the fans are being attacked by real monsters. Given Harry's smart mouth and talent for drawing trouble upon himself, it's not too long before he's captured by a sadistic villain who tries to auction him to his many enemies on eBay. He escapes but then has to lead a rescue mission into the land of Faerie to save Molly.

Entertaining, fast-paced, funny in places, and a little less grim than some of the previous books in the series. The back story continues to develop and Harry's relationships with the ongoing characters evolve, mostly for the better.

I made my radio debut this afternoon. The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read a couple of short excerpts on KBCS from James Joyce's Ulysses, as a foretaste of the readings we're doing next weekend.

This year's reading is of the Nausicaa chapter, wherein Leopold Bloom reposes on a beach to recover from clashing with the Citizen in the previous chapter, and flirts at a distance with young Gerty MacDowell. This is the infamous masturbation chapter that led to Ulysses being banned for obscenity.

There are two readings.

• Sat, June 16th, 4:30pm
  Elliott Bay Bookstore
  101 S. Main St,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

• Sun, June 17th, 6pm
  Pike Pub and Brewery
  1415 First Ave,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

I will be one of several readers giving voice to Leopold Bloom. It is likely that Jim McDermott will once again be reading with us.

Title: Roma Eterna
Author: Robert Silverberg
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Publisher: Eos
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0380814889
Pages: 449
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 5-9 June, 2007

Rome has never fallen to the barbarians. The eternal city has stood for 27 centuries. Its empire has ebbed and flowed, from weak emperors who submitted to their co-emperors in Constantinople, to mad ones who drain the treasury, to conquerors who spread the might of Rome across the globe.

The premise is interesting, but the execution is weak. The book is written in a Micheneresque style: a series of disjointed chapters set decades or centuries apart. The viewpoint characters usually have some connection to the emperor of the time. Reviewing the front matter moments ago, I see that "sections of this book have been previously published in somewhat different form, copyright 1989, 1991, 1994, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003". It's clear that it was cobbled together from a series of short stories.

Title: The Portrait
Author: Iain Pears
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 159448175X
Pages: 211
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 3-5 June, 2007

In 1912, Henry MacAlpine is a well-known British painter, living in self-imposed exile on a small island off the coast of Brittany. His old friend, William Naysmith, the renowned art critic has come to see him and have his portrait painted. Over the course of several sittings, we come to learn why MacAlpine has left London and why he has lured Naysmith to see him. Naysmith has misused his great influence as an art critic to destroy several painters.

It's extremely rare to see an entire novel written in the second person. The Portrait is written as a series of MacAlpine's monologues addressed to Naysmith. It's a difficult technique, but Pears pulls it off. He reveals the backstory with great skill, painting verbal portraits of MacAlpine and Naysmith, while MacAlpine paints Naysmith. Pears is an art historian as well as a novelist, and he marries his two interests to great effect here.

Title: The Black Death, second edition
Author: Philip Ziegler
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 1998
ISBN: 014027524X
Pages: 339
Keywords: history
Reading period: 6 May-3 June, 2007

After reading Doomsday Book, I decided that I wanted to know more about the Black Death. And I learned a great deal from Ziegler's book.

The Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1350. It was hugely traumatic for the people of the time, with their profound ignorance of medicine and science, and it was widely viewed as a punishment from God.

Ziegler spends the first few chapters showing how the plague affected Italy, France, Germany, and other European nations, but most of the book concentrates on England. He describes the state of medical knowledge, the deleterious effects on the Catholic Church's influence, and the social and economic effects. He recreates what it must have been like in a village as it succumbed.

This book was first published in 1969 and seems to have been only lightly revised in 1998. It by no means represents current thinking amongst historians as to the causes or effects of the Black Death. Still, the book is well written and approachable, shedding light on the period.

Title: The Far Side of the World
Author: Patrick O'Brian
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Copyright: 1992
ISBN: 0393308626
Pages: 366
Keywords: historical fiction
Reading period: 27 May-1 June, 2007

This is the tenth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, and it provides much of the basis for the film Master and Commander.

During the War of 1812, Captain Jack Aubrey is sent in pursuit of an American frigate, which has sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific to seize British whalers in the South Seas. Aubrey and his good friend, the surgeon Stephen Maturin, overcome many obstacles during the pursuit: the ship is badly damaged at one point, crew members are murdered, and Aubrey and Maturin manage to get themselves marooned not once but twice on remote islands.

I received a boxed set of the 21 novels for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I've been working my way slowly through the series. Slowly, because I find that if I read several books in a series back to back, they start to blur together, and these books are so good that I want to savor them. Some argue that this series is one 6000-page long novel, since the books are so clearly linked in a sequence.

O'Brian draws you back into the world of 18th-century seafaring, writing in the style of the period, thick with authentic nautical detail. Long tales of adventure and travel and friendship between two very different men. The wretched tedium of months at sea; the thrill of the chase; the horror of battle.

This week, I have written code in C#, C++, Managed C++, C, WiX, NAnt, ActionScript, VBScript, JScript, cmd batch, NMake, HTML, XSLT, and Ruby. And I will probably get some Python in before the weekend is over. <boggle/>

Title: Florida Roadkill
Author: Tim Dorsey
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Collins
Copyright: 1999
ISBN: 0380732335
Pages: 362
Keywords: crime, humor
Reading period: 26-27 May, 2007

The book that introduces Serge A. Storms, the hyperactive serial killer, and his stoner sidekick, Coleman.

The frenzied plot follows a large cast of characters chasing $5 million of drug money down Florida to the Keys. Most of them are Unnice People who will come to well-deserved bad ends.

Dorsey is not in control of his plot. Random flashbacks lay down the backstory for newly introduced characters. The plot jumps about with wild abandon, revving on all cylinders. Somehow it comes together at the end, with some funny moments along the way.

(I read the latest book, Hurricane Punch, last month. It looks like the next few books continue to follow the $5 million.)

Title: Sixty Days and Counting
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Bantam Dell
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0553803131
Pages: 388
Keywords: science fiction
Reading period: 25-26 May, 2007

This book concludes Robinson's trilogy about environmental collapse, begun in Forty Signs of Rain and continued in Fifty Degrees Below.

Set in the near future, major climate change has already begun: freezing winters, melting icecaps, and rising sealevels. Senator Phil Chase has just been elected President and his aide, Charlie Quibler, must help the new administration tackle enviromental collapse head on. Frank Vanderwal, formerly of the National Science Foundation, follows his boss to the White House when she becomes the new president's science advisor.

Robinson draws a frightening and realistic picture of how climate change could occur, and the inevitable denial and feuding in the human response. He is at his best when describing how scientists actually work, and somewhat less successful with the personal dramas of his characters. Robinson thinks big, not just in the global scale of climate change, but also in some of the possible terraforming countermeasures.

Title: The Color of Blood
Author: Declan Hughes
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0060825499
Pages: 341
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 19-20 May, 2007

Sequel to The Wrong Kind of Blood, in which private eye Ed Loy returned to his native Dublin after 20 years in Los Angeles.

Loy is asked to find Emily, a teenager from the prestigious Howard family, after pornographic photos of her are sent to her father. He locates her easily, but not before he finds a body, the first of several murders that will rip the Howards apart, unearthing long-buried secrets.

Loy is a hard-boiled private eye, somewhat in the Marlowe vein: "a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. ... He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job."

He observes the Howards with a horrified fascination: "I realized then that I wanted, as much as anything else, to understand this family in their houses on the tops of hills, to uncover their secrets, to see the Howards plain. Once I had admitted that to myself, I knew that there was no way on earth I was stepping off this train until the end." He thrives on chaos, from a need to make patterns and establish the connections they can't see.

Loy throws in observations on contemporary Irish society from his outsider's perspective, skewering the post-colonial mentality wrought by the Celtic Tiger, the hedonistic mindlessness of teenage clubbers, and the man-boys of the south Dublin rugby clubs. He condemns the failures of previous generations too, notably the Catholic Church's strangehold and their willing enforcers, the doctors.

None of these distract from a fast-paced, well-told story; they inform it and place it in a context. Hughes has a light touch with the Hiberno-English idioms, and non-Irish readers should have no problems following the dialog.

Minor quibbles: for a man who's just come back from two decades in America, he hardly thinks about it at all. And did the two gurriers, Darren and Wayne, have to have the name Reilly?

(Per my Review Policy, HarperCollins provided me with a review copy of the book.)

(Image courtesy of The Learning Center .)

Up to now, all of the books that I've reviewed have been ones that I have bought or borrowed.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a publicity manager at HarperCollins in reference to my review of The Wrong Kind of Blood. She offered to send me a copy of the next book in the series if I would be willing to review it on my site. No strings were attached. I agreed. The review will follow in a later post.

It's time for me to establish a formal review policy, so as to maintain transparency.

Review Policy

I write reviews in my limited spare time. If you want me to review a book or a product, please use the E-mail link elsewhere on this page to contact me.

• I may decline to review the product.

• If I agree, I will require a review copy, which is mine to keep. If you require return of the review copy (i.e., a loaner), you must make that clear before sending it to me, and you pay for return shipping.

• I will not accept payment. The review is free.

• I will not accept restrictions on what I can say: if I don't like the product, I will write a lukewarm or negative review.

• No non-disclosure agreements or other contracts which restrict my freedom to write a review.

• My review will disclose that I received a review copy.

• I make no guarantees about timeliness, but I will try to post a review within a month of receiving the review copy.

• If for some reason, I decide not to review the product, I will let you know as soon as possible.

• Reviews are copyright © George V. Reilly. I reserve the right to post my review on other sites.

• You have the right to reprint part or all of my review in your promotional materials, provided that you do not misrepresent my conclusions. I require attribution and a link to my website, www.GeorgeVReilly.com. I appreciate notification.

• I am not DPReview.com. I write short, pithy reviews, not exhaustive ones.

• I mark on a range of 0 to 5 stars, in half-star increments. I almost never give out 4.5 or 5.0. Most reviews get 3-4 stars, but that's because I tend to review things that I expect I will enjoy.

This policy was initially posted on 2007/05/21. Revision 1.0.

Qualifications

What are my qualifications? For reviewing fiction and movies, no formal qualifications save having been an avid reader for more than 35 years. Read my blog for sample reviews.

For reviewing programming books or software: more than 20 years of professional experience as a software developer. I have tech reviewed books for Addison-Wesley, Wrox, Sams, and New Riders. I have co-authored two books, Beginning ATL 3 COM Programming and Professional Active Server Pages 3.0.

Title: The Rats, The Bats, & The Ugly
Author: Eric Flint, Dave Freer
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0743488466
Pages: 391
Keywords: science fiction, humor
Reading period: 15-16 May, 2007

No good deed goes unpunished might be the motto of this sequel to Rats, Bats, and Vats.

In the previous book, a motley assortment of grunts destroyed a hive of the alien invaders. The military establishment don't really appreciate being shown up as incompetent buffoons, and do their best to persecute and prosecute the human leading the grunts, as well as the military intelligence major who spotted what they were up to and sent in help.

Our heroes are forced into a confrontation with the establishment. It should be no surprise who comes out on top.

Another fun book from Freer and Flint, combining humor and social satire with a deft touch.