CHAOS MANOR IN PERSPECTIVE

For many years the Book of the Month has been a feature in the Computing At Chaos Manor column. This was in two parts: The Book of the Month, which is general reading, and The Computer Book Of The Month, which is self explanatory. The Computer book list is likely to become obsolete quickly.

The general reading recommendations are not obsolete. I have recommended everything from novels to histories to political science to the unclassifiable, some because I think they are fun to read, some because it is good for your soul.

I have changed the name of original page I kept these on. If you want the Computer books up to when I began to neglect this duty, you will find that and more on the OLD PAGE.

In June 2001, reader Tim Pope compiled a new list. This is now complete through all published reviews from 1994 through 2000. I'll try to keep it up to date.

I didn't, but in May, 2002, reader Stephen St. Onge compiled the list from May 2001 to May 2002, then again for June to November, 2002. My thanks.

Finally, in January 2003 Paul Walker did a complete edit and fixed all the links. A great deal of work, and my heartiest thanks. Paul has recently refurbished the page again.

And in January 2004 Mr. St. Onge brought it up to date to December 2003. My thanks.

Year	Month
1994	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1995	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1996	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1997	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1998	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
1999	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2000	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2001	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2002	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2003	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2004	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2005	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2006	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun

>From the January 1994 Column - Travels and Travails Column The book of the month is Joel N. Shurkin's Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Little, Brown, 1992). Lewis Terman did a great deal of pioneer work in intelligence testing and did studies of gifted children. One of his groups, more than 1500 California children with genius- and near-genius-level IQs, became known as "the Term-ites" and were featured in a number of studies. Shurkin is the chief science writer at Stanford University and has a deservedly good reputation for accuracy as well as readability. This book follows the Termites up to the present. If you're interested in gifted children, you'll find this book fascinating.

>From the March 1994 Column John Keegan's A History of Warfare (Knopf, 1993) is one of the few books I'll call important: it's an examination of why men--and that's not sexism, but the subject of the book--fight, and whether we still need war. Agree or not, you're in for a heck of a ride. And so you are with John Podhoretz's A Hell Of A Ride (Simon &; Schuster, 1993), an insider's story of just what happened to send George Bush from an unbeatable 91 percent popularity to defeat by an Arkansas governor. Not quite as funny as O'Rourke, and perhaps a bit more serious.

>From the May 1994 Column - Crash, Bang--Quake Column On which score, the book of the month is Edward Luttwak's Reclaiming the Endangered American Dream (Simon & Schuster, 1993). In my judgment, Luttwak is better at diagnosing than prescribing, but this book deserves a careful reading by anyone who is concerned with just where this nation is going. Agree with him or not, he clearly gives you much to think about.

>From the June 1994 Column - A Pentium Is Sounded Out Column The book of the month is by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D., The Man Who Tasted Shapes (Tarcher/Putnam, 1993). You may never have heard of synesthesia, a sort of scrambling of senses that might cause you to smell in colors or, as the title suggests, taste shapes; but it's very real, and this entertaining book tells of some experiences the author has had with such people, using their experiences to inquire into the nature of sensation and perception. I guess that sounds more like a book reviewer than me, which means I'm getting tired. Anyway, you'll like the book.

>From the July 1994 Column - An Educational Trip Column The book of the month is Alvin and Heidi Toffler's War and Anti-War (Little, Brown, 1993). I recently had dinner with the Tofflers, who are as interesting in person as their books. This is one of their better ones, and I'd have been proud to have written it. I've also recently discovered a series of novels by Patrick O'Brian. They're British Navy novels set in the Napoleonic era, and if you liked Horatio Hornblower, you'll love Jack Aubrey. It's best if you start with the first one, Master & Commander (Norton, 1970). Fair warning, there are 20 books in the series, and once you start, it will be hard to stop.

>From the August 1994 Column - Traveling Light Column The book of the month is Fred Saberhagen's Seance for a Vampire (Tor Books, 1994), another in his series that brings Count Dracula and Sherlock Holmes together. If you don't like this sort of thing you'll hate it, but I love it.

>From the September 1994 Column - Don't Blink Column The book of the month is by Myron Magnet: The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (Morrow, 1993). It's a frightening analysis of why the good intentions of the war on poverty went wrong and the consequent moral challenge to the U.S. Highly recommended.

>From the October 1994 Column - Odds and Ends Column The first book of the month is Cheryl Currid's Computing Strategies for Reengineering Your Organization (Prima Publishing, 1993). It's a readable introduction into modern high-tech management strategy. There are a kazillion books on how to get on-line. The one I fancied this month is by Sharon Fisher and Rob Tidrow, Riding the Internet Highway (NRP, 1994). There's a lot of solid information well presented here.

>From the November 1994 Column - A Look to the Future Column The book of the month is by James Dunnigan and Raymond Macedonia, Getting It Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam (Morrow, 1993). It's a good account of how the Army went from Vietnam to Desert Storm, readable but with plenty of detail. It's not as complete on what the Air Force did. I like to think that Possony and Pournelle's Strategy of Technology, which was a text in the Air Force Academy and War College during some of the critical years, had some influence on Air Force weapons and doctrine. That's a quibble, though; Dunnigan has done an excellent job, as usual.

>From the December 1994 Column - Can You Say Network Column The book of the month is Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero (Dell, 1994), the autobiographical story of a sergeant of the British Special Air Services Regiment during Desert Storm.

>From the February 1995 Column - Software-Installation Hell Column The book of the month is Donald Norman's Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Addison-Wesley, 1994). Dr. Norman is a senior Apple Fellow. I met him at the Hackers' Conference. After spending an hour with him, I promptly bought his book and read it in two days.

>From the April 1995 Column - Orchids and Onions Part 1 Column The book of the month is Technological Risk by H. W. Lewis (Norton, 1992). It's about the clearest and best-written exposition on the increasingly important subject of the risks involved with new technologies. It's readable, too.

>From the May 1995 Column - Prizes and Surprises Column The computer book of the month is by Gene K. Landy, The Software Developer's and Marketer's Legal Companion: Protect Your Software and Your Business The book of the month is by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (Viking, 1994). Jack Cohen is a professor of biology in England. He was a principal consultant to Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, and me for Legacy of Heorot and our upcoming sequel, Beowulf's Children . The book is an investigation into how you can evolve simplicity from a complex world. This book isn't easy reading, but I bet you like it.

>From the July 1995 Column - Windows 95 Arrives Column The book of the month is Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War and The Preservation of Peace (Doubleday, 1995). This is one of those rare books I call important. By comparing the outbreak of war in ancient and modern times, Kagan gives you some insight into why wars happen and what you might do about them.

>From the August 1995 Column - Windows 95 Pastiche Column The book of the month is The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard (Random House, 1994). If you suspect litigation and regulation have gotten out of hand, you'll be certain of it once you read this book. Some of the examples he gives are hilarious--until you realize it's all deadly serious, and people are fined, jailed, and driven out of business for transgressing absolutely senseless rules.

>From the September 1995 Column - Of COM Ports and Digital Frogs Column The book of the month is Crime , edited by James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia (ICS Press, 1995). This will tell you more than you want to know about crime in this country. Essays are presented from nearly every rational point of view. It's not fun reading, but perhaps it's time citizens gave some heavy thought to the problem.

>From the October 1995 Column - Death Swoops and Upgrades Column The book of the month is Independent Birth Of Organisms by Periannan Senapathy (Genome International, 1994). Fair warning: this book is heavy reading, being nothing less than a new theory of evolution; or, rather, a critique of why current theories based on Darwin can't be correct. If nothing else, this is a readable (with difficulty) introduction to modern molecular biology. I found it fascinating, but then I like complicated scientific detective stories.

>From the November 1995 Column - Digital Models Column The book of the month is Peter Magid and Ira Schneider's OS/2 Warp Uncensored (IDG Books, 1995). The title is meaningless, but the book is very complete. If you use or contemplate using OS/2, you'll find this valuable.

>From the December 1995 Column - A New Mutation Column The first book of the month is by Robert L. Forward, Indistinguishable from Magic (Baen Books, 1995). The title comes from Arthur Clarke's phrase, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Dr. Forward is a former senior scientist at Hughes, an authority on gravitation, and one heck of an imaginative writer. The second book of the month is by Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Random House, 1995). It's part of his history of the Seventy Years War (formerly called the cold war) and tells a grim tale of what happens when idealists and cynics fight over power. The CD-ROM of the month is Microsoft's Composer Collection, three CDs on Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. I've written about these musical biographies before. They're a great and painless way to learn about composers, their times, and major works.

>From the February 1996 Column - SuperCow on the Beach Column The book of the month is Ivars Peterson's Fatal Defect (There appears to be another version) (Times Books, 1995, ISBN 0-8129-2023-6), which is about computer bugs that have been fatal in more than one sense. Well written and a bit frightening.

>From the March 1996 Column - An Upgrade for Mrs_ Pournelle Column The book of the month is John December's Presenting Java (Sam's Net, ISBN 1-57521-039-8). Java is Sun Microsystems' animation programming language for the Web. Since Microsoft has licensed Java, it has become the de facto standard Web language. Hot Java is a Web browser written in Java and available from http://www.java.sun.com/ . They're described in clear language in this book. Recommended.

>From the April 1996 Column - The Fragrant and the Foul Column The book of the month is The Web Page Design Cookbook (Wiley, ISBN 0-471-13039-7), an excellent tutorial guide.

>From the May 1996 Column - Of Cables and Cards Column The book of the month is a magazine : The World and I , edited by my friend Morton Kaplan. It used to be about $100 a year. Now it's a bargain at $90 for three years. It has more content than you may read, but what y ou do read will be worth the price. It covers arts, science, literature, poetry, education, culture, and once in a while has an article by me ( The World and I , Washington, D.C., (800) 822-2822 or (202) 636-1628; fax (202) 526-3497). The shameless plug of the month is Janissaries by Jerry Pournelle, recently reissued by Baen Books. Two real books of the month: Plug-N-Play Netscape for Windows by Angela Gunn and Joe Kraynak (Sam's, ISBN 1-57521-010-x), a painless way to learn Netscape and get connected through EarthLink Total Access. EarthLink Network is the Internet service provider (ISP) I presently recommend, and their Total Access software, which comes on disk with the book, is what I use. The other book of the month is Politics on the Net by Bill Mann (Que, ISBN 0-7897-0286-x). It's astonishing just how much political information (as well as polemic) there is on the Net, a nd this is a good survey.

>From the June 1996 Column - When D Equals E Column The book of the month is The Beginnings of Rome by T. J. Cornell (Routledge Publishing, 1995). As much as you want to know about the founding of Rome. If you like that kind of book, you will like this one a lot.

>From the July 1996 Column - Comments on Code Column The book of the month is Wendell Berry's Another Turn of the Crank (Counterpoint Press, 1995). Berry is a farmer, an agrarian, and a moralist, as well as a good writer. He has seen U.S. agriculture go from small farms to agribusiness and farming converted into an industrial activity in the name of cheap food. He doesn't like that, and his reasons are both disturbing and well worth thinking about.

>From the August 1996 Column - Adieu, Pentafluge____Hello, Cyrus Column The book of the month is Expiration Date by Tim Powers (Tor Books). It's a typical Powers story: well-researched details of a world that you'd swear is modern Los Angeles, but it clearly isn't, since in the first chapter the protagonist finds a vial containing the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison. I don't think you'll be bored.

>From the September 1996 Column - A Little Taste of Crow Column The book of the month is Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman (Harper Business, 1996). One doesn't normally think of an economics book as light and pleasant reading, but David makes it seem so. He also explains most of the assumptions underlying economic theory. If you have any interest in economics at all, you'll find this book both readable and fascinating; and I guarantee you'll learn something from it. David analyzes such things as the length of supermarket checkout lines, whether to change lanes on a freeway, and incidentally something about money and unemployment. He's a former King of the East in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and one of the most interesting people I know.

>From the October 1996 Column - Of Zip and Spam and NT 4_0 Column The book of the month is by Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (Routledge). I thought I knew all I wanted to about the Defenestration of Prague , Friedrich the Winter King, Father Tilly, Cardinal Richelieu and Father Joseph "the gray eminence," and Wallenstein, but once I opened this wonderful book, I found a wealth of details more fascinating than any novel. Part of Hitler's popularity came from his promise to upset the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War.

>From the November 1996 Column - Don't Swap Network! Column The first book of the month is also the CD-ROM of the month : Erica Sadun's Java Script CD-CookBook (Charles River Media, ISBN 1-886801-35-5). This is a "book" you read with your Web browser. Clearly written, lots of examples, and probably the first of many "books" done this way.

>From the December 1996 Column - A Hot Night at the Opera Column The book of the month is Dave Barry in Cyberspace (Crown, ISBN 0-517-59575-3). Fair warning: Dave is a Chaos Manor fan; see page 4. If you like his style of humor and you read BYTE, you will love this book. I'm not making this up.

>From the January 1997 Column - A Hard Drive and a Hot Santa Ana Column The book of the month is John Keegan's Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America. Like all Keegan's books, this is both readable and insightful. Fair warning: this is not an introductory work. You need passing familiarity with the American Revolution and the Civil War. I have one quarrel: Keegan goes to great lengths to tell why geography has dominated the wars on this continent -- but the book has almost no maps. To properly appreciate this book, you need a good historical atlas.

>From the February 1997 Column - Of Bug-Hunting and a New Frontier Column The book of the month is G. Harry Stine's Halfway to Anywhere. This is part of the story of some of the most important events in the history of space travel told by one of the participants. Fair warning: I'm rather prominently in the book. If you want to know something about single-stage-to-orbit ships like the DC/X and the upcoming X-33, this is the place to start.

>From the March 1997 Column - It Was a Great Comdex Column The book of the month is Higher Education by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, now out in paperback from Tor Books (ISBN 0-812-53890-0). This book was inspired by nonfiction essays about the future, which Dr. Sheffield and I wrote for a meeting of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences in 1992. It's a novel about the failure of the U.S. education system and one approach to doing something about it.

>From the April 1997 Column - Orchids and Onions Are Blooming Column The book of the month is Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz (Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-09837-1). This is a detailed refutation of the "all knowledge comes from Africa, and the Greeks ripped off the Egyptians and then claimed to have invented philosophy, and it's all a big plot" school of modern history. Lefkowitz is a classical scholar, and she politely but firmly takes the Afro-centered histories apart. She also explains why this is important and we all ought to care. I'm nowhere near the classical scholar Lefkowitz is, but where our expertises cross, she's certainly got her facts right; and her logic is impeccable.

>From the June 1997 Column - Of Supercomputers, Sound Files, and Sugarscape Column The book of the month is Epstein and Axtell's Growing Artificial Societies.

>From the July 1997 Column - A Web Site for Chaos Manor Column The book of the month is Charles Harrington Elster's There's a Word for It! (Scribner, ISBN 0-684-82455-8). There's no better book for a dringle, and yes, I learned that word from the book. To go with it, there's William F. Buckley Jr.'s Buckley: The Right Word (Random House, ISBN 0-679-45214-1). They're both readable and must reads if you write much.

>From the August 1997 Column - Some Things Make You Feel Stupid Column The book of the month is The Trap by James Goldsmith (1994, Carroll & Graf, ISBN 0-7867-0185-4).

>From the September 1997 Column - New Synergies for Computing Column The book of the month is by Clive Maxfield and Alvin Brown, BEBOP Bytes Back, An Unconventional Guide to Computers (Doone Publications, ISBN 0-9651934-0-3). While this looks like a book with a CD-ROM, it's actually an entire course in practical computer application, but presented in an irreverent and amusing way. You "build" your computer on-screen, endow it with many properties, and set it tasks, all the while learning about what goes on inside a computer. Build text editors, hardware simulators, logic engines, and anything else a computer can do. If you work through this book, you will understand your computer a lot better.

>From the October 1997 Column - Virtual Publishing -- and Virtual Travel Column The book of the month is a good novel by Victor Koman called Kings of the High Frontier. Unfortunately, it's intertwined with a bad novel and at least two dull political tracts. The book is about getting to space despite NASA and the government, and I kept reading it, but I have to say, I skimmed a fair amount. Mr. Heinlein said that he never saw a book that couldn't be improved by cutting from 10 percent to 50 percent; this one is no exception. It also suffers from putting characters in funny hats (literally in one case). In fairness, it covers

>From the November 1997 Column - Fooling Around with the Web Column The book of the month is my own, but you don't have to pay to read it. The Strategy of Technology was written in 1968 by Stefan T. Possony, Francis X. Kane, and Jerry Pournelle, and published by the University Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was used as a textbook in all three service academies at one time or another and numerous times over the years in the Air War College at Maxwell AFB. It has been out of print for years, although photocopies circulated with my permission. Recently, some young officers asked me to make it available. A professional Web designer, Arnold Bailey (abailey@bix.com), volunteered to turn it into good HTML, and so he did. You can find it, complete with partial revisions and notes, on my Web site at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html as well as a couple of other places. Fair warning, this is a cold war book, and while the principles haven't changed at all, nearly all the examples are from the Seventy Years War between the U.S.S.R. and Western civilization.

>From the December 1997 Column - Fire Three for Effect! Column The book of the month is by Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Cornell University Press, ISBN 0-8014-3152-2). This is quite the best political biography of Madison you will ever see, and a wonderful analysis of Madison as both framer and one of the authors of The Federalist . There is today all too little attention paid to the relations between the national government and the states, and more 's the pity.

>From the January 1998 Column Two books this month . Terry Pratchett's Maskerade (Harper/Prism, ISBN 0-06-105251-5) is "yet another novel of Discworld," in which Granny Weatherwax meets the Phantom of the Opera. If you don't know about Pratchett and his insane Discworld novels, you have a treat in store for you. Incidentally, the Psygnosis game Discworld II (which includes Discworld I) would make a perfect gift for any computer-using science fiction reader.

The other book is by the late Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (Bantam, ISBN 0-553-10704-6). The cover says it is a sequel to Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz , one of the truly great science fiction works of all time, but it's better than that. This story takes place after part two of the novel but before the remodernizations of part three. Canticle was a story of fall and redemption, and by God's grace, its post-atomic war setting is far less likely than when it was written, but Miller was a wonderful writer.

>From the February 1998 Column - To Cure a Failing Memory Column The book of the month is by Tim Powers, Earthquake Weather (Tor Books, ISBN 0-312-86163-X). Powers writes modern fantasy: imagine that the Fisher King of the West has been slain in modern-day Southern California, and Dionysius must be invoked to restore the king. This is a sequel to Tim's Expiration Date.

>From the March 1998 Column - Doing Something About Microsoft Column The book of the month is by Chaim Herzog and Mordechai Gichon, Battles of the Bible (Greenhill Books, ISBN 1-85367-266-1), a 1997 reissue of an 1978 book. Herzog is a former Israeli general who made use of his Biblical knowledge in the Arab/Israeli Wars: the strategic terrain has not changed much in 2500 years.

>From the April 1998 Column - Good Enough Is Good Enough Column The first book of the month is Peter Kent's Poor Richard's Web Site: Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site. Check out http://www.poorrichard.com for details; the title says all that's needed. The second book of the month is Elizabeth A. Parker's Home Page Improvement (IDG Books, ISBN0-7645-3083-6), another "Gee how did you do that?" Web-page book that's written in English with lots of examples. It may or may not be significant that she is married to Rich Grace, a writer whose works I have admired. In any event, I wish I had had either, or preferably both, of these books when I set out to build a Web site.

>From the May 1998 Column - Four Ways to More Storage Column The book of the month is by George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War (Crown, ISBN 0-517-70403-X). While I don't agree with all they say, it's a valuable contribution to the discussion of technology and warfare. Incidentally, I am doing a two-volume set on high-tech wars for St. Martin's Press, and I hope to turn in the manuscript of the first volume about the time you read this.

The book of the month is On Infantry by John A. English and Bruce I. Gudmundsson, an analytical military history of infantry in this century. Technical but surprisingly readable if you're interested in the subject. It's apparently out of print but I was able to get a copy through amazon.com. If that's not your cup of tea, there are a couple of new Terry Pratchett Discworld books available. Get one and laugh your head off. The computer book of the month is Edward and Jennifer Yourdon, Time Bomb 2000, Prentice Hall ISBN0-13-095284-2. I tend to think of the great Year 2000 Scare as hysteria; the Yourdons have another opinion, which they calmly and soberly present, along with precautions you can take in case they're right. They frankly scared hell out of me.

The book of the month is Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, Harper Collins, 1997; a great sprawling story of the Americans from earliest times, written by a great and readable historian. I thought I knew the American saga, but this taught me things I didn't know.

If you're not into a thousand pages on American History, let me shamelessly recommend Starswarm, by Jerry Pournelle, Tor Books May 1998. Some think it the best thing I have ever done. Perhaps not, but I do find it Good Enough.

The computer book of the month is Jeffrey McManus, How To Program Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition (ZD Press, ISBN 1-56276-485-3 1998). Massively illustrated, good CD of source code, and a good technical level. It assumes you know something about Visual Basic and programming, and want to get started doing something practical. Don't choose this as your first book, but it wouldn't be a bad second one.

>From the August 98 Column The book of the month is Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus, Pantheon, ISBN 0-679-41151-8. This is about the best account I know of the development of management and control structures for enormous projects, including the old USAF SAGE system as well as the ARPANET/Internet. Hughes doesn't say what went wrong with the Apollo program and NASA's Shuttle, but the principles of organization, management, and operations research are laid out well enough to let you think of your own explanations.

The second book of the month is extremely important to Internet users: Michael Godwin's Cyber Rights examines the tensions inherent in the notion of free speech when everyone has the ability to do instant publications. There are severe conflicts between protection of intellectual property, and the right to quote freely; there is another problem with libel and slander; and how much right does society have to suppress pornography and obscenity? Godwin has great experience in dealing with these matters, and he writes well and interestingly. The case histories are fascinating. If your business involves the Internet, or you're an eager Internet user, you really should read this book. Highly recommended.

>From the last CM Column (intended for August issue) The book of the month is, naturally, Starswarm by Jerry Pournelle (TOR Books). It's selling well: thanks. Meanwhile, Niven and I have just about finished The Burning City, about 150,000 words; technically it's a heroic fantasy, but it's got some pretty odd elements for that genre. Of course Niven and I never do anything the standard way.

The computer book of the month is the O'Reilly book Office 97 Annoyances. You'll learn enough to save the price of the book in the first five chapters. All about annoying quirks and how to fix them, and you really need this book. Also, do get the O'Reilly book on the Palm Pilot (Palmpilot: The Ultimate Guide); you can learn enough from the book to decide whether you want to buy a Pilot, and if you do buy the Pilot you will want the book.

I don't recommend the most important book I read this month, despite all the hype-it's sure to become a best seller because of the timeliness and importance of the subject matter. That's just the problem: the subject is important, but you won't learn the truth here.

The book is The MICROSOFT FILE: The Secret Case Against Bill Gates by Wendy Goldman Rohm (Times Business, ISBN 0-8129-2716-8), and while it may have some facts in it, the book is so biased against Gates, and so full of petty and irrelevant insults, that it's very hard to determine what's real and what isn't. For example, many of the "secrets" are reports on conversations at which only two people were present. We are told a lot about what happened between Gates and a pretty girl named Stefanie Reichel who worked for Microsoft Europe. We're even told how she felt about these events, and there are dark hints of sexual harassment of an employee by her boss. However, she is never quoted, nor is there any source information at all: this book is as devoid of notes as a National Enquirer article. How Wendy Goldman Rohm managed to find out what Gates's former girl friends feel about him isn't told.

As it happens, I have known Gates since 1979 or so, and I know a couple of the girls he used to date before he was married. One is a good friend. I've never asked, and they've never told me, what happened on their dates, nor would I expect to be told. It's not my business, or yours.

The book is full of quotes, but it's never clear where they came from. When the Department of Justice threatened to fine Microsoft $1 million a day, within minutes people were quipping all over the Internet that Gates made more than that in an hour. Wendy Goldman Rohm reports that Gates himself thought the fines were a joke, laughed, and bragged "Every two and a half hours I make a million!" This is highly unlikely for several reasons. First, it's not true: $1 million every 2.5 hours is 9.6 million a day or $3.5 billion a year, and both Microsoft and Gates have more revenue than that. Second, in twenty years and more I have known him, Gates has never bragged about how much money he makes; why would he start now? Third, even if he did, he wouldn't say it in front of anyone who is going to repeat that story to Wendy Goldman Rohm.

There's a lot more like that: information that she is unlikely to have any reliable source for is given as if it were signed, witnessed, and notarized, and moreover given in a breathless tone that implies high truth-but there is never any source given. Yet, when it comes to some really interesting stories - such as how Microsoft rather than Digital Research happened to be the company to produce an operating system for the IBM PC - she doesn't seem to have a clue as to the real story. She has a hint about Gary Killdall's name being embedded in DOS 1.0 (it was!), but she doesn't know how or why, and she implies that Gates knowingly pirated DOS from Digital Research, which isn't true at all. The real story is a lot more interesting than that.

Rohm tells us a lot about what goes on in the Federal Trade Commission. In particular she tells us what's happening from the view of a staffer called D'Artagnan, real name Steve Newborn, who was instrumental in transferring the Microsoft case from FTC to Justice. The first time we hear of Newborn we are told that D'Artagnan had kissed someone in the elevator; the someone turns out to be newly appointed Federal Trade Commissioner Deborah Owen, who is described as wearing 'slinky skirts slit thigh high', and whose clothing style and amatory habits seem to have been more important to the FTC staff than the work they were being paid to do. Whether D'Artagnan had an affair with a Commissioner, and whether that influenced the Commissioner's vote, isn't told.

And that's the problem with this book. Sometimes she tells stories that, if true as told, are very damning to Microsoft as a company and Gates as a person. A few are shocking. Alas, there is never any more evidence for the truth of those stories than for the truth of the fictionalized mood pieces.

We hear that "In early November the rolling hills outside Doug Solomon's window hung with fog. Banks of mist were shifting… Plate glass caught his reflection. Solomon, Apple's senior vice president of strategic planning and corporate development, was six feet tall, and balding, with a gray beard and oversized glasses. He hated his appearance in Apple's annual corporate reports…"

Which is pretty lousy writing as fiction, and I'm not quite sure how it adds to the believability of reports on what Solomon said in meetings and in memos. Who is the source here? Solomon? Someone else who was at the meeting? Or someone who heard the story third hand? We don't know and we won't find out.

This book would be a pretty good starting set of notes for an investigation of Microsoft. You could follow the tales and try to see which ones could be confirmed. Some are quite damning. But without confirmation and sources, the book is simply a diatribe, a setting out of every nasty story anyone ever told about Gates and Microsoft, complete with geeky tales of bizarre behavior. There are speculations about Gates's motives presented as unquestionable fact, but there are never any sources. In other words, as fiction it's pretty dull, and as journalism it's pretty worthless, on par with the National Enquirer. You can see more of my opinion of this book on my web site.

The book of the month is Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, Norton, ISBN 0-393-85005-6. I've known Bob Jastrow for several years. He's not religious, but his inquiries into what astronomers now believe about the universe force him to admit there are vast and totally unexpected similarities between the "revelation" and observation. He's also extremely readable, so if you're looking for an account of what cosmologists now think, this is a good introduction. And it's hard to quarrel with his final conclusion: "Despite scientific claims to the contrary, the destiny or meaning of the human race, and of the cosmic order, cannot be ascertained by a study of discrete biological or historical events. It is no more logical to argue that the world has no ultimate cause or purpose than to argue that it does-in both cases the empirical or scientific evidence for deciding the matter is inadequate."

Both Computer Books of the Month are from QUE: Rick and Patty Winter, The Microsoft Office 97 User Manual, ISBN 0-7897-1706-9, a relatively inexpensive (for a computer book) work subtitled "The Manual You Should Have Received With Office 97". It lives up to its name and for under $20 it's a bargain. The other Computer Book of the Month is Mark Van Name et al. Windows Performance Secrets ISBN 0-7897-1752-2. This comes with two CD's of benchmarks, and a great number of specific directions on tuning up your Windows systems to get the most out of them. Even if you're not a performance freak you will learn a lot from this book, and no gamer or user club should be without a copy.

>From the November 1998 Column There are two books this month. The first, Once a Hero by Elizabeth Moon, is a pretty standard space opera set in the world of the "Herris Serrano Series"; (Baen Books). The title character, Esmay Suiza, is an aristocrat from a provincial planet who has joined the imperial space navy and short lyafter finds herself the sole surviving officer in command of a ship in battle, which she wins, thereby saving an entire planet. That happens before the book begins: the novel is about the consequences of having been a hero. Well worked out, over detailed in spots, but still a page turner.

The second book is quite strange. Guy Gavriel Kay writes about the 5th Century Byzantine Empire, but he doesn't call it that. Sailing to Sarantium (Harper Prism) takes place in a fantasy world; one with a history so close to our own that sometimes only the names have been changed. That is, Sarantium is Constantinople, Rhodium is Rome, Varena is Ravenna, and the geography is the Mediterranean world of Europe in the 5th Century. The story opens as Valerius, Count of the Excubitors, is raised to the Imperial throne through the intrigues of his nephew Petrus. In due time Petrus becomes emperor, and experiences the "Victory Riots." All of this happened in real history, with Justin as Valerius, Justinian as Petrus, and the Nike Sedition as the famous riots which nearly brought down Justinian and Theodora, the dancer he married who became the most famous empress in Byzantine history. She's called Aliana in this book.

Of course if you don't know all that, it's still a whacking good story. Kay has details on chariot racing which sure feel authentic. His major character is Crispin, a master mosaic artist, and details of that art are important to the story. When Crispin interacts with characters from history including Petrus (Justinian) and his general Leontes (Belisarius), the characters are true to what history knows of their real world counterparts. Details of the book sometimes get in the way - the author cannot resist the writer's trick of making a scene important by saying "If Crispin had known this history would have been different" - but this is minor carping about a story good enough to have kept me reading 400 and more pages in one sitting. If you like historical fiction or heroic fantasy, you will like this book.

>From the December 1998 Column The entertainment book of the month is Elizabeth Moon, Rules of Engagement (Baen) the sequel to Once a Hero. Quite as good as the original. Fast action, good space opera.

>From the January 1999 Column The book of the Month is Patrick O’Brian The Hundred Days, the last of the Aubrey-Maturin sea stories [January 2002 update: there are now 20 books in the series]; the Hundred Days are of course the short reign of Napoleon after his return from exile to Elba. If you ever liked sea stories you must know of the O’Brian books; there are no others like them.

>From the February 1999 Column The book(s) of the month are Tales of the Knights Templar and On Crusade, More Tales of the Knights Templar, both edited by Katherine Kurtz and featuring stories by various authors, but all the stories are set in the same fantasy universe. (Warner Books.) The premise is that when the Knights Templar were falsely accused in 1314 by the French king Francis the Fair, some of the order escaped the persecutions to continue the work of the Templars. That’s likely straight historical fact, but in these stories the order continues to this day, and some of the stories are set in modern times. The fantasy element involves the head of John the Baptist and the Shroud of Turin, both of which figure prominently in the fantasy history of the order. Some of the stories are better than others, but I liked the series well enough to read them all, and it’s an interesting premise.

The first Computer Book of the Month is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Running Your Small Office with Microsoft Office, by Laurie Ulrich with Jon San Filippo (Alpha Books QUE ISBN 0-7897-1748-4 $16.99). This one lives up to its title: it is for rank beginners, and I doubt if any BYTE readers will find a single thing in it they don't already know. I'm not all that thrilled about some of the advice either, as for instance when Ms. Ulrich advises you to spend money on a faster processor rather than a bigger monitor. My view is the opposite, for Office applications blazing speed isn't needed, but you can't have too large a monitor: get the biggest one you can afford. It will last through several changes of computers, and save you no end of money in eye examinations not to mention headache powders. Still, if you have friends thinking of setting up a small office and completely at sea as to how to do it, this is no bad beginner's book (which is what it's intended to be, of course) and you can do a lot worse than to buy this for them just to keep them from pestering you with the obvious questions.

The Computer Book Of the Month is Real World Photoshop 5 by David Blatner and Bruce Fraser (Peachpit Press ISBN 0-201-35375-X www.peachpit.com). If you use Photoshop or are thinking of using it, get this book: it starts simple and goes into real detail, and you'll find yourself referring to it again and again. I often give review books to schools, but this one I'm keeping.

For light reading this month I've been going through the Ellis Peters "Brother Cadfael" series, beginning with the origin story "A Rare Benedictine" and going right on through. There are some twenty-one of these, and they are wonderful, invoking the time of early 12th Century England during the Civil War after the death of Henry I, when Norman and Saxon hadn't come together, and William the Conqueror's grandchildren fought it out to see who would be sovereign. They're nominally murder mysteries with a strong element of romance (Brother Cadfael is a Benedictine and not himself involved but he has a knack of helping romance along in others), and very readable. Great books to take on airplanes.

>From the April 1999 Column The Inmates Are Running The Asylum. That’s the title of Alan Cooper’s new book (SAMS, www.samspublishing.com ), and it’s appropriate. Cooper’s subtitle is "Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy, and How to Restore the Sanity." The first part of that is correct. See the column for more on this book: I recommend it but it has problems too. Well worth your reading, though.

The second Book of the Month is Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought (Warner Books, see www.speed-of-thought.com ). This book rambles a bit, and it’s not as specific as I had hoped it would be, but it’s well worth reading by anyone using computers in their business, which is to say, by everyone in business. Gates gives specific examples of how he uses different computer capabilities and programs to run Microsoft. There’s a lot about how to use Information Technology including where to find things on the web. I think I expected more from the book than I found, but on reflection that may be because it was written primarily for business people not as familiar with computers as I am. Even so, I learned a lot from it, and I’m sure anyone involved in business will find it more than worth the price. Recommended.

The general interest books of the month are Tom Clancy and General Fred Franks, Jr. (Ret), Into the Storm - A Study in Command, and Mark Bowden Black Hawk Down. I actually bought the Clancy/Franks book on tape to listen to while driving down to the beach house, and I liked it enough that I bought the paper copy as well. This is the story of VII Corps in the Desert War. VII Corps had the toughest assignment of the war, the "Hail Mary" play. General Franks was VII Corps commander, the first amputee active duty general since the Civil War. Franks gets bad treatment in General Schwartzkopf's book on the war; here he gets to tell his side of the story, as well as go into detail on what Clausewitz meant by "friction".

Black Hawk Down is a well told story of a shameful incident in which US troops were sent on the wrong mission with the wrong intelligence by political leaders with the wrong idea and politicians who denied them the right equipment for the missions they were given. It's a compelling story of heroism and betrayal. Bowden is a lot kinder to the President and Secretary of Defense than I would be.

>From the June 1999 Column The book of the month is Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott. Scott was one of the best storytellers who ever lived. Kenilworth is about Robin Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and his romance and secret marriage with Queen Elizabeth. People don't read the old adventure stories now, largely because they find the descriptions slow-moving and dull. The trick is to skim past much of that.Scott had no choice but to put in plenty of description because most of his readers didn't travel, there were no illustrated magazines, and television didn't exist. Painting pictures in the reader's mind's eye was the only way to get people to see settings that are commonplace to television viewers, but were exotic to the people of Victorian England. I picked up Kenilworth quite by accident, but once I got to reading it, I didn't want to stop.

>From the July 99 Column The book of the month is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, his novel of medieval mercenaries. Doyle liked that book much better than he did his Sherlock Holmes series. As with all books of that era, the pace is a bit slow because so much has to be described to a readership that didn't have television or National Geographic. But the action is good, the history is accurate and gives a good feel of the times, and it's a whacking good story. [The Project Gutenberg text version can be found here]

The book of the month is John Keegan, The First World War (Knopf, 1999 ISBN 0-375-40052-4). All of Keegan's books are superb but this one is a masterpiece. He does the best job of explaining how civilized and educated people, all convinced that war was far too costly to be a useful way of solving international disputes, could find themselves unable to stop short of the most terrible war in history.

The computer books this month are Jesse Liberty, The Complete Idiot's Guide to A Career in Computer Programming (Que, 1999 ISBN 0-7897-1995-9) , and Rob Thayer et al, Visual Basic 6 Unleashed (SAMS, 1999, ISBN 0-672-31508-4). If you know someone contemplating a career in computer programming, the Liberty book will give a surprisingly good overview of what's involved, complete with a pretty good discussion of programming languages. Do understand, reading this book isn't going to make a professional of anyone; but it can show what's involved in becoming one.

>From the September 1999 Column The book of the month is Wm. F. Buckley, "The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy" (Little Brown, ISBN 0316115894, June 1999). This is as much nonfiction as fiction, and indeed the fictional aspects of the book are the least believable. I lived through the McCarthy era and I have definite memories of what happened; this book takes a view I didn't then hold, and tries to show what McCarthy was and was not, and what he did and did not do. It embeds the man in his times rather well, and I found myself fascinated. McCarthy certainly did his own cause more harm than good. This book shows how that happened, and to a lesser extent why. It's also a whacking good read.

October 1999 Column: The book of the month is Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone by J. K. Rowling. Fair warning: the Harry Potter series of children’s books are real books, with real words. By that I don’t mean “adult”; there aren’t any words children shouldn’t hear (as if, in these days of the Internet, our children don’t know more about sex and violence than we do). What I mean is there are phonetic words like “Muggle” that kids will never have seen before. What’s great about these books is that kids want to read them, and they’re fun for adults too. In Harry Potter’s world, which looks more or less like modern England, wizardry and sorcery work, and there’s a Ministry of Magic whose major purpose is to keep Muggles - those who can’t use magic - from knowing that magic exists. There’s also a boarding school for young wizards that’s a cross between modern Eton and Tom Brown’s School Days. There’s no religious content to these books, but there is a strong ethical content: the good guys win, but it costs them, sometimes dearly, and the bad guys are really evil.

I’ve heard a few objections to these books, mostly from people who think children would be better off reading Swiss Family Robinson and Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure stories. I certainly don’t object to those, but I share Jacques Barzun’s view on what children should read: pretty well anything they want so long as it’s written with good grammar and isn’t actually depraved. (Barzun notes that at age 12 he got hold of a “highly naturalistic” novel by Mirabeau. “I thought the characters behaved in an odd manner, but I put it down to the author’s inexperience rather than my own.” If you haven’t seen his Teacher in America, let me recommend it to you.) Anyway, there’s nothing like that in these works: the 12 year old characters behave the way we did when we were 12 or so. I much enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, and if that’s what it takes to get kids reading real books as opposed to controlled vocabulary pap, I’m all for it.

>From the November 1999 Column The book of the month is Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited. Banfield's careful studies of urban problems are disturbing, but anyone concerned about the future tranquility of cities really should read this book. It won't make anyone happy, but it is very hard to argue with his conclusions, which are that bad cultures produce bad results; all cultures are not equal; and without cultural changes, the inner cities are going to become less, not more livable.

The book of the month is a series of books on CDROM from The Oregon Institute. Long ago J A Henty wrote a series of juvenile historical novels. They take place from the time of the Crusades to the Industrial Revolution, and generally have a teen-age character, usually but not always a boy, involved in great historical events. In one, for instance, the protagonist is an apprentice to silversmith Paul Revere. In another he's a page with King Richard on crusade. The stories are interesting, and I found them fascinating from age 11 until I went into the Army. Reading on screen from CDROM isn't the best way to read a book, but it will do, and for that matter you can print the books out if you have a good printer. Anyway, the whole set, about 50 books, is available for $100 from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 2251 Dick George Road, Cave Junction, Oregon, 97523. If you are into home schooling, you might also ask about their Self-Teaching Curriculum [ it's called the Robison Curriculum ].

>From the January 2000 Column The book of the month is a series of books on CD-ROM from The Oregon Institute. Long ago, J A Henty wrote a series of juvenile historical novels. They take place from the time of the Crusades to the Industrial Revolution, and generally have a teen-age character, usually but not always a boy, involved in great historical events.

In one, for instance, the protagonist is an apprentice to silversmith Paul Revere. In another he's a page with King Richard on crusade. The stories are interesting, and I found them fascinating from age 11 until I went into the Army. Reading on screen from CD-ROM isn't the best way to read a book, but it will do, and for that matter you can print the books out if you have a good printer. Anyway, the whole set, about 50 books, is available for $100 from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 2251 Dick George Road, Cave Junction, Oregon, 97523. If you are into home schooling, you might also ask about their Self-Teaching Curriculum [ it's called the Robison Curriculum ].

>From the February 2000 Column The book of the month is David Gerrold's Jumping Off the Planet (Tor Books, 2000). Fair warning: the book has highly realistic portrayals of a dysfunctional family, and being told from the viewpoint of a rebellious teenager might be thought to be a little juvenile. I suspect most young people will enjoy this book, but the parents might want to read it first. There is no explicitly portrayed sex, but there are a number of off-stage sexual encounters that turn out to be important to the plot. Me, I would have encouraged my teenage boys to read it (only of course they are all grown men now), but I can understand parents who don't want that.

>From the March 2000 Column The book of the month is Charles Sheffield's, The Borderlands of Science, from Baen Books. Sheffield has his degree in physics from Oxford, and does satellite-imaging work when he's not writing science fiction. We've collaborated on some things, most notably Higher Education, and there is no one more qualified to write on the subject of where science leaves off and science fiction can begin. Charles has done a very readable work introducing writers to science, and incidentally gives a number of interesting pointers on just how to get into the science-fiction racket. This is a book suitable for nearly anyone interested in just where science may be going.

>From the April 2000 Column The book of the month is Hoodwinking the Nation by the late Julian Simon (Transaction, 1999). Simon looks into just what are the facts behind prophecies of doom, and shows how the doomsayers pull the wool over our eyes. Simon, you may recall, used to regularly win bets with doomsayers, although they often didn't pay up.

>From the May 2000 Column The book of the month is Legacy of Prometheus, by Eric Kotani and John Maddox Roberts, Forge Press, April 2000. This is a hard science-fiction novel about solar power, and when I say hard science I mean it: Eric Kotani is the pen name of my old friend Yoji Kondo, a NASA scientist who has managed to make so many contributions to astronomical science that they've gone and named an asteroid after him. It's a good read, too.

>From the June 2000 Column The book of the month is Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, Knopf 1999. I do not often use the glib reviewer's phrase "this is an important book," but in this case I will. This book is essential reading for anyone teaching political science, economics, ethics, civics, or citizenship, and for those who got through their education without any real discussion of the place of property in the development of what we call democracy and the rule of law. That means most of us, as Pipes shows. Although there is a rich heritage of theory connecting property rights to "human rights," most of it has been neglected in modern education. It shouldn't be.

>From the July 2000 Column The book of the month is Peter Huber's Hard Green, a conservationist view of environmentalism. He seems to think much as I do: the trick is to use government to do what it does best, which is nothing. In this case, get government to take over land and let it become wilderness and national parks. That is likely to do more for the environment than all the regulations in the world. It's an interesting read, anyway.

The second book of the month is Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. This is an intellectual history of western civilization that makes an excellent read. It's also an important book, and I don't use phrases like that lightly. Universities sadly neglect history and the liberal arts: this book isn't a substitute, but reading it will fill a number of gaps, not so much in information as in connections. It reminds me a lot of Burke, but Barzun is both more scholarly and more readable, no mean feat. Highly recommended.

>From the August 2000 Column The book of the month Is Robert B. Banks' Towing Icebergs, Falling Dominoes, and Other Adventures in Applied Mathematics (Princeton University Press). If you've ever wondered what use mathematics is, this book applies fairly simple calculus to a variety of interesting themes. Might it be practical to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to the Los Angeles harbor as a freshwater supply? And so forth. Not light reading, perhaps, but I found it a good change of pace.

>From the September 2000 Column The book of the month is Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion, by James Gifford; Nitrosyncretic Press, 2000 ISBN 0-9679874-1-5. This wonderful book has a short disquisition on every known work of science fiction Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein, including works I never heard of, and I thought I knew Robert's work pretty well. It's readable, and if you're at all a Heinlein fan, it's essential.

>From the October 2000 Column The book of the month is The Code, by Ken Sheldon. Ken was my editor at Byte Magazine for years, and at another time was chief of Byte's West Coast bureau. He knows the computer world, and his novel about the largest online service in the world shows it. Roberta glommed onto this when it came and wouldn't put it down until she finished it. A compelling novel, and a real page turner. Recommended

>From the November 2000 Column The book of the month is by Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today, St. Martin's Press. Donald Kagan is the Yale history professor whose four-volume work on the Peloponnesian War [ one of them is The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition ] was recommended here a few years ago, and who has written extensively on history and international security. His premise has always been not only that if you want peace you must be prepared for war, but that if you want peace you must keep that peace actively. His son Frederick is a historian at West Point, so this book is likely to be influential.

While I agree with much they say, I have my doubts about the ability of the United States to "keep the peace," even if we adopt the policies both of the Kagans advocate. The United States has no very splendid record as an Imperial power, and peacekeeping in places far from home where there is no immediate and obvious threat to our national interest may change us as much as it changes the world; and not for the better.

On the other hand, if the United States wants to intervene all over the world, as we seem determined to do, we had better pay attention to the instruments we do that with. Walter Lippman's observation that foreign policy commitments are like checks drawn on the bank of military power must not be forgotten; nor should the lessons learned in the Korean War. (For that, see T. R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War, not only the definitive history of the U.S. effort in the Korean War, but the best analysis of what we did wrong and right in that nearly forgotten conflict.)

>From the December 2000 Column The book of the month is by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson: PC Hardware in a Nutshell, O'Reilly, 2000. Like all O'Reilly books, this one is well edited and has a decent if not excellent index. Fair warning: I wrote the preface to this book, and Thompson and I are collaborating on a far more elaborate hardware book, complete with Chaos Manor war stories and considerably more detail. This book is lean and spare, as are most Nutshell books. It's also available now, and as good a desktop-reference work as you'll find. The advice on how to do things is specific and clear, and the reference data is excellent. You'll get your money's worth out of this book while you're waiting for ours. Recommended.

The second book of the month is Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words, Warner Business Books, 2000. This is an enormous coffee-table book that came to me with a letter from the Microsoft director of corporate communications. In a sense, it's a huge PR press release. It has no index, and not much of a table of contents. You have no choice but to read it by browsing through.

The book of the year is Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence, Harper Collins. If you don't read another book this year read this. It will take you a month or so. It's worth the time.

The book of the month is Que's Special Edition Using Windows 2000 Server, nearly essential if you are going to set up a 2000 Server network.

The movie of the month was Miss Congeniality. I know a number of critics panned it, but I thought it was charming. Of course I almost always think Sandra Bullock movies are charming. The movie of the year was Chicken Run. I know it's not going to win any Academy Awards, but it was the funniest thing I saw in 2000.

I've also recently got a tape of one candidate for the best movie of the last century: the Claude Raines/Vivian Leigh Caesar and Cleopatra, a straightforward adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play of the same name. Shaw's Caesar is certainly more believable than Shakespeare's. It's hard to see how men would fight and die for the pompous ass Shakespeare gives us, but Claude Raines shows us a man that fighting men would - and did - follow to hell and back.

The book of the month is Sharon Crawford Windows 2000 PRO, The Missing Manual. ( O'Reilly, www.missingmanual.com ) This is precisely what it says it is, and if you're doing Windows 2000 Pro - and you should - you'll want this as a handbook. The second book of the month is also O'Reilly, Walter Glenn's WORD 2000 In A Nutshell: A Power User's Quick Reference (www.oreilly.com ). This is precisely what the sub-title says, and gives a quick survey of the many features most of us don't use in Word 2000. Some of those features are worth knowing about. [Apparently I did not have a general book of the month.]

The book of the month is Bill Walsh, Lapsing Into A Comma, "A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print - and How to Avoid Them". Contemporary Books, 2000. Walsh is the copy desk chief at the Washington Post. This book belongs on your shelf alongside Stunk and White, and if you don't know about it, once you do you will thank me for telling you. The second book of the month is Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma (Revised ed. Harper, 1997, 2000). This book is essential for anyone who wants to manage a company in this age of innovation. I don't agree with everything in it, but there is not a line in there you shouldn't think about.

The computer book of the month is Mary Millhollon with Jeff Castrina, Easy Web Page Creation, Microsoft Press, 2000. Largely intended for Front Page users, this starts at the beginning and goes through to fairly complex and impressive web sites: how to design them and what to do once you've done the design. I wish I had had it in hand when I first created mine, and I'll probably take some tips from it.

The second computer book of the month is Richard Feynman's Lectures on Computation, Perseus, 2000. Richard Feynman had the gift of presenting highly complex ideas in a way that made them look simple. If you're in computer science or thinking of going there, read

There are two books this month. One, KALVAN KINGMAKER [no reference to this book can be found on Amazon or Barnes and Noble] by John F. Carr, is the sequel to the John F. Carr/Roland Green Great King's War set in the Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen universe of the late H. Beam Piper. Those addicted to Piper's universe simply can't afford to miss this one. Pequod Press, 2001, hardbound. John F. Carr was for about 15 years my co-editor on a number of anthologies. Most of us have been waiting for this book for a long time.

Second, Tim Powers, Declare (Wm. Morrow, 2001) is the ultimate conspiracy novel. The title comes from a passage in the Book of Job. Characters include Kim Philby. As you read this book you will begin to think you understand what's going on. You'll have that experience again and again as the plot turns and twists. Declare, if thou hast understanding…

The computer book of the month is Mark Lutz and David Ascher, Learning Python, O'Reilly. This is a good general introduction not only to Python but to object-oriented programming languages in general. If you ever wrote programs in Pascal or BASIC or dBase-2 and have any interest in getting back, or if you program in C++ and want to know what Python is all about, this is the right book to start with.

I do not usually review books I don't care for, but I have a warning this time: there is a series called Cassell's History of Warfare in multiple volumes from Cassell and Company. The general series editor is John Keegan, and they are beautifully produced, and practically worthless as history. The illustrations are lovely, and there are a few good maps, but the text is perfunctory. There is little detail and almost no sense of strategic importance, and I cannot recommend any of the series. I wish otherwise.

The book of the month is Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax (University of California Press). This is a chilling account of the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk when some of the products of a Soviet germ warfare laboratory were accidentally released. The Soviets denied that, of course; Jeanne Guillemin builds her case in a story as well told as a good detective novel. If you worry at all about germ warfare, you need to read this book.

The computer book of the month is Brenda Kienan, Managing Your E-Commerce Business, Microsoft Press. I don't encourage you to spend money on starting an e-commerce business, but if you want to know most of the details of how to do that, you'll find them in this book.

For book of the month I return to a previous recommendation: From Dawn to decadence by Jacques Barzun. Given the rather spotty — I am tempted to say miserable — state of our school system we are in danger of losing the continuity of western civilization. This book, by itself, can help change that: It goes through the history of ideas and puts them in context. It's highly readable as well as thought provoking, and I can literally say I wish every U.S. citizen would read this book.

The computer book of the month is Anthony Bolante's Premiere for Macintosh and Windows, Peachpit Press. This is a good book to take you from bare minimum to mid competence with what has become the standard video editing software, and it will serve as a good basic handbook as well. (column 249)

The Computer Book of the Month is a pair of Peachpit/Macromedia Press books: Dreamweaver 4 for Windows and Macintosh, and Macromedia Generator and Flash Demystified. The first of these books is a good handbook for use with Dreamweaver. It is not sufficient to introduce you to the product without some prior experience in web building, but it probably would be good enough to convert someone like me from FrontPage to Dreamweaver given that I had the time to learn it. Dreamweaver is an excellent program. It was good when it first came out, and has improved since. I rather wish I had learned it: There are many effects easily done in Dreamweaver that are clunky to difficult to impossible in FrontPage.

You will find "The Official Guide to Generator and Flash" interesting, which shows you what these programs can do. Vector-based animations and interactive movies are popping up all over the place, and web authoring is just beginning: If you have any interest in developer level skills, this book will give you a good picture of what you're going to have to learn (and teach you a good bit of it in the bargain). Neither of these books is simple and easy, but no book covering these subjects is likely to be.

The Book of the Month is Tom Wakeford's Liasons of Life, which presents an alternative view of the place of microbes in human evolution. I can't say I agree with everything here but there's a lot going on in biology since I looked last. If new theories of biology and evolution aren't sufficiently interesting, try James Chatters's Ancient Encounters: Kennewich Man and the First Americans. This one is fascinating to me because Niven and I are doing another book set in North America 14,000 years ago... column (250)

The book of the month is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a great sprawling novel that jumps between World War II and grandchildren of those characters. Ostensibly about code breaking and efforts to conceal that codes have been broken, this is also a grab bag of diversions and observations by Stephenson that make John D. MacDonald's books look highly focused in comparison. It will take you a while to read it, but unlike most of his books, this one almost has a real ending. Byte.com readers will like it.

The computer book of the month is Linnea Dayton and Jack Davis's The Photoshop 6 WOW! Book [see also The Photoshop 7 WOW! Book] from Peachpit Press. It's not cheap, but it starts at a fairly simple level and goes through to a pretty advanced level on using Photoshop to create effects. If you're interested in computer graphics art and have some hopes of learning to do it professionally, you will be glad to have this book. Recommended.

The book of the month is Big Chief Elizabeth by Giles Milton. This is the story of the English colonization of America, and what happened to Sir Walter Raleigh's lost colony on Roanoke Island. It's also about politics in Elizabeth's court, and somewhat less so about the time of her successor James I and VI, King of England and Scotland. Fascinating all the way. The second book of the month is one I somehow missed when it first came out, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I said of his Cryptonomicon that I probably could have written that book but I wouldn't have wanted to: Not that it wasn't good, but it wasn't the kind of thing I do. Snow Crash is different: I couldn't have written this if my life depended on it. It's inconsistent, part novel and part satire, and don't start it if you have a lot to do because you will have a lot of trouble putting it down. Incidentally, the unabridged version of this from Books On Tape is excellent and the experience of having this read to you may be even better than that of reading it yourself. I don't say that of many books.

The computer book of the month is a Peachpit Press Visual Quickstart Guide, Jeff Carlson's Palm Organizers. Good handbook on Palm-based systems and how to use them.

The book of the month is David Weber and John Ringo, March Upcountry (Baen Books 2001). This is military hard science fiction, with a good story, lots of action, and believable characters. The main character is a spoiled brat who grows up. If you like military science fiction you'll like this. Pure fun with some good sense behind it.

The computer books of the month are both from O'Reilly Press: Sharon Crawford, Windows 2000 Pro: The Missing Manual; and Mitch Tulloch, Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell. I recommend Windows 2000 Pro, and Chaos Manor runs under a domain controlled by Windows 2000 Server; but the manuals that come with Windows 2000 are pitiful, and the online help isn't a lot better. Between these two books you have a chance of finding out how to do things you must do to keep W2K going.

While I am on the subject of missing manuals and reference works, if you don't have the O'Reilly PC Hardware in a Nutshell by Robert and Barbara Thompson, you should: The subtitle "A Desktop Quick Reference" is accurate. If you still operate with NT you definitely need it, but it belongs on the Windows 2000 reference shelf as well. ...

I've already mentioned several reference books. The Computer Book of the month Hacking Exposed, by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, and George Kurtz (Osborne McGraw Hill). This book is heavy going, not light reading, but it will tell you more about what hackers have done and can — and can't — do than anything else I have seen. It's also chock full of tips on countermeasures and just plain usability tricks. Recommended. ...

For light reading this month I went through several of the Harry Potter books. They're as much fun on the second reading as the first, and I can't wait to see the movie...

The book of the month is Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture. Hanson is the author of The Western Way of War, and this book continues his investigation into why western civilization has been able to use warfare in a decisive manner. To the best of my knowledge, Fletcher Pratt was the first to raise that question in his The Battles that Changed History (1956), but he didn't answer it. Hanson tries with a look at a series of western battles from ancient to modern times. All cultures have wars: Why has the western way of war been decisive?

The computer book of the month is Andrew Troelsen's Visual Basic.NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide. The title is accurate: It's quite advanced. On the other hand, you don't need to be an expert to make use of this book. Like it or hate it, Visual Basic and Visual Studio and the .NET platform are going to be important, and everyone in the computer business needs to know something about them. This book is one of the Intertec Instructor Series from A! Apress. That series includes C# and the .NET Platform by the same author, also worth your attention as C# gains in importance as a programming language.

The book of the month is The Root of All Evil, another collection of the User Friendly comic strips < http://www.userfriendly.org/ > from Illiad, otherwise known as J.D. Frazer. This is the third in the series from O'Reilly, and continues the mad antics of the techies vs. the marketers in a Linux house. The book contains a (short) introduction by me. Oddly enough, not only was I not paid for writing that (I was glad to do it) but I wasn't even told when the book came out, and while I get O'Reilly technical books for review, I didn't get a review copy. I had to buy one. Buy it. Of course, I bought it from Amazon through my own web site, so I get a bit of the money back, but buying review books is likely to get me thrown out of the guild...

First, Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong, a masterly analysis of Islamic culture, which does a pretty good job of explaining how things in the Middle East have come to this pass. Lewis is generally considered to be the antidote to the pernicious "postmodernist" Edward Said — between Lewis's new book and David Pryce-Jones's The Closed Circle, one can get a pretty good idea of where we've been in regards to the Arab world, and possibly some insight into where things may be going.

Second, Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World is a highly sensible presentation of just what's happening on the environmental scene. Lomborg looks at, and presents, real data, not just hunches. He has been reviled by some environmentalists on the grounds that he may not be wrong but he's doing damage to the movement by concluding that things are not always as bad as they have been painted. That seems an odd attitude for people calling themselves scientists. Lomberg's book is slow reading precisely because it is so rich in primary data, but if you've been concerned about the environment, you really need to read this book.

The book of the month is The Law of Falling Bodies by my former BYTE associate Edmund X. DeJesus (ISBN 0-595-20200-4). It's readable and contains both a good scientific puzzle and an interesting romantic novel. The publisher is which is a Print On Demand house. I'll have a good bit more to say about those in another column. Meanwhile, this was a fun read.

The computer book of the month is by Ken Getz, Paul Litwin, and Andy Baron, entitled Access Cookbook (O'Reilly). The title pretty well says it all, and if you work with Access or plan to or even just want to know some of the things Access can do, you need this book.

The second computer book of the month is J. Tarin Towers's, Macromedia Dreamweaver for Windows and Macintosh (Peachpit Press). If you're planning on web designs, there are two major paths: Microsoft FrontPage, which is fairly easy to learn and often good enough — it's what I use for my own site — and Macromedia's Dreamweaver with its various toolboxes and add-ons. Of the two, it's pretty clear that Dreamweaver will take you farther and give you more capabilities. It's also harder to learn, or it was that way for me; and it may take you beyond where you want to go. A good way to find out is to go through this book, which goes from the basic to the advanced. I suspect that if I'd had this book when I first started designing my web page I might have gone a different route.

The first computer book of the month is Sergei Dunaev's, Advanced Internet Programming Technologies and Applications, A-List Charles River Media, 2002. The book assumes you know something about Active X and Java, and mostly it lives at the "advanced" level, but you don't have to be an expert to follow what's going on. If you're an intermediate-level programmer familiar with programming techniques, you can learn a lot from the examples in this book. For those trying to brush up on Internet programming skills, or learn some new ones, this is worth the time you'll spend on it.

The other two computer books this month are both from Microsoft Press. Greg Holden's E-Commerce Essentials came out in 2001 and I'm just getting to it, but it's still current. It assumes you'll use FrontPage to set up your web site, and then proceed to build a web store. There's a good bit about using wizards and such. The book wasn't a lot of help to me because its better features require FrontPage with the Server Extensions enabled, and due to my odd connectivity problems at Chaos Manor those don't work properly with my remote site, and I don't have the connectivity to host my own; but the book does show me what I can do as soon as I get the Extensions connected, and I can hardly wait. It's still worth getting this book if you're contemplating a commercial web site. Its companion book, Brenda Kienan's Managing Your E-Commerce Business, has some decent information, but is interesting in part because of the cheery optimism that was so prevalent before the dot bust. It's still an interesting introduction to web commerce and site design, but the basic assumption that anyone with a good idea and some time can go build a web business is now a bit questionable...

The book of the month is Sam Williams's Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software (O'Reilly). Get this book and read it. I'd be astonished if you agreed with all or even much of what Stallman believes, but you will be better off for understanding what he is saying. I first met Richard Stallman (he called himself RMS in those days) when he was a graduate student at MIT and I was just learning about the ARPANET. He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish. I learned then that RMS and I have a common failing: We don't suffer fools gladly or indeed at all, and we are sometimes wrong about who is a fool. But that's another story for another time.

This book is part biography, part philosophical tirade, and part bemused observation. It's well worth the time you put into reading it.

The book of the month is Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, by Victor Davis Hanson. This is another of Hanson's masterful analyses on why western civilization has been so successful in war and what might happen to change that. The section on the Battle of Lepanto is as good as anything I have seen on that subject..

June 2002: The book of the month is The New World Strategy (Simon and Schuster Touchstone, 1995) by Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. His On Strategy was about the best analysis of what happened in Vietnam, although I think he didn't understand the strategic importance of the South East Asian War: While it appeared to be a defeat of the West, and locally it certainly was, it was a victorious campaign of attrition in the Seventy Years War, the last phase of which we call The Cold War. The U.S,. for better or worse, employed a strategy of containment, denying the Soviet Union new conquests to feed from; we held Vietnam long enough to make their victory nearly worthless while the costs to them were high. Summers' On Strategy is a good analysis of our local defeat, but does not see the grand strategic victory.

The New World Strategy advises us to return to our roots; its most important conclusion is that there will be no great military revolution that changes everything. The principles remain. I may disagree with Summers on details, but I agree completely with that. The Strategy of Technology, by Possony and Pournelle, made that point 30 years ago. We wrote as theorists. Summers writes from military experience.

The second book of the month is just plain fun. Fair warning, some of you will hate it. J. Neil Schulman's Escape From Heaven (Pulpless Press, 2002) is a romp, an attempt to rewrite C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, with the theology removed. It's fair to say that Schulman, behind the pure fun he's having, has the serious Miltonic purpose of justifying God's ways to man. Milton would have thought him a heretic, and I suspect C.S. Lewis would have said Schulman (like Heinlein in Job) missed the point; but for all that it's a good read, and if the assumptions annoy you that might make you rethink your own: no bad thing. Like much of Schulman's work this suffers from inside jokes that break reader empathy—but that's a hard temptation to resist, and I found I kept reading to the end.

The computer book of the month is Open Source, The Unauthorized White Papers, by Donald K. Rosenberg (M&T Books, an imprint of IDG Books International). If you are seriously contemplating business decisions involving Open Source software, you had better read this book if you haven't already; and if you have read it, it does no harm to read it again.

New editions of previous books of the month aren't generally selected, but I do want to remind you of the new edition of Robert Bruce Thompson's PC Hardware In A Nutshell. This is the single most useful book on this subject that I know of. Not only does it tell you about all you need to know about upgrading and maintenance, but there are URLs to even more technical details if you wa