Product Description
Photos taken by Jeff Bridges during the making of the movie. One of only 1,000 copies ... Read more

Product Description
Gargantuan dragons soar over Krynn, battling for control of the lands below. On the isle of Sancrist, the weakened Knights of Solamnia ask their old enemies the Knights of Takhisis, for help. At the insistence of Lord Gunthar, the knights renew the alliance forged during the last days of the Chaos War. But when the Grand Master of the Knights of Solamnia abruptly dies, the leadership of the knights -- in fact their very existence -- is challenged.

Jeff Crook's novel tells a tale of the Knights of Solamnia, the greatest knightly order on Krynn, faced with what may be their greatest challenge.
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Customer Reviews (13)

A Worthy Effort
The Rose and Skull takes place between the events of the Chaos War and before the War of the Souls.It is a story of political intrigue, dark humor, and good character development.Jeff Cook paints the most interesting portrayal of the Knights of Solmania, adding dimensions and elements to the normally one-dimensional "Knight of Solmania" archtype.

The story centers around the mysterious death of Lord Winston Gunther, a character from the original Chronicles Trilogy.Lord Gunther has been the head of the Knights of Solmania for years, and towards the beginning of the novel he is a man who is becoming senile.Gunther devises a plan to combine the Knights of Takhisis and the Knights of Solmania into one unit to ward of the growing threat of the Great Dragons.Thus, he invites a contingent of the dark knights to his castle where they begin to settle and interact with the Knights of Solmania.

There are many who do not like this plot.

Lord Gunther mysteriously dies, and the events that follow his death are the backbone of the book.As many have said in previous reviews, there were to many chapters devoted to the Gully Dwarf Characters.Gully Dwarfs serve a purpose in the Dragonlance universe, but a third of the book are dedicated the "little ones"This took away from the what could have possibly been a very political novel of intrigue and a excellent murder mystery story that could have taken place in the Dragonlance world.

The beginning of the book has displays and descriptions of dark humor and I found myself laughing at some of the descriptions Cook inks, especially about Lord Gunther.However, towards the end of the novel the book takes a dramatic shift in tone and frankly becomes quiet violent in nature.The plot is not a bad plot, and the characters are somewhat interesting.But the novel deviates to much from the true purpose and does not have a consistent flow to it.

A praise:Cook has done his research with the Dragonlance world.He makes a nice reference to 'Bupu' the gully dwarf who fell in love with Raistin Majere.Cook makes mention that 'Bupu' had become a legend and a great heroine amongst the gully dwarf race.

And there is a nice appearance by Crysania.She makes a speech at Gunther's funeral and then interacts with one of the female Knights of Solmania, who happened to be inspired by Crysania's adventures and passion for Raistlin.Crysania is the cleric on the cover of the book and there is a brief cameo by Tander as well.

Overall the novel gets three out of five stars.Rose and the Skull is an okay/good Dragonlance novel.If you like politics, dark humor, the Knights of Solmania, the Knights of Takhisis or a fan of the Revered Daughter Crysania, this might be a novel you are interested in purchasing.

Well written and engaging, yet an insult to fans of the Solamnic Knighthood
This is essencially a warning to anyone who is a fan of Dragonlance and of the Solamnic Knighthood- If you got emotional when Sturm Brightblade fell at the High Clerist Tower, do not read this book.

While, as I stated, it is well written by a talented author and is fairly engaging and a good read overall, there are plot points and events in this book that are downright absurd when in the context of the Solamnic Knighthood.

I don't want to give anything away with spoilers, so I'll simply say that events nearly lead the Knighthood to doing two things that is simply implausible and downright blasphemus.

Enjoyable
While I didn't think this was quite a four star book, I felt it was closer to four than three stars.Crook gives us a very interesting look at the Solamnic Knights and the poor condition they find themselves in after the departure of the gods and the subsequent arrival of the great dragons.It seems both the Solamnic Knighthood, as well as the Knights of Takhisis, have fallen on hard times with the arrivial of these dragon overlords.They are grasping at straws and, in desperation, decide to do something that would otherwise be unthinkable for both sides (don't want to spoil it).The story is told from the point of view of the Solamnics and we get to see their struggle between doing what they commander feels is the right thing and what they feel in their hearts they should be doing.Mixed in among this is the courageous adventure of an unusual gully dwarf and his companions.

The characters populating this story were fairly well developed, including a dark elf that fascinated me.I was disappointed to find that he plays no role in Weis & Hickman's subsequent WAR OF SOULS trilogy.The two or three Solamnics that we get to meet are all different and are loyal to the Knighthood and their commander in their own way.The gully dwarf character has traits that make him more than just a regular gully dwarf:honor and loyalty drive him to attempt a task that no other gully dwarf would ever undertake.

The plot is interesting and action packed, with the aforementioned plan between the Solamnics and the Knights of Takhisis being the main plot device to propel the story.I would be very happy if Crook at some point wrote a sequel series to this book using the same characters so that we can see how they have progressed.Not a great book, mind you, but definitely worth a read if your a Dragonlance fan.

Roses for Crook
I'm new to the entire fantasy Dragonlance seriesbut after accidentally stumbling across Jeff Crook's, The Rose and the Skull, it appears I have some reading to do. Of course, I didn't get all the past references and probably missed half of the inside jokes but hey, you gotta start somewhere.

Crook captured me with his sly humor and tongue-in-cheek descriptions but then was quite the craftsman with the plot and character developments. Lady Jessica was a worthy heroine and I would like to see a book with her and Liam. Not much romance but still, a brooding tension that bordered on romance. Sometimes, less is better anyway. I loved the Gully Dwarves, especially Uhoh, but, what do I know?It seems other reviewers hated that plot line but it appeals to the underdog in me, always a chance.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to reading more in the Dragonlance series, both past and future. Especially ones by Mr.Crook.

It was missing something
Don't get me wrong, this book was worth reading but there were a few things that bugged me in it.First of all the Gully Dwarves were in a full half of this book and after awhile the jokes about the number two got oldand annoying.And then there were the fight scenes; they really weren'tthere.When I picked up this book I expected to have some really bigbattles play out in front of me, but that's not how it worked out.Crookused past tense on the battles so you really didn't get to read about anyhuge action scenes, just a small fight here or there.

There are pluses tothis book however.The Dark Elf Knight of Takhisis Valian Escu was aninteresting character and I personally would like to see a Dragonlance bookthat focuses only on him and his life after the Rose and the Skull.Andalso it was nice to see some of Pyrothraxus the Great Red Dragon of Mt.Nevermind. ... Read more

Product Description

Building maintainable and extensible web applications requires significant design and planning before even a single line of code can be written. But when you leverage development frameworks, you can overcome the many challenges of web-based development. This book maps out the Jakarta Struts framework, to help you solve everyday web application development problems.

This book concentrates on using Struts to develop the core architecture of a web application, and using other Jakarta projects to create a fully open source web application. Included are Object-RelationalBridge, Lucene, Velocity, and ANT. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Informative and very helpful
As a non-programmer, I found this book to be clear, precise and easy to read. I highly recommend it to people interested in the subject matter, but lacking a technical background.

Wait for the second edition
This book is a reprint of a Wrox book that APress bought when Wrox went out of business.Although the book has a publication date of September 2003, it was actually published by Wrox earlier in the year.Also, APress intends on releasing a second edition of this book (ISBN:159059228X) in December 2003.With that in mind, let's discuss the contents of this book.

The book is broken up into five sections.The first and longest section discusses Struts.This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad.This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier.Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete.The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool).Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.

The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition.Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, "Buy Me" from the shelves.

very good book
I had a chance to attend one of John Carnell's sessions here in Chicago. I was very impressed with his presentation and the content. After that I bought the book and I am very impressed with the simplicity with which the content is presented.

The Good, the bad, the overloaded
Since software moves quickly, some aspects of the book are already out of date even though it's only a matter of months old.The template tags are already deprecated in favor of the new tile tags and the Object Relational Bridge stuff has changed quite a bit (which is to be expected if you consider it wasn't even version 1 for OJB).I'm glad there's books on these topics in any case.

The first chapter is a nice read and while it's covered everywhere else, they cover MVC well and how it relates to the struts framework.

My biggest pet peeve is with one of what is otherwise their most useful chapter on prepopulating forms and setting forms up.In chapter 2 they talk about the concepts of pre and post setup actions (post as in after). Then in chapter 3 they use a PostStory example (post as in posting an ad, but then again it could be like the post form submit method).They have a PostStorySetupAction and with all the meanings of posts I had trouble not seeing it as an after[post]-before[setup] action.My brain core dumped and in the end I went back with a pen and marked out "post" everywhere in the chapter.If only they could have used AddStory or CreateStory, or I could forget the other overloaded meanings of post I wouldn't have had to reread that chapter.

The one time the book came to the rescue was when trying to mix the validator framework validation with custom validation.extending the ValidatorForm instead of ActionForm was exactly what we needed.

Good start for Struts beginners
This book summarizes Struts and some other technologies related. It can bring you to lot of save times in your beginnigs because It exposes a professional point of view front the use of these technologies and patterns. Not Struts beginners don't purcharse it. ... Read more

Product Description
Teaching children the "Law of Attraction" and accepting others for who they are. A story of a bridge that learns to appreciate all the different things in her life, big heavy buses as well as shiny new cars and all sorts of boats and people. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Bridging the Gap

Driving north for a week's retreat in one of the places I love most--the Keweenaw Peninsula, a peninsula on a peninsula, in the U.P. of Michigan--I packed a bag of books as travel companions. I've had an insatiable love of traveling since earliest childhood, and for me, taking books along that in some way reflect on the new world to explore, in some way deepen my experience and help me to understand a place and its inhabitants, is a part of the adventure. I once lived in the Keweenaw, so this is not a trip to discover something entirely new. This is, however, a journey to understand a place, and my place in it, on a deeper level.

And so, among my companion books is this slim-as-an-envelope-stuffed-with-a-love-letter book of stories by ex-Yooper, Jeff Vande Zande. Can one be an ex-Yooper? Yooper is a term Upper Peninsula people use to affectionately describe themselves and indicate their close ties to this northern land. Someone who lives in the Lower Peninsula, that great mitten-shaped part of the state of Michigan that most people think about when considering Michigan, is known as a Troll. You know, someone who lives below the bridge. And the bridge--that would be the five-mile long expanse of steel that connects the two peninsulas, the Mackinac Bridge. Vande Zande is now a "troll," as am I (sigh). But that he knows and keeps his Yooper roots, I quickly find, is evident in The Bridge.

Settled into my Keweenaw cabin, fireplace stoked, I open up this collection of three stories. The first story is flash fiction, not even two full pages, titled, "Have You Seen Us?" It is a quick glimpse of father and adult child, crossing the bridge, considering a camping spot, but more, considering the connection a bridge provides. A bridge connects two pieces of land, but a bridge is also that connecting thread between people.

Next, a longer story that is the title piece for this threesome, "The Bridge." Once again, we are looking at steel bridge juxtaposed against the bridges built and sometimes broken between family members: Mitch and Susan and alienated son, Jimmy. Mom Susan urges Dad Mitch to try harder to connect with his son, and Mitch can think of only one way that he knows how to reach out across this generational gap--by taking his son to see the Mackinac Bridge.

"The long stretch of the bridge sent a charge up his spine. He followed it with his eyes from the shore. The south causeway worked its way up the gradually rising piers until it came to the first anchorage pier. Pier 17. It had been years since he'd read seriously about the bridge. From pier 17 his eyes followed the steady arc of the deck and the cables shot back down toward the deck and the center of the bridge. Here the structure looked as though it rested against a mirror, as the cables rose skyward again toward the second tower and the deck began its descent toward the north side causeway and eventually into the bright lighting of the tollbooths. After that it was nothing but the darkness of the Upper Peninsula. He looked underneath the bridge, where the rough water of the straits broke high and ghostly white against the pilings of the piers."

Awed by this great and powerful structure, cognizant of its history, Mitch presents it to young Jimmy. "What do you think?" he asks. "Big," replies Jimmy. And with such masterly use of dialogue, almost painfully realistic (who of us have not had such conversations in which one tries to convey depth of feeling while the other remains bland and bored?), Vande Zande manages to tell a story of missed connection. He balances both sides so expertly, that at one moment the reader feels the ache of the father, the very next, the ache of the son. Both, after all, long for connection, but simply do not know how to create it.

The third story is "White Out," and with this grand finale, Vande Zande accomplishes the rare feat of being able to write cross-gender, that is, a male writer writing with a female voice. Few pull it off; Vande Zande makes it work. The main character of this story is Jackie, a young woman who lives in the Upper Peninsula and, yes, longs for connection. Her family scattered and broken apart, some still living in the U.P., some elsewhere, she has created a life for herself that leaves her longing for substance. Night after night, she sleeps with men with whom she makes a casual, physical connection, but comes up empty on intimacy, or true connection.

"In the smoky light of the bar, leaning against a table, shouting over the music, different men reminded Jackie of her father, big and unafraid. With some she would start relationships, but they never lasted more than a couple of months. She would soon reason that the man was not really a man, not what she imagined a man should be. Many of the men had drinking problems and spent most of their nights in the bar. Others were unemployed. Some lived with their parents. Others cheated on her. One had proposed to her after only two weeks of dating, but girlfriends told her that kind of desperation could only mean bad news."

Finally, Jackie wakes up one morning too many to an empty bed, last night's aimless lover gone, and she feels empty and used. Unable to bear her own company any longer, she decides to drive into the winter night to visit one family member after another. Back and forth she goes, at one moment thinking about connecting with her sister in Marquette, then her mother, remarried and now living in Ohio. She thinks about running away from her life and going to Detroit, that great metropolis in lower Michigan, but realizes Detroit has nothing to offer--it's just "someplace else."

The winter night has its own say, and as so often happens in the Upper Peninsula, she is forced to stop driving during a white out. Jackie has to wait out the storm at a gas station and convenience store, where she passes the time with the woman running the place with her husband, who also longs to be somewhere else. Once again, Vande Zande shows his mastery of dialogue, choosing just the right words to convey two personalities, very much U.P., very much female, very much lost within their own lives.

One evening of reading by the fire in my U.P cabin, and it was time well spent. I put the little book down on the coffee table and watched the flames, thinking about life that is unique to this place apart, yet in other ways the same as everywhere: people longing for connection, looking for bridges that will help them to know themselves less alone in the world.

~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet
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