Detailed, but disjointed and repetitive
591512
I bought this book on the recommendation of a fellow LE firearms instructor.  The premise of the book is to review and provide details on all of the officer-involved-shootings in MN over a period of 20+ years.  I assumed it would be a treasure trove of good after-action material that could be used for developing and refining training programs.

Unfortunately, while I'm sure there are true nuggets of wisdom buried in this book, I'll be darned if I can dig them out.  The writing is difficult to wade through, basically just cleaned up incident reports - very much "just the facts, ma'am."  The material is ostensibly organized into categories of shootings, but there seems to be limited development of logical presentation of the material.  The vignettes are all written using officer/offender's last names, and since each vignette is about two-three pages long, it's pretty tough to keep track of who's doing what to whom.

There's little or no real insight into the effects, thoughts, or experiences of the officers involved in the shootings, and the descriptions of the incidents themselves are so sterilized that it's tough to get any real "feel" for the incidents.
3489531
Steven Patterson's review is accurate. It's probably decent for a first novel, but reads in a disjointed manner. I believe this disjointedness may be attempts to place historical  in the book, but it fails at this, although does provide interesting tidbits of unrelated info now and then.
I also found myself wondering Yellow Fevers actual and percied importance versus other more well-known epidemic diseases of the times, such as malaria. I found that it is likely a lot of what I "knew" as purely malarial epidemics, may have also included yellow fever, but this book largely has the reverse problem of focused only on yellow fever without context to other diseases.
All in all, non-fiction for the masses still needs a coherent storyline, and at its best places the story in historical context, and this book did not astoundingly succeed at this.
1589631
Although the research is thorough and detailed, the information in this book would better be summarized in about 10-15 pages.  It became WAY to tedious reading and I couldn't continue.  ZZZzzzzzzz.
3821383
I bought this book because I liked the first book in the series and because I appreciate detailed research into little known military history, e.g. the Italian perspective of the air war in general and during the opening phases of the Desert War in particular.  However, the amount of detail in this volume seemed to exceed that of the first volume, with the result that it is a lot tougher to follow events in the narrative.  I don't mind knowing who is on a particular SM-79 shot down by RAF fighters once in a while if an important personality is aboard, but when you begin talking about a higher tempo of air operations that includes the frequent loss of several multi-engine bombers with three or more persons aboard each, that amount of detail begins to dramatically bog down the narrative.  In short, highly recommended as a reference source, but you might want to go with another book if your reading tastes tend toward mixing military history with pleasure.
1318991
The author knows his stuff, and there aren't many other places to find such an exhaustive and frank discussion of steroids.. However, the rambling, repetitiveness, and disorganization make it difficult to extract cohesive information. Furthermore, in trying to be complete, he throws a lot of unnecessary minutiae and over-analysis in there, especially regarding steroids, the make the book confusing at best. Lastly, the dosages he recommends, even for intermediate levels, are very high (and I myself am for from conservative in that area). There's some useful stuff in here, but it's buried in a haphazard heap.
2535294
I've read many books about the Battle of Britain, and each contributes to one's overall knowledge of this remarkable struggle.  But this one goes overboard with seemingly endless details, to the point that it becomes distracting to the narrative.

It's clear the author is totally devoted to the subject.  But for every encounter, we are told, with varying degrees of completeness for British and German forces:  1) Names and numbers of units, 2) fields from which they flew, 3) numbers and types of aircraft involved, 4) time of day and place of action,5) names of unit leaders, 6) names of the pilots involved, including who shot who down, 7) where the planes crashed, if applicable, 8) where the bodies were found or washed up, 9) how badly the planes that returned were damaged, 10) how badly the pilots were injured, and where they were treated and/or died, etc., etc., etc.

An amusing side note:  Lady Bader wrote a glowing forward for this book, but I can't imagine she had read the manuscript.  The author was highly critical of her husband, Douglas Bader, on numerous occasions.  While Bader was a remarkable pilot, he was something of a renegade, and caused considerable friction among the upper echelons of the RAF.
617817
I found that this book tried to cover too many issues with too many details that it could not flesh out well.  In short, the book is a bit too cluttered, which is a bit ironic.
545951
Interisting facts, although very tedious book
3145701
As others have said, it's got a lot of information, but the quality of that information -- coupled with the difficulty navigating it, due to the guide's less-than-ideal layout (in my opinion) -- is disappointing.

I do use it for the appendices: the list of 'Required Reading' (the various skill books found around the Commonwealth), Bobbleheads, etc., but I would otherwise just print these lists off or compile my own from information on the web.
4404439
This book has a great deal of valuable information in it, but it is so hard to follow. The author obviously did a great deal of research, but jumps back and forth in time, location, and characters. I really wish it was presented in a more continuous fashion with some kind of storyline instead of a list of dates and facts.
953194
I don't think that this book is well organized, and there are just too much historical events mixed together without a coherent setting to make sense. I believe that the book becomes tiring after some time and is really difficult to get to the end.
4170233
There are some good observations about writing here, but the presentation is rather disjointed--Vandenburgh admits to having trouble organizing her thoughts in the acknowledgements, and it shows. She goes about drafting novels in a very free-form, unstructured way (nothing wrong with that!), but I think this approach works against her in a non-fiction book about writing. My biggest barrier to gleaning information from this book is the fact that nearly half of it is an extended encyclopedia of writing terms. There are some standards here, like "conflict", "empathy", and "evil", but also invented terms and phrases I wouldn't have known to look up, such as "the way we name a river" (under W) and "your story's needs" (under Y). This forces you to read the encyclopedia chronologically--I noticed terms are re-referenced only in later sections, which seems to confirm my decision to read this way--and yet, reading an encyclopedia like this can be downright dull. There are some great little gems hidden in here (I liked "revelation" and "fairy tale"), but I found it hard to retain the disjointed, alphabetical list. Some definitions are lengthy, spreading over multiple paragraphs or pages, while others are overly vague and much too short. I think it would be more beneficial to read the books referenced here instead: Wood's "How Fiction Works", Lamott's "Bird by Bird", King's "On Writing", Forrester's "Aspects of the Novel".
1176433
I found the subject matter very interesting, but it was way too repetitive.  I wish the author would have organized the material in more of a chronological order. I would have loved to read the entire story of one mistress, one at a time.  Reading 20+ references of Madame Pompadour made it difficult to get a cohesive picture of her life with the king.

I recommend the book, but be prepared to be frustrated with the read.
4198455
The history of the two companies is fairly deep, and involves a lot of back and forth.  Insight on the ownership is deep and interesting.  But it is set up like a, "they did this, so the other guy did this" type of format.
That is fine since it is basically an ongoing battle once the others like Excelsior were out of the way, but at times gets tedious.

My main complaint is the person who wrote this either has no formal writing experience, or just is unable to put more than a few sentences together.  The narrative is such that it is similar to being talked to rather crudely, rather than the companies being written about.  I often found silly phrases, broken sentences, and other incorrect usage that made it much harder to read.

The history is covered well, the writing, not so much.
And no, there is not too much on racing save for the obvious, like who took any particular year.
1362751
MultiAgent Systems is a great field of work. There is a lot to explore in the space and it ties in ideas from many different fields.

The problem with this textbook is that it tries to cover far too much. I felt as though the chapters were very disjoint, and I also thought the notation used in the book was sloppy and obtrusive. It could've been presented in a much clearer format.

One thing I enjoyed were the MindMaps at the end/beginning of the chapters. They really showed the ideas that were being presented in a nice manner and helped calm the frustration of the overall disorganized manner of the book. I hope to see future editions clear a few of these issues up, because this area is very important with the growing number of independent automaton, and it would be great to have a resource such as this aims to be.
4174321
This author is redundant.  He repeats himself.  He says things over and over.  I feel like the book was too long by half and it can make for tedious reading.  While there is a lot of information to process about why whales do what they do, and why trainers do what they do,  and how the two species interact together, some procedures and anecdotes are presented more than once.  I'd even go out on a limb and say more than twice.  So much so that several times over the duration of the narrative, I found myself checking page numbers on my kindle thinking I may inadvertently have sent myself back to the beginning of the book.  Fifteen or so whales are examined in depth, including Tilikum, so emphasis on their histories and relationships to each other was helpful.  However many incidents between them and the trainers are recounted several times over the course of the book as if for the first time.  Dawn Brancheau's tragic death is analyzed from many perspectives.  The very title of the book lets the reader know that David Kirby is sympathetic to the anti-captivity side of the debate and indeed, Sea World is depicted in a very poor light...an employer and business concerned only with their bottom line despite the injuries of many trainers and the shocking and violent deaths of three.

I was interested in the story behind the headlines and expected a somewhat biased account of the tragedy.  As an animal lover, I'm deeply disturbed by the plight of these orcas, and the shock and grief surely plaguing the families of those who lost their lives.  Steel yourself for an alarming, albeit somewhat rambling, read.
4149383
Having an interest in Edison, I was looking forward to this "definitive biography"; however, while the book provides great detail about Edison's invention process, I was disappointed in learning so little about Edison the man.  I would have entitled the book, "The Experiments, Inventions, and Business Ventures of Thomas Edison", because that's the focus of it.  There is great detail regarding his experiments, the invention process, and the business ventures that arose from it, but someone looking for a true biographical picture of Edison should look elsewhere.

For example, having visited the Ft. Myers homes of Edison and Ford and Edison's lab there, I was interested in their relationship and their shared perspectives; however, beyond the mention that they were friends and some short comments on their business interests together, there is nothing about their relationship in this 472 page book.  I learned more in 10 minutes from the guide at the Edison home than I did from this book.  Likewise, the book becomes tedious with details of all the experimental attempts which didn't work and an overabundance of anecdotes and quoted comments which may provide a complete record, but which overwhelm the narrative making the book a very tough and dry read.  Better editing would have made this book more readable.

For an engineer or technical person, this book is a gold mine of detailed information and will be much appreciated by someone looking for that level of detail, so I don't want to sound too negative about the book.  The average person, though, would be better served by other true biographies of Edison if they hope to be inspired by the true genius and greatness of Thomas Edison.