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I thought this was a nice return to the initial style of the Dresden Files. The previous three or so books have had a lot of changes, and a lot of new information has been released, and while some new information was discovered in this book, it was mostly a story about Harry, getting himself into trouble, and figuring out how to get out of it again. Nothing extremely earth-shattering was revealed, which was very nice.
After hearing Jim Butcher plans on releasing a total of something like 30 books, this book helped establish how he's going to handle the second half of this series, which I enjoyed.
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Unfortunately, not useful for my purposes, because it's largely composed of exercises for Spanish/French interpreters, and not much theory. Probably good for those audiences.
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This book was published in 1995, and it really shows its age, especially when it comes to sources to build your knowledge base. Since we now have plenty of online dictionaries/articles, as well as the ability to contact specialists regardless of where you live, his suggestions for gathering information are not really applicable anymore. His guidelines for confirming the reliability of your sources is still applicable to internet searches, though, so these sections are still worthwhile.
This book is focused primarily on teaching in a classroom setting. I assumed from the title that it could be used for individual study, and certain parts or chapters have been helpful to me, but there are lists of exercises, and teaching suggestions in every chapter, and a lot of his focus is on providing teachers with good methods.
There is a pretty awesome illustration of capacity required for simultaneous interpretation. After expressing these capacity requirements as though it were a math formula, the author then includes an illustration, for easier comprehension. The variables are guests, and the host must provide them with booze. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since this author is a French translator/interpreter.
Overall, I think this was a pretty good book, despite being pretty outdated. I got some useful information about techniques, and some references for the future. Unfortunately, since the author's B language is French, a lot of the examples and resources he lists are in French.
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This is a very different book from what I normally read, but the writing was beautiful. It was a fantastic piece of work.
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