There can be no question that Isaac Asimov deserves his place among the legends of science fiction. The original Foundation trilogy and the Robot series are canon deservedly so. Unfortunately, Earth Is Room Enough does not do justice to the Grand Master. The stories collected range from the fairly decent to the deadly dull. The sole stand-out is the brief "An Immortal Bard," answering the amusing question, "What if Shakespeare were alive today and taking a Shakespeare class?" Otherwise, the collection is largely forgettable.

Isaac Asimov was, unquestionably, one of the greatest science fiction writers to ever pick up a pen. As well as his award-winning novels, he also wrote some of the classic short stories of the genre. This collection was one of his earliest such (preceded only by 1955's The Martian Way.) As these are early Asimov, they are not his best or most representative work. Although all are written in Asimov's clever and intimitable style (including the witty poem), there are not real, true classics included - some are very good, some are quite good, and a few merely pedestrian. Personal favorites of mine from this collection are Dreaming Is A Private Thing (concerning which Robert A. Heinlein accused Asimov of making money out of his own psychoses), and Jokester, a highly original and clever story. Pick this up if you are an Asimov fan and have already made headway into his works; otherwise, read a few of his better, more classic collections (such as Nine Tomorrows), first.

Some of Asimov's best short stories, including some funny ones.

I expected this to be a walkthrough for people like myself who have a knowledge of physics but are far from being experts and are interested in reading the classics of science. This is a guide for the modern Professor of Physics, not a guide for the common reader as it says. If I had known that I wouldn't have bought it. I get the impression that there is certainly a demand for such a walkthrough. I thought this would be it.
A BIG disapointment!

I have not read this book, but would love too. But the price is just too high for a book that is intended for the common reader. It is unaffordable for the common reader.

(NOTE: My stars rating is meaningless because I have not read the book.)

Chandra translated Newton's Principia from the geometric language that Newton was forced to use into language that is immediately familiar to a modern audience. As such *every* physicist should be forced to read this book from cover to cover, or else face the *shame* that they have not. This is truly a piece that every physicist will enjoy and find thought provoking at the deepest level.

I think that this is an o.k. book about words it's almost like a dictionary of words used in myths but they are not in alphabetical order. It doesn't say wich myth this word comes from or anything. It could be a little better but at least it gave part of a story. Whoever wrote it had a good idea about it but I don't think they knew how to start. It mostly had the names of the gods and goddesses. If it is called words from myths it should have explanations of the places too.

This book contains only 9 small chapters. Before I read this book, I have already perused Greek myth; hence I enjoyed this book a lot. Especially, Isaac's coherent explanation was admirable. He never makes a cursory attempt at delineating the origin of words concerning myth. In addition, his ebullient expression not only showed his own unique creativeness but elicited my deeper imagination about the myth itself. Even though there are prodiginous ways of interpreting the symbols of myth, his erudite opinion enabled me to assimilate some astronomical esorteric terms easily and even explicitly. I felt sullen just to see the epilogue, this book is too short!
This book is mainly concerned with the origins of words that are connected to mainly greek myth. If you have an ardor about myth and the derivation of english words, I strongly recommand this lucid text.

Do you know the origin of the word "mysterious" concerned with the eleusinian ceremonies? Why do you call anything that is airtight as "hermetically sealed"? Can you discern claustrophobia to agoraphobia?

TRY this book~ It won't take long...

I am still reading this book that I managed to fish out from a box somewhere. I find it to be tremendously insightful on the subject of the mytholgical gods of ancient Rome and Greece. Not everything is as it seems. It is too bad that this important work of literature is out of print. Published in 1969 this book is a treasure. I urge anyone with an interest in ancient history (not just science fiction) to find this book.

I have got to stop giving my old books away. I probably have a small fortune in out of print volumes. Every time I look up a book for a gift I reach the same section, "sorry." "13 Crimes" is one of those entertaining books that probably started as a coffee shop conversation. "Hey Joe, you notice there aren't any SciFi detective stories." "Can't be done Fred. Too easy. The Gumshoes could just come up with some gizmo to see fingerprints, or track shoe size. It can't be fair. For along time this was the case. Then someone got the idea of making rules. What if you had a world of the future, but no surprises? Any technology you want, but the reader has to be let in on it. A hundred years ago crime stories were just laid out. Today it's different. You have to give the reader a chance to figure it out along with the detective. "13 Crimes" does this masterfully. It takes the 13 types of mystery stories, the loc! ked room mystery, the hard boiled PI mystery, etc., and puts it in a SciFi setting. The result is a collection of authors and stories that will satisfy both the SciFi AND mystery fan. Or a least it would if you can find it.

Authors do not develop new stories, they write new twists on old ones. While a science fiction setting does provide additional possibilities for a mystery, it is also very limiting. To be effective, the science fictional aspects must be important, yet secondary. For example, it would be a very dull tale if a locked room mystery was solved by a principal character simply using a device to step into the fourth dimension at a critical moment.
These thirteen stories of crimes are well crafted. Each follows one of the basic themes of crime stories: hard-boiled detective, psychic detective, spy, analytical detective, whodunit, why-done-it, how-done-it, inverted, locked room, cipher, police procedural, trial and punishment. The science fiction aspects are necessary, yet do not overshadow what is a tale of suspense. My favorite stories are "Mouthpiece" by Edward Wellen and "Time In Advance" by William Tenn. In "Mouthpiece", the personality of a gangster is loaded into a powerful computer and the programmer who did it becomes an unwitting pawn of the gangster who wants to avenge his assassination. "Time In Advance" is aptly named, as in this story, the human race has expanded out to other planets and colonists are badly needed. A solution is to have people voluntarily serve a sentence for murder before the fact and then in the unlikely event they survive, they have the right to commit one murder.
These are thirteen of the best combinations of crime and science fiction stories that have ever been written. The editors made their selections well and I enjoyed each one immensely, even though I generally do not read crime stories.

From the title and table of contents i expected a lot more. It indeed did cover all the topics of logic and faulty reasoning and avoidance of prejudice as listed but only in the most superfical ways. Not very many specific examples beyond common sense.

This is a great book for those that need to brush up on reasoning skills or as an introduction. With many full grown adults possessing little or no science and critical thinking education these days, books like these are a must-read. It is never too late to empower yourself with logic!

yah baby! ya kno ya wanna read this book by asimov. it was really cool reading it because asimov has always been good, but in his youth he screwed up a lot. hehehehe

Picking up where the first volume left off, The Early Asimov - Book Two continues to showcase the growing confidence and talent of a young Isaac Asimov. With these 14 stories the talent continues to grow. In some of the stories we see ideas that will turn up later in his Galactic series. As with part one of this two book collection, Asimov continues to write introductions and literary histories of each story. Once again, they are intriguing. As with any short story collection, it is unreasonable to expect that you will enjoy every single story. However, most of the stories are good. Loyal Asimov fans should like this book. It is definitely a worthy addition to the legendary collection of science fiction books written by a true legend himself.

As the previous reviewer points out, the first Fantastic Voyage was not Asimov's story, but merely his novelization of the movie plot. So Asimov decided to write his own story on the same theme. Unfortunately, his was not as good as the original.

Asimov had an enormous ego (if he was called "The Great Explainer", as the previous reviewer notes, I wouldn't be surprised if I were to learn that Asimov gave himself the title. He often bragged about the huge volume of output from his typewriter. The problem is that quantity does not equal quality, and much of his writing wasn't worth much. This book falls into that category.

Asimov bowed to pressure to write a sequel to his highly acclaimed Fantastic Voyage. Unfortunately, as it is with many non-series sequels, this novel is rather flat compared to his original.

If you like medical related sci-fi or thrillers, than this is a book you should buy.

To what pressure did Asimov bow in writing this book other than his own? And, incidentally, this is no sequel to the first Fantastic Voyage. There is no mention of anything from the first novel here. Asimov's first Fantastic Voyage was not his own: he merely novelized a movie, and was never satisfied with the end result for all of its scientific and otherwise flaws. II is a much better example of Asimovian sicence fiction: totally cerebral, and I like that at the end of the plot, there was no "getting the girl," as one sees all to often, even in Asimov's novels. The victory here involved no sexual liason of any sort-- it was merely that of a scientist having his views validated by grueling experience. There is too strong a tendency in many novels, especially in science fiction novels, to present the attaining of a woman's affections as the "prize" toward which the male hero works and eventually succeeds in getting. Here there is the setup of that, but in the end no actualization. Asimov presents enough scientific notions throughout this book to spin any reader's head, and more than one is are presented a little too didactically. But Asimov could not help it. In the end he was the disseminator of scientific knowledge that earned him the distinction "Great Explainer."

required reading for those heading into Native American vs. US Government studies. Have a can of Red Bull though!

A gutsy, three-dimensional view of the Judge. Tuller's passion for the subject is evident throughout.

The first major biography of Judge Isaac Parker to be written since 1951, 'Let no guilty man escape' provides refreshing insight into the life and career of a man that western novelists and Hollywood have stereotyped as the "Hanging Judge." Since most of the standard works on Judge Parker were written a half century ago, the documents and resources used by Tuller help to paint a picture of the complex person that Isaac C. Parker really was. While minor factual errors and inconsistancies occur throughout, this book is a worthy replacement of 'Hanging Judge.'

This book is full of inaccuracies about Deaf culture and ASL and is probably only enjoyable by people who don't know any better. As someone trained in the linguistics of signed languages, I feel the need to educate consumers before purchasing this book. One major problem is a line in the book which notes that the Deaf students need to study reading and writing English because it is "like a different language" from ASL. It is not LIKE a different language, It IS a different language! An illustration in this book shows a letter which a student "wrote in ASL." ASL has no written form. It is possible to write a "gloss" -- a word-for-word translation -- of ASL, but even this is not what is portrayed in the illustration. The "ASL" letter contains words such as contractions -- which would *never* be used in a gloss and are difficult for Deaf adults to use correctly, let alone an elementary school student -- and words for which there are no direct corresponding signs. One MAJOR problem that I had was with the lowercase writing of the word "deaf." The word written in lowercase is meant to mean the audiological conditition. However, the meaning meant in the book is that of "culturally Deaf," one who uses sign language and is part of a rich community of language and culture. This would be like describing me as an "american." Do yourself a favor and don't buy this book.

I teach elementary age deaf and hard-of-hearing children and I have to say they loved this book. They thought seeing a deaf student as the main character in a book was something they could relate to. I used it in my class to talk about the different types of schools deaf children could go to, also how they could become a teacher for the deaf one day. The extra pictures with simple signing sentences were also fun to learn. My favorite, teaching the kids to sign Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

Moses Goes to School is a book written for children, and its language is well suited to informing the understandings of hearing children. Far from being a linguistic primer in the morphology of American Sign Language written for college students and professors, it is instead a wonderful for way for children to physically interact with literature. It is certain that Millman was considering the linguistic development and understanding of children and their language when writing the book. From a teacher's and linguistic researcher's perspective, this book is extremely stimulating and socially valuable piece of a small literature on children and ASL.

For teachers, this book, and others by Millman (Moses Goes to the Circus, Moses Goes to a Concert) allow developing thinkers (primarily 6-9) to understand language from a new perspective, and to have a new form of language that they can share with peers. In addition, sharing this book with a classroom allows teachers to use sign language to manage a classroom, and can give a classroom its own character and signature style.

I thought I was buying a book written by Mary Higgins Clark. I am one of her biggest fans. The short stories were pointless and poorly written. One story was written by Mary Higgins Clark and even that was pointless. On a scale of 1 to 5, this rates a 0.

This twelve-story anthology loosely focuses on the title, MURDER IN THE FAMILY. Though the tales are well written, they lack the suspense and cutting edge expected of this famous group of popular authors that contributed to the collection and that of previous short story books produced by the Adams Round Table. For most mystery readers, previous Adams Round Table editions are stronger (see MURDER AMONG FRIENDS, etc.). However, die hard fans of Lawrence Block, Mary Higgins Clark, Stanley Cohen, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Mickey Friedman, Joyce Harrington, Susan Isaacs, Judith Kelman, Warren Murphy, Justin Scott, Peter Straub, and Whitley Strieber will want to read the tales. Yet even the strongest of loyalists need to keep the expectations a bit lower than usual as the gaggle of writers fall short of what each one usually provides.

Harriet Klausner

Lawrence Block, et.al.'s Murder In The Family packs in high-profile mystery writers whose new presentations have not seen print elsewhere. Mary Higgins Clark probes a father's motivation for revenge, Susan Isaacs presents a chilling portrait of a family which should not be in business, and Dorothy Davis tells of a letter which transforms lives in this excellent collection.