The authors call Tooth & Nail a mystery novel, yet the "mystery" part only compromises the last 40% or so of the book. The preceding stuff is just garbage -- extremely slow exposition. There is even a chapter (the "radio chat" for those of you that have read this book) that serves ABSOLUTELY no purpose, other than to cram in words. That's fine and dandy, except one thing: the less interesting a book gets, the less likely you'll finish it. You can tell that the authors haven't visited a college campus for a while (yet, I think they put forth valiant effort trying to make it seem real.)

Indeed, I augmented my lexicon from taking etymology, but most of it was from a wordlist book. Contrary to what many people say, word-books are a good way to learn lists of words, so long as they provide exercises---this is what I recommend instead of (or at LEAST in addition to) this book.

The book, Tooth and Nail, was written by Charles Elster and Joseph Elliot to prepare the reader for the verbal part of the SAT by expanding the reader's vocabulary. This book was about three college students trying to solve a mysery that had a big reward at the end which was coveted by an unknown adversary. After reading the book, I found it to be great for learning new words and improving reading comprehension.
In the form of a mystery novel, Tooth and Nail is actually a guide to many challenging SAT vocabulary words. Each bold word in the novel is defined in the back of the book in the glossary, some of which have synonyms. By reading a word in context and then looking up its definition in the back, the reader will learn new words faster and more efficiently than he would studying a list of endless words. More than twelve hundred upper-level words show up in the book that have popped up on numerous SATs, and will strengthen vocabulary based on the level of enthusiasm put forth to study them.
On recieving a letter from the deceased, Propero, Phil, Caitlin and Leo go on a treasure hunt to search for a priceless, truth-revealing item. Although they are excited and eager to get started, nothing could have prepared them for what they are about to encounter. While searching for each clue, Phil and Caitlin were followed by a creepy fellow who tried assaulting them. This angered the group because they knew someone was hot on their trail that knew what they were searching for and the value of it. With this new information, they realized finding the treasure wouldn't be a piece of cake.
By reading the book, I believe I have increased my vocabulary tremendously and think it has prepared me for the verbal part of the SAT very well. By taking this into consideration, I think the book has fully achieved its goal. Compared to other books that have preparation for the SAT, I believe Tooth and Nail is right up there with the rest of them. For increasing vocabulary and reading comprehension, it is one of the best books out there. I like that there are bold words that are defined in the back and how the author switches the characters' thoughts back and forth simultaneously. The author describes the setting so vividly with every minute detail, that it feels like I have actually been to the campus before. The character's body and facial expressiones and stature are so clear that I can picture them in my mind exactly how they look.
All in all, Tooth and Nail is a solid, tenacious book that provides the reader with a promising vocabulary, improved reading comprehension and an interesting mystery that is fun to read, all combined into one. After reading this book, I believe I am now prepared for the verbal part of the SAT in both aspects of vocabulary and reading comprehension.

I found some of the problems too difficult for this level course. Many texts have summary of the formulas at the end of the chapters, this one does not.This year we changed the text book for the incoming freshmen,however kept it for physics II to save money for the students who already had Giancoli.For the first time in my 21 years of teaching career, once the students saw the new book we adopted for the course, they wanted ...to buy the Wilson and Buffa's College Physics. When they did this, I realized the intensity of their frustrations.

If you are new or just beginning with eBay, you might find this book useful, if you want to sit down and read about eBay at length. But the best way a new person will learn about eBay is to get out on the site and play around. Once you have bid and/or sold, I think you'll find that this book doesn't have a lot to offer you.

The only useful section of this book was the area that addressed buying/selling strategies. Not enough info for me to keep the book - it's currently on half.com... :)

My purchases were primarily books, but I made some foolish mistakes when I started buying on e-Bay. By the time I bought Sinclair's book, I was a seasoned eBay buyer and seller, but after reading his book I realized there was still quite a bit that I didn't know.

If you're going to spend more than $50 on eBay in your lifetime (which by definition would include everyone in the Milky Way Galaxy) you need to buy this book.

Good layout, good size, easy to read, simple writing style, yet very informative and a fantastic price - considering the potential savings (and profit) from following his advice.

The part I loved best - you don't have to be a computer genius to read and comprehend what he's telling you. My computer literacy is a few notches higher than Daisy's. (she's my dog) And I was able to follow pretty much everything Sinclair is saying.

And there's also a section on how to protect and defend yourself against fraud.

It's over 400 pages and is fully indexed. Lots of good graphics too.

Seriously - if you do more than a couple eBay transactions per year, this book is needful and valuable. As much for buyers as for sellers.

I'd have saved myself close to $100 if I'd bought it before I started trading on eBay.

Please tell me that this book wasn't seriously called "The Sequel to Catch-22." It was? WHY?

Something should have clued me into the fact that this wasn't quite up to the standards, elusive as they were, of the original dark comedy masterpiece. Maybe I should have recognized the marketing strategies: make the cover look like Catch-22, and people will think the content is like Catch-22; and put Joe Heller's piture on the back cover, people might recognize him.

Perhaps it's age, perhaps it's the passage of time, perhaps it's just the 90's -- but Closing Time just didn't have that magical spark: Yossarian and several other characters from Catch-22, as well as several new additions, have survived WWII, the hippie 60's, the disco 70's, and the punk/yuppie 80's (none of these decades were mentioned in much detail, if at all) to become the aging, soon-to-be-retirees of the 90's. No, let me rephrase: they didn't just survive, they prospered. Yossarian is rich for what appears to be no good reason, and Milo and his son own half the world. Conceivable? Maybe. And maybe that's the problem: it's *just* believable, and not quite absurd enough to be life.

Now, I know this is supposed to be yet another reflection on today's society and values, but somehow, it just isn't quite as compelling as when Yossarian and his buddies were at war with war.

The fact that it's also poorly written doesn't help any, either: characters that might have been forgotten since the last time you read Catch-22 are mentioned with a few helper hints, i.e.: Kid Sampson, the poor guy who was sliced in half... That's all good and fine, but mention the same thing using the exact same wording three times over the course of two chapters, and one is reminded of senile seniors reminding themselves of events and people that only they themselves have forgotten -- and Yossarian is nowhere near that old or that senile. And we readers are nowhere near that forgetful.

Perhaps it's just that I'm living in the same era that Heller is describing in Closing Time -- I have no comfortable distance from which to judge things. But as a whole, this book came off as an odd jumble of nostalgic remeniscences about boyhood and teenage days, bitter gripes and grumblings about the state of the world today (particularly New York City and the US Presidency -- more pointedly, the Vice Presidency), refractions and reflections of death (so much that the poignancy is lost), and ineffectual attempts at humor, usually at the expense of some female character or other.

Catch-22 needed no sequel, and I hope I can go back and read it again someday without feeling somehow tainted. Perhaps if Orr hadn't disappeared...

If I could offer any constructive negative critism of this book, it would be that the surreal juxtaposition of concrete life, the military, and Hell seemed somewhat ill-defined, and as a result Heller's conclusion to the novel lacks some of the conviction that it could have had.

Closing time is different story coming from my World and my time. It is serious satire warning which forecasts what could perhaps happen and why and also how the western civilization twisted in recent decades. My mind values such a work written with brilliant and unique technique much more then the emotional postevent cries. While Catch 22 was of little practical usage for life of all of us, Closing time digs deeply to the fuzzy beginnings of the causes using the author's 22 like paradox tool which could be sorted as dialectic, unmodern and difficult to accept by too serious readers. If we only pay attention. To much extent I agree with the writer's critical points while the book more then often laughs me on.

If there is any weak point this is that similar causes proliferate around the entire World in huge variety and sometimes even quite new clothes. Both Catch 22 and Closing time show the outside undescribed world as unknown and/or unbeliavable. Catch 22 uses the scope of small army unit, Closing time is enlarged to that of U.S. society. But the other World simply is here evolving and behaving its own ways, interacting with any subject's common world.

Btw. seems Amazon should reconsider the 5 stars indicator as "average" result simply can not reflect the love/hate rate distribution of this and other really good works.

In my own journey, I have had to painstakingly cull the truths in this book from many religious books, which has not been fun. This book clearly presents the basic ideas behind reparative therapy without resorting to preaching - the only book on this topic that I have ever seen.

Most gay recovery books are written by evangelical Christians who force you to convert (i.e. become "born again") in order to heal. The problem with this, imho, is two-fold. First of all, the authors often neglect some of the deep emotional issues that need to be explored or systematically examined by saying "just commit yourself to Jesus and his love will heal you." Experiencing the love of God and developing a spiritual life certainly may heal the injured soul, but this is often a copout for lazy pseudo-psychologists who know little of the science of emotional development and the psyhological tools for exploring and healing the wounded soul.

The second problem with conversion therapy is that it shuts out many people who are not ready or don't want to convert to Christianity, when many, if not most, of the tools for healing homosexuality can be employed independently of faith - things like understanding true masculinity v. the false masculinity that many men have rejected, etc.

Most human characteristics have both biologic and environmental causes (a.k.a. nature and nurture), but the ratio may not always be 50/50. I believe that the same holds true for sexuality, i.e. the factors that contribute to a homsexual orientation are probably both biologic and environmental. People who want to choose either/or here usually have a personal issue involved, and are not genuinely interested in finding the truth, but rather, are entrenched in their own position, defensively mocking or striking out at the fools on the other extreme.

The real questions are:
- is homosexuality a disorder or not? How do you determine what is a disorder? This is a long discussion (which I would love to have)
- are there different types of homosexual? - are some types of homosexuality influenced primarily by genetic or biologic factors? If so, what are they, and what is the proposed mechanism?
- are some types of homosexuality influenced primarily by environmental factors? - of this group, are some caused by environmental factors during development? If we assume this, by what mechanism? If bad or absent parental role models are the proposed cause, what corrective method is suggested? How well does it work?

I believe that reparative therapy says "yes, some, perhaps most cases of homosexuality are mainly caused by external relational factors that affect gender identity development, and can be corrected through therapy." Nicolisi paints in the details of this hypothesis with clarity and at least the appearance of scientific rigor, and documents results (albeit only the good ones ;) in his other book, mentioned below.

Overall, this book is a great reference for those who want to study the perspective of reparative therapy.

Other useful books, not as scientific or complete as Nicolisi's are listed below. However, all but the first two of these invoke Christianity and doctrine (a.k.a. "conversion therapy"), where Nicolisi's book remains mostly clinical and psychological in outlook.

Being and Loving by Althea Horner (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - she endorsed Nicolisi's book)

Healing Homosexuality : Case Stories of Reparative Therapy by Nicolisi

Counseling the Homosexual by Saia

Pursuing Sexual Wholeness by Comiskey (great chapter on gender identity malformation and healing)

Nicolosi expresses the nature of male-male attraction as it affects some men - including myself - in a more lucid and humane way than I have ever come across elsewhere. For a long time I have travelled alone with my view of why I spent all my teens and most of my twenties fetishising maleness and being very insecure in my own. This book and Nicolosi's 'Healing Homosexuality : Case Stories of Reparative Therapy' which contains very similar themes to this book, have been a revalation to me.

Another reviewer here criticises the book as psychobabble. Nicolosi's book probably does read lik! e psychobabble if you don't know what it is like to be stuck with the dilemma that you prefer men, believe you are strong enough to come out, but just don't want to because you know something's not right. The reason why it's not right is because, for some men, there gayness is a symptom of the fact they never felt like other men and consciously or unconsciously craved to be men, but never knew how.

That is my story. The great objection that might be raised, which Nicolosi deals with neatly, is that I have been conditioned to hate gays and hate gay-ness in myself by a society which does not accept nonconformity. That's where my self-hatred comes from. For me, that's psychobabble.

Nicolosi also presents a clear critique of the virulence with which some gay men react to the notion that there may be those with similar desires to their own who believe they would like to change and can change to a fundamental heterosexual orientation. Like Nicolosi I think this smacks of the sa! me doctrinare and bigoted viewpoint which gay men - rightly! - feel they are too often faced with.

The book sets out to conquer the application development task with an enterprise application architecture. But in the end all that the reader gets is the ramblings of one developer as he spends over 700 pages showing how to create the worlds most complicated base tables and join tables.

This book could have truly shined if it had provided: 1. A specification of the authors design pattern, 2. The source code for a tool that uses this design pattern to generate code, 3. A object-oriented analysis of a application to be build using this design pattern and a walk-through of the process of using his design patterns to build this application.

As other reviewers have state, this book almost completely ignores the hard part of application development - the business logic.

I would suggest to the author that he practices what he preaches in terms of reusable components and place the source code for the Object Factor on the book's web site so that developers can really use his approach. If anyone is interested, I am working on a code generator that takes an XML specification of the business objects and generates the components.

Chris Harrington

ActiveInterface, Inc.

Enterprise Application Architecture takes VB OOP to the level it needs to be at. The ability to reuse large portions of code, compilied or not, across multiple applications is addressed and handled very nicely. Joseph Moniz is to be commended on an writing an easily understandable book that presents advanced object design patterns that deliver on the promises of OOP about as much as I think I need.

Bugliosi makes two points in this essay. First, and primarily, is that the Supreme Court's ruling - that Paula Jones civil trial against Bill Clinton should not be postponed until after the completion of his term - is so illogical as to defy belief. Bugliosi's secondary point is that only in a world that (in his opinion) is slipping into insanity can this ruling be shrugged off as an anomaly and that this is a sign that the Supreme Court is not immune to the malaise that is afflicting the world at large.

Bugliosi's argument that the Supreme Court was in error is both exhaustive and compelling. Whatever one might think of the author as a personality, one would be hard-pressed to read this book and not come away agreeing with him. Example after example shows how Clinton is not "just another citizen" but rather a man with incredible power and an even more incredible responsibility.

The author's second argument that the world is going to hell in a handbasket is a little harder to accept, mostly because of the examples he uses to support the proposition. I may be biased by the fact that my wife is covered with ink and has her share of piercings but I find it difficult to take the fact that "girl[s] today wear rings not only on their ears and fingers, but unbelievably on their noses and tongue, even their navels" as a sign of Armageddon. In recommending this book I temper it with a warning that it might be best to just skip the "introductory" (read: "let me tell you how clever I am") chapter. Start with page 31 and simply stipulate that Vincent Bugliosi is a brilliant guy.

Any fair reading of the FERERALIST PAPERS leads one to conclude that the founders could not have intended for a federal district judge to have the power to compel a sitting president to answer a civil suit.Bugliosi uses Fed.69,by Hamilton,to argue that a sitting president could not even be arrested for murder without first being impeached and removed from office.
Bugliosi correctly sketches the true meaning of the case.The Supreme Court now views itself as the "first among equals" and wields the power of judicial review to assert iteslf against the other two branches,with no repect for precedent or original intent.
Bugliosi also takes on the question ignored by Mr. Clinton's lawyers:the need of Mrs. Paula Jones' interests to be balanced against the interests of all other Americans.Even a soldier undergoing basic training enjoys "temporary immunity" from lawsuits,but the President apparently does not.
On the negative side,Bugliosi's writing style is colloquialistic and unfocused.He can sometimes depart from sober analysis and launch into hyperbolic editorialism in the very same sentence.There is too much slang,and too much "tough guy language",and this does not serve to support his thesis in a meaningful way.
I believe that the Rehnquist Court has waged war against the rights of private citizens and against the traditional balance of the separation of powers.Bugliosi argues convincingly that the latter is,at least,the case.This book was written before the Clinton Impeachment.A revised edition is now in order.However,the legal reasoning would be the same.

He accurately critizes a decision that apparently was made on a political, rather than legal, basis. In the zealousness with which his critics have been out to "get" Bill Clinton, this decision establishes a dangerous legal precedent -- that a sitting President can be subjected to a civil lawsuit. Bugliosi's principal argument is that for this decision, the Office of the Presidency should have been separated from the person holding the office at any given time. This core message is an important one that was severely neglected by the traditional media, who used to have some sort of "journalistic integrity" that distinguished them from the tabloids.

This argument extends to the entire manner of the Kenneth Starr investigation, and now that his report has been sent to Congress, it will be entirely appropriate to examine his tactics and political motivations. We can only hope that Bugliosi will do so, although without the emotional outbursts that detract from his stellar legal career.

As this review is being written, further disgrace to the Office of the Presidency is being inflicted by Starr and the Congress by their decisions not to allow the President time to review the report before it is made public.

Furthermore, another review of this book "Poorly veiled partisan deceit" is typical of the hypocrisy of Clinton critics. In this highly partisan critique of Bugliosi, the author completely ignores the crux of Bugliosi's argument (as stated above). That this author, the Republican party, and vast portions of the media are disrepectful of the Office of the Presidency is shameful; that the Supreme Court could unanimously be so is a national disgrace.