I have learned just as much from "What to Expect When You're Expecting" and could really have done without the African names/meanings and tips on how to use kente cloth in a nursery. "WHat To Expect..." is much more thorough, although a lot of the information overlaps. The pictures in "Mama's Little Baby" are great, but not sure that you'll really learn how to bathe a baby based on these pictures...Get "what To Expect" and save the money...

I was surprised to learn that there aren't more books of this type available for black mothers. But this book may be the only reference guide you need! A very easy read, and so full of useful information that I read it chunks at a time! The historical information is invaluable too. This would make a great gift for a special mom-to-be.

This is an excellent book for Pregnant woman from a Black perspective. From the interesting history side stories to the added stories of black woman any black woman will find this useful throughout their pregnancy and through the first few months with baby.

Key things I liked, the section on single moms, down to earth section on going back to work, negotiating leave, creating a budget for the new baby in your life, baby names, and 100% accurate medical information. Paritically on the choices for childbirth, from birthing centers to hospitals and the medications you available now.

This a great book I will keep in my reference for my second child.

As a public speaker and trainer, no matter how well prepared I am for an engagement, I encounter situations, audiences and questions that can catch me off guard. This book offers concrete tools, suggestions and examples of how to handle these types of situations using various improvisational techniques.

It is also a witty, fun and playful reminder to trust our instincts and tap into the natural creativity that we are born with. A definite must have on your book shelf!

I pull this book off the shelf so often that I'm thinking of naming it and teaching it to fetch. As an acting teacher, I not only find the games energizing and useful for my students, but I value the advice and suggestions. It really helps with the side-coaching, with reviving the essential spirit of the work that got all of us into this. As a mostly human being, I sometimes let this book jump up onto my lap simply for the giggles. These are people who not only know what they're talking about, but who write with great wit about wit. Hey . . . this book may be the solution to that pesky old form vs. function debate. This is a really, really good book that continually inspires.

In a world where the corporate climate is becoming more and more concerned about don'ts, than dos, more worried about what can't be said, than what can, this delightful book is the perfect reminder of the power of play. I love the messege. Let's get out of our heads and have some fun. Then let's see how that fun effects our work product.

The authors give us inspiring examples of humor in the workplace, and a series of excerises to loosen up even the most button downed office. They manage to give sound advice while keeping tongues firmly in cheek. I found it an easy read, perfect for the airplane.

This is a great beginner's book for Improv in the workplace. Now,I would love to see a more in-depth work from this joyful team. Improvise This! has whet my appetite.

I was prepared to love this book, based on the reviews posted so far and my general love of travel and books about other cultures. While it is written well, I found it disappointing - the characters weren't fully drawn, the situations weren't interesting - overall, it just didn't grab me. And it's a lot of money for such a slim volume. If you want a good read about buying a house in Italy and adjusting to life there, try Extra Virgin instead.

The book was enjoyable. I would have loved for it to be a little longer. Some topics or stories could have been expounded on longer. I also read "Extra Virgin ... " by Annie Hawes and it sounds like Maremma is close to the small town she wrote about. From the description of the house, it sounds like it turned out to be gorgeous, they sould have included a picture of some of the decor of the house. I enjoy reading this genre of books, please keep them coming. I will be reading "Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town" by Michael Rips soon.

Two US writers conclude their charming account of life in a non- chic Tuscan town with the insight that though they moved there "... to capture a dream less of Italy than of being foreigners in Italy, figures in a Forster novel," they have become Tuscans despite maddening bureaucracy and cravings for peanut butter. One wishes for a map, farmhouse remodeling photos, and observations on how they are viewed as an apparently gay couple.

This book just didn't do it for me. I did not care about the characters or the plot.

Right upfront let me admit to a love/hate relationship with the works of Mark Roeder. Maybe it's because I have not read them in order and don't follow the progression. Nah, that has nothing to do with it. It is because I like a small dose of realism in what I read and some of Mark's premises are wildly improbable, none moreso than "Keeper of Secrets". There is, to be sure, a place in fiction for ghosts, apparitions and the like but the best authors surround them with something to build up their credibility. Not here. (How can you possibly explain the fact that the boys find the pages of a 120+-year-old-journal, scattered individually all over the house, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER?!?) Beyond many other examples like this is the fact that, unlike the people in Roeder's other stories, there is very little to like about the two main characters, Sean and Avery, and the Nick character is hardly developed at all. Happily, Roeder's more recent work, notably "The Soccer Field is Empty", is much better developed. Keep "Keeper of Secrets" a secret.

If you know a gay teen, have a gay teen, or are concerned about a gay teen, get this book! Also recommend for gay fiction: Leaves of Red and Gold.

The editors of this book add an interesting note at the end on the subject of the translation of the text. They point out that the sayings of Jesus contained in the book represent a 'paraphrase' since the principal of 'dynamic equivalence' was followed in producing their work. They do not seek a word-for-word translation but rather an overall meaning. Many scholars may be turned off by this approach.

The arguments for the existence of THE LOST GOSPEL Q put forth by Marcus Borg in the Preface are the most interesting and provocative part of this book. It is easy to understand why the work of the Jesus Seminar is challenged by skeptics. However, I do think it is important not to dismiss it too quickly before it receives the attention and scrutiny it deserves. THE LOST GOSPEL Q is a serious attempt to shed light on the historical Jesus.

This book is based on the theory that the Gospel of Mark was written before any of the other synoptic Gospels. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were then written with the help of those from Mark and another unknown source which is called the Gospel Q. In 1838 a German noticed that there were many sayings of Jesus which were common to Matthew and Luke but not included in Mark. The Lost Gospel Q is comprised of these sayings. Adding fuel to the argument was the discovery in 1945 near the Upper Nile River in Egypt of a codex called the Gospel of Thomas. It contained 114 sayings of Jesus. Over one-third of these sayings were similar to those found in the Lost Gospel Q.

If you accept the idea of the probable existence of Q, then you can look forward to reading sayings of Jesus which were recorded and used by some of His earliest followers less than two decades after His death and resurrection.

When I finished this book I wanted to heave it across the room. This author has a VERY bad habit of leaving major issues unresolved. He did it in Monster of Minnesota, and he did it in this one as well. At the end, we aren't even told what happened with the 19 year old girl who is dying! And what about the mayor? He walks in the building during the climax and we never hear from him again! His character pretty much disappears from the story shortly after he appears--and he's not a minor character! The denouement was rushed and left the reader feeling like the author simply lost interest in the story. No wonder this series in now out of print.

If you're like me, you bought this because of the Chronicle on the SF channel. It's way different--most importantly, here, the supernatural IS generally debunked, not real.

There's not much science in these short, prose driven novels. What the author does do well is write hilarious prose. These novels are so funny that you laugh out loud. He's got a turn of the phrase, a feel for the absurd. By the time you are done, you feel guilty for having had so much fun considering how light the plots are....! Ps. I liked Vampires of Vermont better.

Killer toasters, remote controls with attitude, refrigerators with a
penchant
for gobbling pooches...just another mundane day for ace reporter Savannah
"Savvy" McKinnon at the Global Query, the country's sleaziest tabloid.
Only
something about all the reports of appliances gone crazy catches her eye:
all
the calls seem to have come from the same town in Illinois, a normally
peaceful borough called Meridian.
Nabbing the field assignment, Savvy heads for the town, forced to bring
along
Terry, former football player, not-functioning-on-all-mental-cylinders
Global
photographer, finding events growing stranger by the minute. Meridian sits
on
an island in the middle of the Mississippi, only accessible by ferry.
Trouble
is, halfway across, she discovers the captain sitting naked in the pilot's
compartment eating an apple and unaware he is even on a boat. After a
forced
landing, Savvy finds the town in no better frame of mind. The local doctor
is
wandering around in a foil space suit, an old woman is being menaced by
electronics and a college girl is being chased by green elephants. other
than
that things are pretty much normal.
Except for the body of the local police officer slumped over his desk with
a
bullet lodged in his brain.
Is this tied in with a food plant testing "super wheat" and the annual
apple
festival? Savvy is determined to find out.
INSANITY, ILLINOIS, the third (well, actually the second in the series
overall) book upon which SCI FI Channel's now defunct series The Chronicle
is
based, is an afternoon's worth of escapism and pure entertainment. The
prose
snap, crackle and pops and pages rush by. The budding relationship between
the lead and her older mentor begins to gather momentum and some of the
quips
are sharp as a spinster's tongue. Hopefully ACE will show more sense than
SCI
FI and bring readers more in the series.
--Howard Hopkins
...

This book thoroughly (and in some cases, repetitively) analyzes why the authors think socialism failed in the US, or what they consider socialism to be, which isn't manifestly apparent. In a country where, politically, anything presumptively bad is typically labeled "socialism," I think that omission on their part is important.

Other things I didn't like was the endless cycle of socialism gaining favor, and then ultimately losing it, as they analyzed it from chapter to chapter. Since they explored it along various thematic lines, this makes sense, but it sort of tires you out as a reader, watching socialism die a thousand deaths by the end of the book. I also didn't like the ending of the book, which merely offered a conclusion to the last chapter, rather than an overarching conclusion or retrospective. The last chapter seemed to try for that, but I think it ultimately failed, in that respect. I would have liked something more definitive and global, instead of simply restating the points brought up so many times earlier.

Still, this is an interesting book, which, along with Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in America", Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," and Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda" can offer an American reader a sense of the American political landscape that won't be covered by the punditocracy. There are very good sections in this book, and useful insights, but I felt that the whole didn't exceed the sum of the parts. I would have liked to see more in-depth exploration of the "sewer socialism" of Milwaukee, which only got brief references, although I suppose it would exceed the thesis of the book.

One undercurrent I think that might be of use to leftist radicals today is the repeated (if indirect) assertion by the writers that Americans are more suited to anarchism than to old-school, Old Left Socialism, given the rejection of statism and centralization that is strongly evidenced in American political thought. This only gets alluded to in a roundabout fashion, but it's there for the alert reader. I think, ultimately, that socialism does exist (and strongly) in the US, but only in very select areas -- like the military, for example, which is a huge socialist institution (budget: $330 billion+) and in the universal health care given to members of Congress and the federal judiciary at taxpayer expense.

This isn't the kind of book somebody simply picks up out of the blue; you have to be fairly motivated to figure out why socialism failed in the US to read this, but if you are so motivated, it reads pretty well, overall. Tables are peppered throughout, with some interesting details.

This ambitious and generally excellent book by two veteran political sociologists seeks to explain why the United States, alone among industrial societies, lacks a significant socialist movement or labor party. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, who currently teaches at George Mason University of Virginia, and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, they are addressing " a classic question of American historiography." That is an accurate assessment, and the authors tackle it with intelligence, imagination, and useful comparative analysis. In an era of global capitalism triumphant, I suspect that most readers will not be interested in a long, albeit erudite, discussion of why the working-class challenge to industrial capitalism failed in the United States. Nevertheless, I recommend this book because it offers deep insights into American society which go far beyond answering the narrow question presented in the title.

Lipset and Marks present three principal reasons for the failure of socialism in the United States. First, that it is "but one instance of the ineffectiveness of third parties in the United States over the last century." Second, socialists and labor unionists "never succeeded in bringing the major union movement, the American Federation of Labor and later the AFL-CIO, to support and independent working-class political party." Third, "immigration created an extremely diverse labor force in which class coherence was undermined by ethnic, racial, and religious identity." Lipset and Marks devote a long, detailed chapter to each reason, and they are the heart of the book, along with the authors' fascinating discussion of the socialists' tendency to battle among themselves over issues of "ideological purity." Rarely has the history of the American labor movement and its political failures been surveyed so effectively.

Even general readers will instantly grasp why, as Lipset and Marks put it, the Great Depression "presented the Socialists with their final opportunity to build a viable political party." Especially in the early 1930s, in the authors view, "[r]ampant poverty, mass unemployment, widespread bankruptcies, and the public's general uncertainty about the future gave the Socialists grounds for believing that they could finally create a durable mass movement." That failed to happen and, in 1932, the Socialist candidate for president received only 2.5% of the total popular vote. The authors write: "Socialists were bitterly disappointed by the vote for [Norman] Thomas in 1932." Even in this time of obvious economic crisis, most American voters refused to turn to a third party. One reason certainly was the Socialists' extreme positions. According to Lipset and Marks, "the majority of Socialists stood far to the left in the first years of the Roosevelt administration, sharply attacking the New Deal as state capitalism." President Roosevelt shrewdly adopted "leftist rhetoric," offered "progressive policies in exchange for support from radical and economically depressed constituencies," and recruited "actual leaders of protest groups by convincing them that they were part of his coalition." At the end of their chapter on the 1930s, Lipset and Marks conclude that the "Great Depression politicized American labor," but the political party which labor embraced was the Democrats, not the Socialists. After World War II, socialism never had a chance. Communists and their fellow travelers were demonized, and leftists of all other shades were marginalized. In contrast with the conventional wisdom, Lipset and Marks make the important observation that "the Communists had lost most of their influence and membership before (Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist) crusade." They assert correctly, therefore, that "the long history of repression of American socialists cannot explain their failure to establish a viable political party." I take that remark to mean that repression, alone, does not account for the failure of socialism in the United States, but it certainly was a factor.

Lipset and Marks wisely concede early in the book that the question they pose - Why did socialism fail in the United States? - "may never be ultimately resolved." But, at the beginning of their final chapter, the authors come close to an authoritative answer when they incisively observe that the "United States is the only Western democracy to have a party system dominated by two parties, both of which are sympathetic to liberal capitalism and neither of which has inherited a socialist or social democratic vision of society." Lipset and Marks explain: "Distinctive elements of American culture - antistatism and individualism - negated the appeal of socialism for the mass of American workers for much of the twentieth century. Socialism, with its emphasis on statism, socialization of the means of production, and equality through taxation, are at odds with the dominant values of American culture." More than anything else, therefore, socialism may have conflicted with the American political tradition and its long-standing social and economic ideals.

Lipset and Marks are correct that socialism promises "to eliminate poverty, racism, sexism, pollution, and war," and its program clearly has its attractions, especially, as the authors observe, "to the idealism inherent in the position of young people and intellectuals." However, some of the most attractive features of the socialist platform have been coopted by the mainstream political parties. This may explain why moderate middle-class reform in the 200h century (progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society) has succeeded, while its working-class variant (socialism) failed. This book is not merely about of why socialism did not take root in the United States. It is about the essential characteristics of the political and socio-economic order in American society.

Seymour Martin Lipset's and Gary Mark's book, It Didn't Happen Here, explores the various reasons why Socialism never became an influence in the United States. They combine an historical perspective looking at events in America with a comparative approach to politics in other countries where Socialism influenced the political life. The book is thorough and well researched and should set an example for an approach to the subject. There are times that it does become repetitive in presenting a point repeatedly and much of the book is not as fascinating as the first and concluding chapters where a whole range of ideas are presented in a more general fashion. This book, though, is ideal for the reader with an interest in comparative politics who desires an in-depth look at left wing politics in connection with unions, immigrants and American exceptionalism (an idea that is in some ways showing a bit of decline as the rest of the world becomes politically more similar to the United States). The intellectual effort getting through this book does eventually pay off.

Mark Doty is a gifted writer, but there is such a mix of profound work and slight image in My Alexandria, that he comes with a little too much hype for someone coming to this book first. There are some exquisite images, but as an AIDS work, this is slim. This work is more about our humanity and how we deal with what we face in the world more than it is about a pandemic.

The most moving poem in this collection is, "With Animals", which is wisely used in the closing third. Some of the work is empty and rich at the same time, which is a lot like a Hostess Cupcake, but we can't live on cupcakes. When Doty really reaches, his work is utterly transforming. Here it is progressive and showcases the talent he shows later in his career.

Levine selected My Alexandria for the National Poetry Series a few years ago. And after reading this collection, you can see why it is Doty's best. It's a grim collection, focusing on death and grief, but an elegant one. "Bill's Story" alone is worth the price of the book. This is a book for anyone who loves poetry or has had AIDS tough their life. Good work Mr. Doty.

My Alexandria is undoubtedly one of my favorite volumes of poetry written within the last ten years. Doty's aesthetic reminds me of the aesthetic of the great Japanese woodblock artists -- "mono no aware" -- beauty and sadness. These are poems of haunting emotional resonance and power that are exquisitely rendered in beautifully crafted, ravishingly polished arabesques of language. Doty's sensual imagery is simply stunning, and his sense of metaphor simultaneously organic and epiphanic. The poems "Brilliance" and "Difference," in particular, are poems that I know I will remain in love with always. I highly recommend this beautiful book.

This book provided a decent walthrough of MySQL and its JDBC driver, however it made some shocking conceptual mistakes. For instance, the "Consistency" principle in ACID transactions has nothing to do with referential integrity, but dirty uncommitted reads. A type 2 and NOT 4 JDBC driver is frequently the best performing type (Oracle's OCI outperforms its Thin and DB2's App seriously outperforms its Net driver). Furthermore, it had one of the most shocking mistakes I've ever seen in a technical book: The "JavaScript" example provided is really just scriptlets inside a JSP -- To me, not even understanding what JavaScript is seriously undermined the credibility of this book.

Rarely have I been so irritated with a book that I felt compelled to write a review. I feel that the 5-star rating that the book had when I bought is undeserved. It's replete with errors. Even the URL for the companion website is incorrect. I tracked down the companion website with the help of Google and downloaded the samples, but of course, they wouldn't compile. The authors admit to the challenge of timing the release of book with the release of the Connector/J driver. Too difficult to allow for decent quality control it would appear. Detailed examples can be very helpful, but not when the details are wrong. That just makes for massive frustration.

I haven't found the errors that other reviewers have mentioned (that's not to say they're not there, but they weren't an issue to me). However, I have found this to be one of the most useful technical books I have ever used. I knew nothing about mySQL configuration and a passing bit of experience with JDBC and this book helped me setup an enterprise-used database that is very well designed and works like a charm. I have a TomCat servlet server running and used this developer's guide religiously. It is actually interesting to read, not only as a reference. Of course, I'm interested in this topic, so I'm a little biased, but I really recommend this book to anyone who wants to use this EXCELLENT, free database and write powerful apps using Java.

This book is a conversation starter for those who trying to sort out the appropriate role of religion in American public life. It should provide a stimulating start for a reading journey at the center of contemporary American history. For those who come away concerned, or indeed, not very concerned about the errosion of religious freedom and separation of church and state in the U.S., the logical next reads are Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Separation of Church and State, by Robert Boston...

The founding fathers were horrified by witch hangings conducted by Christian Puritans, and by atrocities committed by state-enforced Christian churches in Europe. The founding fathers were attracted to a deistic concept of God, a kinder, more humanitarian God than the jealous, cruel, vindictive God of the Bible. The founding fathers were well-read and had studied many religions. Washington was acquainted with Buddhists and with "Mohammetans", as he spelled it. In 1778 James Madison said to the Virginia Convention on Ratifying the Constitution: "Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest." Deists valued reason, science, knowledge, not religious superstitions.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, James Madison were not Christians but were rationalists and deists. Jefferson hoped that America would be a tolerant land of religious diversity; he was a Unitarian. Madison wrote in 1774: "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind." They believed in reason, not mythology.