Eric has an amazingly sensitive and intense way of expressing his views on social justice issues. mainly it is all rapped up in love. devour this book and start painting on the walls.

As a Canadian I find that this book is an excellant example of what can be achieved through exploring our multi-culturalism. The children's artwork, coupled with the text make this book very informative to others so they can understand a little about other cultures, and see the differences and similarities. What I find to be an added bonus is that the text is written both in English, and the writers native language! An excellent read for children mostly, but still enjoyable to adults.

This is the first book I've ready by Dickey and I picked it up because everyone talks about him so much. At first I was slightly turned off because he uses such detailed, artsy descriptive language and the story moves at a leisurely pace. I was waiting for the drama to just jump up and smack me in the face. But within a few chapters I was getting drawn in... in the end I was talking about the characters in this book like they were real people.

The topic of this book is a bisexual/heterosexual love triangle and in the process of reading the book I went from thinking that the characters were all freaks to actually feeling some type of empathy for them. It was quite a strange feeling, but that's why I think it would make a great movie. It's so scandalous, but not fake. I could see something like this happening to real people, that's what made it so wonderful.

I like Dickey's style. I'll definitely be picking up some of his other books. Just be ready for a book that really makes you think.

Between Lovers is the story of one man and two women who agree to an unusual love triangle. A man and woman openly and willingly divvy up the lips, bed, mind, and soul of another woman and they believe that this arrangement is doable, acceptable, and something that they're willing to endure because of their love for that one woman and her love for them. The center of this emotionally fascinating, yet disturbing relationship is Nicole, a woman who loves deep, loves hard, and if she has things her way, the two people to whom she wants to give all her love are a nameless male writer from Los Angeles, and an aggressive woman named Ayanna. The man is actually Nicole's former fiancé and Ayanna is the individual whose existence caused Nicole to change her mind about marrying him.

I really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons. For one, the story was written from one person's point-of-view, which is a different read for me from Eric Dickey. However, the writing wa!s detailed and thorough enough so that you're given a complete picture regarding the characters: the writer, Nicole, Ayanna, and especially Nicole's deeply religious mother, and the writer's father, a civil rights activist.

I also really liked the fact that the main characters have living parents. Sometimes their presence helps the reader to understand the main characters a little better. The novel is structurally sound: no noticeable gaps, great intensity, everything was done very well. I enjoyed the setting (Oakland) and the vivid writing makes you feel as if you're walking alongside the characters.

One other thing I was happy about is the word orchestration/combination of long and short sentences (as opposed to a lot of short sentences). To me this gives the novel more of a lyrical or poetic feel and I loved that aspect.

I truly believe the readers will enjoy Between Lovers once they settle down and begin to read...it is the type of story that takes you! to another place and that's what novels are supposed to do.

On the constructive side: the writer might want to watch those spellings of celebrity names...(Atlantic Starr). Sometimes those misspelled words stand out like a cop car sitting in front of your house. :)

In summary, I love that Eric's writing is evolving & going to an even higher level, and Between Lovers is wonderful evidence of that growth.

I have to say that this is like no other love story I ever read. You have to give props to the gentleman who continues to love and support the woman who left him to follow a love of her own---one who happens to be another woman.
Most women who are in search of a "good man", however, will eventually find his persistence hard to swallow (find a woman who is more deserving!); that is certainly how I felt. Nicole, the love of this man's life, I disliked as a character. I found her to be selfish, and self-centered, and certainly undeserving of the love that is showered upon her by both her past boyfriend and current lover.
Ayanna, Nicole's new love, was difficult to like as a character also; I found her to be both angry and spiteful. Overall, I could not fathom why the two of them continued to pursue Nicole as they did...
The storyline was original and extremely interesting. And the way this man writes and describes the lovemaking between all involved is pure poetry.....well done, EJ.

This was my first book that I purchased for learning 3d studio max.. I also bought the fundamental book too.. I've only flip through couples of pages then I put it away to collect dust. The exercise are hard to follow, they gave complete instruction for teaching you a certain command. But you wouldn't find motivation to delve in to the 3d world by building something that's meaningless. The book is only good for advance user as it'll teaches you how to press certain short cut keys and stuff..

I found this book hard to comprehend.. even if I'm a immediate user, I wouldn't picked this book, as this is so boring.. It teaches you how to do certain things, but don't tell you much why you are doing it, or why is it necessary to take the steps..

there are few other good ones out there if you are a intermediate user...

This was my second 3D Studio max book. Buying it then was a mistake. There are many introductory books out there and this is one of the best but the problem is that the followup to this book; Inside 3DSMax vol 2, has everything vol 1 does and more. Get it if you are just starting out, and then I hope you are not scared of big books because this is where you start off, and start off well. If you already know your way around Max and just want to know advanced stuff like material manipulation and smoother models, get volume 2.

Many books on the market will give you step by step instructions how how to create a scene, or create certain effects. Although this is sometimes handy, it doesn't easially allow the user to incorperate the skills they learned into their own work.

Inside 3D Studio Max shows you the concepts behind how the program works, and allows you to apply these concepts, and skills to your own work, rather than a preformatted tutorial. It is this fact, however, that makes the book not extremely useful for modelers who are new to the program. This book often speaks of the manual which ships with 3DS Max, and the writer made it clear that this was not yet ANOTHER MANUAL. Inside 3D Studio Max explores how to expand your ability.

If you have no prior modeling practice, read the manual which ships with Max, then buy this book. If you do that, you will appreciate what is taught in this massive book.

This is an overall GREAT book, and it has really helped me to become a much better 3D artist.

I read this book long before Woody Allen's personal troubles became public. (I've always been an admirer of Allen's films.) It is, hands-down, the worst biography I ever read. Lax is more than reverent of Allen; he is obsequious and subservient. At a very early point in the book, I began to sense that every word had been approved by Allen. By the end, I though Allen's publicist and psychiatrists had probably signed off too.

P.S. If I had an option of giving this book no stars, I would have done so.

It's a commonplace that many artists have questionable private lives. What Mr Allen does or doesn't do in his private life is of passing interest to me. That he likes younger women doesn't make him much different, maybe unfortunately, from millions of other men (is Rupert Murdoch a classic example or what?) If I want gossip I read a magazine. Mr Allen's work on the other hand interests me very much. This bio by Mr Lax is good for excerpts from Mr Allen's comedy routines and in revealing the movie making experience from the editting point of view, shooting, casting, writing and rewriting. I don't think the prose skill of Mr Lax is especially high but the book's subject matter is interesting enough, and Woody Allen's writing amusing enough, to carry it along.

A natural stage in my succession of becoming a Woody Allen freak was picking up a biography. Any single one would have suited my needs, because I knew only as much as somebody who had seen ten or so of his movies and was beginning to show some serious interest in this singular personality.

It turned out that by accident I had picked out just the right book. Eric Lax delivers over 400 pages of what seems to be a very detailed and reliable account of Woody's life. Contrary to the tabloid-like obsession with Allen's women which many writers of today appear to revel, Lax's primary emphasis is on his work, influences, and progress as a comedian. A special section was added to the end of the book to summarise the events of the last ten years (the first edition of this biography was published in 1991), including the row with Mia Farrow and Woody's marriage to Soon-Yi Previn. But it remains a biography of the man it boasts in the title, not a collection of second-hand conjectures and prejudices about what he might seem to be. Indeed, this is left to the army of Woody admirers who like to derive his character from the roles he has played or written.

The shattering of preconceived images that surround the private self of Woody Allen is probably one of the major strengths of Lax's book. Woody is shown as somebody who has been engaging in his beloved trade for years and now shows genuine surprise about all the fuss that is being raised around his straightforward life. Nevertheless, I refuse to buy such a portrayal, simply because I am one of those blind followers who have merged Woody on-screen with the real-life Woody. True or not, it is an illusion I am prepared to live, for that is the main attraction of his movies.

Did not connect very well with theological studies for me. Also, without some significant biographical, historical and philosophical context on the writers themselves, it was hard to be able to put the writings in perspective. Better to read from an original translation of the philosopher's work than to take out of context. Need at least a couple of courses in philosophy prior to tackling something like this. Admittedly the readings were easier to work with than the "Philosophy for Understanding Theology" which this volume was intended to supplement.

Fair overview of ideas regarding philosophy and it's relation with theology.

This is a fabulous text paired with its companion volume, Philosophy for Understanding Theology. The editors' selections of text well highlight and enrich the material covered in the other text. These two texts are a must own for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of the philosophical roots and contexts of theology.

This text appears to have been a technical report or a PhD thesis that was modified to become a book. The authors did their best to stretch the page count by providing basic information that is generally known by most senior-level students in electrical engineering or operations research. Even after this exercise, the "real" page count is 108. The remainder of the book was made possible by copying several standard formulas from a statistics book, by downloading and plotting some of PJM's data (isn't the Internet great?), and by providing an amateurish source code for some of the material suggested in the book for the single-unit case.

The book begins by describing the unit commitment problem, referencing a total of 9 journal articles (Page 9), but skipping most of the important references in this area. It is strange to discuss unit commitment (in a book) without mentioning the original work of Muckstadt and Koenig (1977), Merlin and Sandrin (1983), or that of Zhuang and Galiana (1988), to name a few. The authors quickly discount all previous work as being inadequate as it does not handle many of the important elements of a system (leading you to believe that they are going to discuss these issues), such as network constraints or losses. I suggest that they refer to "The Generalized Unit Commitment Problem" by Baldick, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1995, for a discussion on this subject. I also strongly recommend that Mr. Allen and Ms. Ilic obtain a copy of (the outdated) "Unit Commitment Literature Synopsis" by Sheble and Fahd, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1994. It may serve as a starter on this subject. The most impressive aspect of this book is its depth, or lack there of. The authors manage to provide their deep knowledge of the unit commitment problem and its solution techniques in less than 5 pages.

Chapter 3 describes the unit commitment in a deregulated environment in the most simplistic fashion possible (indicating the authors' lack of any true experience in this business) resulting in six pages of basic material. In chapter 4, the reader is presented with a pathetic review of dynamic programming. Chapter 5 is even more interesting. The authors assume a known price process in the market and optimize each individual generating unit based on these prices. They discuss (in less than 7 pages) the use of dynamic programming to solve the unit commitment (in reality a single generator) with and without generation limits using normal and lognormal price distributions. For those of us teaching dynamic programming to senior or master level students, the three models could serve as a homework assignment. If you are a "quant" on the trading floor, you may want to derive these formulas during your lunch hour.

Chapter 6 is entitled "Price Process of Electricity". Thanks to the statisticians of this world, the reader is bombarded with endless tests and distributions describing electricity prices. The authors skillfully demonstrate their ability to use Matlab to draw a large number of graphs.

I must admit that I stopped reading when I reached Chapter 7 "Computational Complexity of the Unit Commitment". The authors say that the dynamic programming is widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems "however, it also has the disadvantage of non-polynomial (NP) growth of operation count with respect to problem size." They refer the reader to the book by Bertsekas on Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control. The authors abruptly shy away from discussing this subject. Given the depth of the book, I would have expected a proof showing that the problem being discussed (the unit commitment) is NP. It is not sufficient to say that their formulation suffers from exponential growth. If the matter is so simple, I have several problems that I modeled as dynamic programs and would like to claim that they are NP (including a couple of linear programs that I solved using dynamic programming as I was lazy to call the LP solver).

In summary, the book is a waste of time and money. It is a sad demonstration of how tenure and graduation pressure can lead people to publish garbage. If you need to learn about this subject, I suggest searching the web for articles related to deregulation. Then, you can buy Bertsekas's book (or refer to your notes from college), use your good old Schaum's Series on statistics, and derive the results that truly fit your problem.

The unit commitment problem is stated using math formulas which contain 28 symbols. To understand the formulas, it is necessary to memorize the definition of each symbol. If you have the patience, you can translate the formulas into something coherent in about 3 hours. The result is rather straight forward and forms a basis for understanding which, theoretically, is the purpose for which the book was written.

For those who are already familiar with the symbols, see the review by the reader from Yonkers.

Excellent book. Definite keeper for anyone working in the market. Appreciate the source code and data which backs up the paper. For those who believe in cost based world, get this book and compare your results