Ed Mc Bain prose, teddy bears, boats Florida country-club/marinas, a pretty girl and murderous rogues. The toy industry and copyrights/patent scheme turns on the profits from the "must have toy" of the year. Just the book for a chilly evening, comfy chair and your favorite beverage.

Ed McBain is the best and this is one of his best. Matthew Hope has two cases, but only one client. The first case is Lainie Commins' battle with a big toy company over trademark rights to a cross-eyed teddy bear. The second is defending her aginst charges that she has murdered the owner of the toy company. He is also battling the after-effects of his own recent near-death experience. Matthew has to work through all these difficulties without the help of his favorite PI's Warren Chambers and Toots Kiley who are embroiled in a life-threatening subplot of their own. This complcated story is played out against the backdrop of McBain's beautifully rendered city of Colussa, Florida.

I loved reading this book. I forced myself not to skip to the end of this book because I wanted to enjoy the ride as long as possible. McBain always teaches you something i.e. strabismusly challenged, INS in Big Bad City (which I already knew) and the subtle variations of the definition of Nocturne (I give Nocturne ***** also). I even went back and read The Black Board Jungle and enjoyed it.

Criminal Conversation and Privileged Conversation are also excellent books.

McBain/Hunter is an absolute gem. I always feel I've gained an experience from his books.

Based on the reviews, I expected to read an excitement filled, humorous novel. The humor was there -- to some degree, but the excitement wasn't. It was a decent read, but it's not one I could pick up again.

It was heartwarming to read about a middle class African American family who encountered the same or similar problems of our blue-eyed brothers and sisters. I WANT TO READ MORE OF THE LOUDERMILKS...WHEN IS THE NEXT ADVENTURE....IT HAS BEEN TOOO LONG..

GOING NOWHERE FAST takes time to introduce Joe and Dottie Loudermilk in their souped-up winebago, traveling here and there, and ending up at a pit stop with two unwanted passengers...baby son(aptly nicknamed), Bad Dog, and a dead white man in there mobile bathroom. The Loudermilks related to each other as if we had known them all along, and the totally manic/off-center Dog will remind you of that one member of your family that acts as if needs Pat Sajak to buy a clue, when all along, he knows more than he's willing to admit. Characterization hits high notes, and the mystery, while simple enough to follow, will take you along until bad guys have been caught and you want to see them in print again.

This book may be fine for children or adolescents, but there is not enough substance to keep an intellegent adult interested. I expected more. I will probably return the book.

I watched the show on PBS and was interested in finding out more information. The book is very informative as well as a coffee table book. I would highly recommend this book.

The book is great and the television series the same

This book is a great story about two families in different times of history. It shows how people can remain the same even when time changes the world around. Good book if you're interested in evolution.

this book plus the other two of the trilogy are great! i've read all of them twice.

it's true this book does have a lot of sex material in it, but other wise it is a good book. and it's not that they never die, it's they are reincarnated over and over again in similar situations to the ones they were in before. as long as you get past the first couple of chapters, which are kind of dull because no knows how to talk, you will find a book worth paying attention to.

What could have driven Edmund Wilson to betray his friend Vladimir Nabokov? Why was Mark Twain so remarkably mean-spirited toward Bret Harte, going to great lengths to ruin Harte's reputation?

Why did F.R. Leavis indulge in character assassination of C.P. Snow? How could a man so celebrated, so revered as Ernest Hemingway let himself be upset by Gertrude Stein, an old woman who had once been his mentor and friend?

What demons drove Truman Capote to the miserable death that Gore Vidal called "a good career move"? Why did Lillian Hellman bring a libel suit against Mary McCarthy, accusing her of slander and defamation of character? What caused Norman Mailer to physically assault Gore Vidal at a cocktail party in 1974?

Anthony Arthur's latest work, Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe, is filled with gossip and vitriolic attacks.

Some of our most illustrious writers have tried to destroy the reputations of their enemies, using wit, humor, sarcasm, invective, and the occasional right cross to the jaw.

For example, consider these quotations taken from Arthur's work:
Ernest Hemingway: "Gertrude Stein was never crazy/Gertrude Stein was very lazy."
Sinclair Lewis: "I still say you [Theodore Dreiser] are a liar and a thief."
Theodore Dreiser: "He [Sinclair Lewis] is noisy, ostentatious, and shallow. . . . I never could like the man."
Mary McCarthy: " Every word she [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"
Gore Vidal: "It is inhuman to attack [Truman] Capote. You are attacking an elf."

It would be a mistake, however, to think Literary Feuds is only a book of juicy gossip. Anthony Arthur, an accomplished literary historian and critic, demonstrates his expertise in literary history and criticism.

Arthur, who was a Fulbright Scholar and for many years has taught writing and literature at California State University, Northridge.

In the eight essays of this book, Arthur draws on a lifetime of reading and teaching the works of 16 cantankerous writers whom he describes.

Arthur scatters insightful comments throughout the work. For example, "As every teacher of literature knows, comedy and satire are harder to teach than tragedy and melodrama; everyone can feel, but not everyone can think."

Provocative quotations also abound. For example, Gore Vidal, a "born-again atheist," opines, "The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism."

One should not be too eager to search for "opposites" when investigating literary feuds. It does seem, however, that many of the literary artists described in this book are "opposites" in their temperaments, worldviews, politics, or aesthetic tastes.

Those who espouse "realism" or "naturalism" are at cross-purposes with those who champion "idealism" or "romanticism." Rural sentiments clash with urban mentalities; elitism and populism collide.

The outstanding cause of these feuds, however, was pride and the competitive spirit. Mark Twain knew he was a better writer than Bret Harte and could not abide critics who lumped them together as belonging to the same echelon.

Of course, one must not discount that green-eyed monster of envy--the jealousy and bitterness of an outdistanced rival over the fame and financial success of a rival.

Commendable for their style and substance, these true tales of feuding wordsmiths are fascinating, behind-the-scenes glimpses of our (mostly) 20th-century American literati.

Anthony Arthur is the author of Deliverance at Los Banos and Bushmaster, both narrative histories of World War II, and of The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist. He lives in Woodland Hills, California.

Anthony Arthur presents eight literary feuds in chronological order: Mark Twain and Bret Harte, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis, Lillian Hellman and Mary Mccarthy, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe and John Updike.

Arthur is an excellent writer, and it is great fun to read his elegant prose about badly behaved literary types. I was familiar with some of the authors discussed but not all, as I was familiar with some of the animosities but not all of them. Arthur turns a beautiful phrase and has a knack for finding illustrative, sometimes toxic quotes. One good thing about fights between scribes -- they leave lots of luscious things in writing!

The eight disputes are interesting by virtue of the characters or the topic or both, and the author does a fine job of describing the people involved and laying out the foundation and history of each quarrel. Moreover, he makes insightful comments about the disagreement or the relative merits of the protagonists. I thoroughly enjoyed these tales of intelligent people behaving poorly.

--That is, resplendently at their conniving, back-stabbing, vainglorious best.

Anthony Arthur's polished and scholarly accounts of eight famous literary feuds beginning with Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and ending with Tom Wolfe and John Updike, come across as fairly expressed and finely observed. True, with my fabled ability to read between the lines, I can see in places where perhaps the good professor favors one side or the other. Indeed, part of the fun of reading a book like this is discerning where the author's sympathies lie. (You might want to discern for yourself.) But for the most part Professor Arthur lets the chips fall where they may and keeps a balanced keel through the straits of the tempest-tossed tussles while knavishly enjoying himself like an after-the-fact provocateur.

Notable are Arthur's physical descriptions of the gladiators, usually quoting contemporary sources. Thus the young Truman Capote, who is squared off against Gore Vidal, is "unnaturally pretty, with wide, arresting blue eyes and blond bangs" (p. 161) while Vidal is "Tall and slender, Byronically handsome...luminous and manly" (p. 159). (Uh...nevermind.) Sinclair Lewis, who fights with Theodore Dreiser (physically on one occasion--or at least Dreiser is reported to have slapped Lewis), has a "hawkish nose" and a "massive frontal skull...reddish but almost colorless eyebrows above round, cavernously set, remarkably brilliant eyes..." (p. 49) Dreiser, self-described, has "a semi-Roman nose, a high forehead and an Austrian lip, with the edges of my teeth always showing...." (p. 56) The effect of these descriptions along with Arthur's bright and lively (and very careful) style is to make the literary warriors especially vivid and to impress upon us just how human they are.

Arthur however is at his best in coming up with really juicy quotes to illustrate the matters of contention. Thus Lillian Hellman dismissed Mary McCarthy (Chapter 6) as merely "a lady magazine writer" (p. 141) while McCarthy charged in an interview with Dick Cavett that Hellman "is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer..." whose every written word "is a lie, including AND and THE" [my capitalization, p. 143], causing the fur to fly. More civilized was the exchange between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov where Wilson expresses his disappointment with Nabokov's novel, Bend Sinister: "You aren't good at...questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them." Nabokov replies: "In historical and political matters you are partisan of a certain interpretation which you regard as absolute." (pp. 90-91) (They're just sparring: it heats up later on.)

One of the most interesting bits in the book is from page 32 in which it is asserted that Ernest Hemingway learned part of his style from Gertrude Stein (feud number two) by copying her gerund-driven, run-on sentence constructions. What is especially amusing is that Arthur gives a sentence from Stein and then a similar one from Hemingway--"ing's" flying. The effect was bad in Gertrude Stein, and, although improved in Hemingway, it was still bad. Arthur's book is full of these delightfully sly bits of satire.

He also likes to slip in a few literary jokes. For example, British Don F. R. Leavis, who is in combat with C.P. Snow over the famous "Two Cultures," is characterized as saying of his "fellow Fellows": "They can all go to hell. Of course, some should go before the others. One has a responsibility to make discriminations." (Quoted from Frederick Crews, p. 116) Also: "J.B. Priestley...called Leavis a sort of Calvinist theologian...who makes one feel that he hates books and authors...not...from exceptional fastidiousness but...[as a] result of some strange neurosis, as if he had been frightened by a librarian in early childhood." (p. 118)

All in all, a most entertaining and informative read from a fine prose stylist.

Disregard the review from the irate student from Riverside: there is no better textbook on the subject then Hormones by Litwack and Norman.

This book is really an awesome book for the subject. I have used it for both research and teaching. There are not too many books that cover the same materials at the levels of focus and depth as this book.

I think this is one of the few best textbook on the subject. The authors, Drs. Litwack and Norman, are well known in their field of research. They explain all concepts really well. The book is well written. All chapters have excellent references. I have the first edition of the book and have found that the 2nd edition is even better.

I read this book and I believe it is a great analysis on the life of John Lennon. I appreciate the fact that the first reviewer has their own opinion on the book but it is really not a waste of time. I highly recommend this book!!!!!

Having read the two previous reviews, I got a chance to look at the book in the Cleveland Public Library. It is a great source, and a nice addition to the other Lennon books out on the market. It is well researched and gives a clear (although somewhat academic) portrait of an artist worthy of an indepth study. I would highly reccomend to other Lennonologists.

This book is unlike any Lennon book I've read before. It is intuitive and emotionally vivid in its description of Lennon. Beyond the myth of Lennon's "Beatle John" image, The Mourning of John Lennon manages to give you a powerful sense of what his life was about - up close and personal. Fantastic.

Tony Gill admits to driving in the carpool lane as a single occupant. For that reason alone, I would urge you NOT to buy his text!

Anthony Gill is a very nice young man who is simply misunderstood. While he may sometimes tell students he skips into the carpool lane illegally to illustrate points about rationality in his class, he actually respects the laws of this fine land. And his book is wonderful, filled with lots of knowledge. [...]

I read this book for a class in Latin American history and found it very compelling. The book is a bit scientific in tone, but it is much more clear than anything else we read in the class. I was surprised to find out that there were so many Protestants in Latin America. Also, the economic approach used in this book was surprising at first (I was skeptical), but in the end I was sold. I usually sell my books back, but I plan on keeping this one on my shelf.

The jacket and reviews of this book claim that it is written by a psychologist. This is wrong, it is written by a psychiatrist, with all the difference once expects between the two professions.

I bought this book hoping for a scientific discussion of how music influences us, for example things like: the influence of music of different types on animals, the reactions of children to different types of music, what MRI and PET scans tells us about the effect of music on the brain,

differences in music across cultures; stuff like that.

What I got was a text in the worst traditions of Freud and Jung, a rambling collection of fragments and observations from the writings of Western Civ over the last two thousand years and presumed to be true simply because their language is resonant and evocative. This is doubtless of interest to some people, but is of very little interest to me.

To people like myself, interested in what is actually known about music and the mind, rather than interested in simply reading a hundred different ways in which people have essentially said the same thing "Music has a profound and mysterious effect on the mind", this book is a complete waste of time and money. I cannot warn you strongly enough that it will do nothing but disappoint you.

The author is an acclaimed psychiatrist whose personal life was very sad and lonely; he attributed his passion for music as the element which preserved his sanity and emotional equilibrium. Out of the many books he wrote, this was his favorite. He attempts to discover what it is about music that so profoundly affects us, and why it is such an important part of our culture. In doing so, he quotes a vast array of opinions; actually he draws more from what other peole have had to say about music than his own personal opinion.
Storr sees music as subjective, emotional need for communication with other human beings; it structures time and brings order out of chaos, and it has a positive effect upon patients with neurological diseases. Physiologically, the emotional response is centered in the right hemisphere whilst the ability to appreciate structure and make critical judgments is located on the left side of the brain. He is of the opinion that music originates from the human brain rather than from the natural world and its universality depends on the urge to impose order upon our experience. He criticizes the dispute between formalists and expressionists since for him it is obvious that appreciation of both form and emotional significance enter into the experience of every listener and cannot be separated. Contrary to Freud's opinion, Storr holds that music is not an escape from reality but a means to structure our auditory perceptions and can also serve as a precursor to creative discovery.
The last few chapters are dedicated to a philosophical analysis of the views held mainly by Schopenhauer, Jung, Nietszche with respect to music. Storr does not fully accept Schopenhauer's "unus mundus" or Jung's "pleroma," and is more inclined to accept Nietszche's concepts: music reconciles an individual to life and enhances it, it is physically and emotionally based, and it links the two principles of Apollo and Dionysus.
Storr gives a historical, psychological, philosophical, and above all a passionate account of importance of music in the life of an individual. Quoting his own words, music is "something for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on earth... it is an irreplaceable, transcendental blessing."

Storr synthesizes his knowledge of biology, psychology, history and evolution and fuses it into a mindful musical journey. This is a thought provoking and comprehensive integration of music and the human psyche, and like many of Storr's books, it enhances your self awareness with each chapter.

Whether, stimulating & arousing or relaxing & calming, music has enormous emotional power. Storr has written an eloquent treatise on how music serves as one of the bridges connecting mind and body.

Tony Campolo had a name that carried a lot of good will with me. I came to this book having long heard of Campolo. I had heard his sound bite wisdom flashed across my television over the years. I was excited to pick up this book and read it. It promised to be something interesting - and very likely useful to my ministry.

Sadly, the book was more than a disappointment. Campolo used this book as a printed infomercial for his own ministry. Over and over again he crows about his successes and shamelessly promotes his ministry as exemplary - while doing nothing to take seriously HOW one translates a model of ministry from one place and situation to another. He says so many things that, on the surface, sound appealing. Like a politician, he is skilled at ladling out catch phrases that are like candy to the ear. But...which fall apart when you really look at them.

Some of his most offensive suggestions include the inference that the poor should essentially be satisfied and thankful with what they get economically. Having a future that dead-ends at McDonalds is the hand God dealt, so stop bellyaching. He heaps blame on people who suffer, and readily gets their oppressors off the hook by saying it's a good thing to be rich and enjoy it (with no responsibility attached??).

As a scholar of Wesleyanism and Methodism, i take particular offence at his intentional misquoting of John Wesley. He notes that Wesley said that one should 'earn all you can and save all you can' (note that Wesley meant be frugal with what you have when he said 'save' - not store up, as we think of its meaning) - while omitting that the purpose of this was to GIVE all you can! Here, Campolo is caught in a gross misrepresentation of Wesley, essentially editing his words to make him say what Campolo wishes he had said! Shame!!

I also was shocked by the suggestion that entrepreneurial Christians should look into the possibility of getting on the privatization bandwagon and contract with the government to run Christian prisons!

The whole book is a gross accommodation to much that is the WORST about our society. It may read sweetly for those who see ministry to the poor of the inner city as a ministry of condescension. But, i see nothing of Mr. Campolo's upper middle class values in the genuine ministry of compassion of Jesus Christ.

Sadly, this book made me lose respect for Mr. Campolo. I wish i could say otherwise.

For those who really want to do something, or need to be encouraged to do something to help the Kingdom of God be manifest in the city, this book is for you. It is practical, and most importantly, hopeful. Campolo uses his own ministry and experiences, as well as other unrelated ministries (for example, Minneapolis; Ripon, New York; Costa Mesa, CA; and the Dominican Republic) as prototypes for what can be done in inner cities. He is honest in not promising that every ministry he mentions can be replicated; but since Campolo gives so many specific, practical suggestions on how to carry out the ideas and programs presented, people will hopefully catch a vision and be encouraged to give some of them a try.

Campolo's love and care for those in the inner city is contagious. He believes that one of God's main concerns is for the poor and oppressed, as evidenced in Jesus' first public words in Luke 4:18-19. Campolo challenges all of us to champion the needs of those who lack the basic necessities of life. He challenges the churches who have much, to partner with those who have little. And he challenges all of us to love Jesus through loving others, especially the poor and oppressed. But his ideas are not only about others helping the poor. He also believes in empowering people to help themselves (for example, see Ch. 7 on neighborhood meetings). If you want to do something to help God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, read this helpful and hopeful book.

As someone who has heard Tony Campolo speak many times, and as someone who doesn't enjoy reading, this book opened my eyes. It only took me 2 days to read this book. I couldn't put it down. Tony Campolo obviously cares for the inner city missions of Camden and Philadelphia. This book is a great example of how Christians need to respond to the poor and the inner city people. This book will touch your heart with the stories by Bruce Main of his experiences in Camden adn so forth. This is a must have book for any person entering the mission field. Eastern College is very lucky to have a man like Tony Campolo to teach there. As a student at Eastern, I am blessed to have heard this man encourage the students and faculty to reach out to the people of Camden and Philadelphia. This book makes you look in depth at your life and walk with Jesus Christ.