The authors - two pastors and a college chaplain - write from personal experience of the new "post-liberal" perspective emerging within the Protestant mainline churches. Thoughtful and readable, the book is particularly suited to the lay person who has felt that the church should be more than a well-intentioned institution dedicated to "making the world a little nicer," but has not been able to identify where the problem lay, or what the solution might be.

This is a short introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is not very exciting but covers the standard academic territory pretty well. It has some nice sections in translation. Parts of it depend on having some knowledge of Greek. The author writes with the assured grace and precision of traditional British scholarship, which is always a pleasure to read. However the main thing this introduction has to recommend it is its brevity.

Instinctively, most decent people don't like to see anyone singled out and denigrated unfairly. To most, it seems particularly distasteful if the denigration is on the basis of race, gender or (to many, at least) sexual orientation. Yet the authors of this book, all of whom are active in campaigns for equality as well as for civil liberties, see codes on US campuses which prohibit and punish such speech as a threat.... Why?

Their book examines the arguments for and against such codes and the issues that underlie them. Objections to these codes include that :

They are a threat to basic free speech principles. In particular the idea that speech should be protected regardless of its content or viewpoint -- a principle intended to prevent the law from favouring one interest over another.
 
They have a chilling effect on wider discourse. Nadine Strossen points out that : Regardless of how carefully these rules are drafted, they inevitably are vague and unavoidably invest officials with substantial discretion in the enforcement process; thus, such regulations exert a chilling effect on speech beyond their literal bands. (1)
 
They put us on a "slippery slope". Ideas not originally intended to be the subject of the codes will be penalised. Throughout the book examples are given of this happening. Strossen points out that in Britain the "No Platform for racists and fascists" was extended to cover Zionism (whereby its victims included the Israeli ambassador to the UK). (2) In Canada the victims of restrictions of free expression have included the black feminist scholar Bell Hooks, and a gay & lesbian bookshop in Toronto. (3)

Much the same issue was raised from the floor of an LM sponsored conference in London at which one of the authors (Nadine Strossen) spoke; it was pointed out that the UK Public Order Act of 1936, which was ostensibly introduced to control the followers of British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, had been invoked time and time again to ban demonstrations by leftists and trade unionists. Similarly, police tactics used against the National Front in the 1980s to prevent their coaches from reaching demonstrations were later employed against striking miners.

The book's authors note that the codes give power to institutions and government. Can we trust them with these new powers? As David Coles, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote :

...in a democratic society the only speech government is likely to succeed in regulating will be that of the politically marginalised. If an idea is sufficiently popular, a representative government will lack the political wherewithal to supress it, irrespective of the First Amendment. But if an idea is unpopular, the only thing that may protect it from the majority is a strong constitutional norm of content neutrality. (4)

Donald E. Lively questions how new powers will be exercised :

Reliance upon a community to enact and enforce protective regulation when the dominant culture itself has evidenced insensitivity toward the harm for which sanction is sought does not seem well placed. A mentality that trivialises incidents such as those Lawrence relates is likely to house the attitudes that historically have inspired the turning of racially significant legislation against minorities. (5)

But perhaps Ira Glasser puts it best in her introduction to the book :

First, the attempt by minorities of any kind -- racial, political, religious, sexual -- to pass legal restrictions on speech creates a self-constructed trap. It is a trap because politically once you have such restrictions in place the most important questions to ask are: Who is going to enforce them? Who is going to interpret what they mean? Who is going to decide whom to target?
The answer is : those in power. (6)

Another condemnation is that the codes are an exercise in self-indulgency, a trivialisation of real racial imperatives by the pursuit of relatively marginal and debatable concerns....
Donald E. Lively states :

As a method for progress, however, protocolism (1) seriously misreads history and disregards evolving social and economic conditions, (2) is an exercise in manipulating and avoiding racial reality; and (3) represents a serious misallocation of scarce reformist resources. (7)

Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex doesn't just put the arguments against speech codes -- it also deconstructs the arguments put in their favour. The three most interesting arguments in favour of such codes are, in my view, (1) that racist expression is not about truth or an attempt to persuade and so is not worthy of protection; (2) that racist declarations are in fact group libels; and (3) that racist expression is akin to an assault.

All three arguments are dismissed by the authors. In the first case, Justice Douglas is approvingly quoted :

(A) function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. This is why freedom of speech, though not absolute is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance or unrest. There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardisation of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups. (8)

The second argument -- that racist, sexist or homophobic statements are group libels -- is likewise dismissed. The authors point out that libel involves the publication of information about someone that is both damaging and false. Apart from the obvious fact that group libel doesn't refer to an individual does it fit the definition? Henry Louis Gates Jr. states that it does not. He points out that racist statements may be right or wrong but cannot in many forms be judged true or false. they are often statements of what the individual thinks should be or an expression of feeling. As Gates points out : You cannot libel someone by saying 'I despise you', which seems to be the essential message of most racial epithets. (9)

The last argument -- that such speech represents an assault or words that wound -- is examined, and also dismissed. The authors accept that words can cause harm. Their concern, however, is that no code can be drawn in such a way as to punish only words which stigmatise and dehumanise. They point out that the most harmful forms of racist language are precisely those that combine insult with advocacy -- those that are in short the most political. (10) Attempts to deny that racist speech has a political content also deny that they are part of a larger mechanism of political subordination.

So, can we combat hatred on grounds of race, gender or sexual preference whilst cherishing and nurturing civil liberties? Can we encourage a diversity of thought as well as of population and lifestyle? The answer given by the authors of this book is an emphatic 'yes'. They don't see equality of opportunity and freedom of expression as being at odds. As such, their ideas are refreshing in contrast to the many who seem to have quite unthinkingly accepted that we must sacrifice our freedom on an altar of (faked) equality...

I liked the reference as an introduction to MPI, but it switched between fortran and C so often that I spent a fair amount of my time just trying to interpret the code samples and synchronize to the syntax of the language they were using. You shouldnt have that problem if you have used Fortran in the last ten years but i havnt touched it since college. You have to be able to work with both languages though because many of the key concepts are only demonstrated in one language. Also the examples were usaully spread out into mini snipets as opposed to a larger block that might show a more complete picture.

I found the book to be extremely hard to get through, wordy and boring. The entire book focuses on direct quotations from all of Shakespeare's works with little focus as to why the quotations were included in the text. The book gives the reader little of his personal life, personality, or political views, but focuses only on hundreds of people that he knew and met throughout the years giving detailed explanations of names, and their backgrounds. I found the book to be very boring, with little content on Shakespeare as a person; the book featured only comments on his hundreds of works. If you are EXTREMELY well versed with Shakespeare's works, this is a good pick for you. If you have some to little knowledge, pick something else. For the student who needs interesting information on him as a person, choose another book. I found it to be dry, repetative and only in depth on quotations from thousands of plays.

Somewhat to my surprise, this is a first-rate popular biography of a genius about whom we know practically nothing. Not that this has stopped any number of amateur sleuths from the Baconians to Eric Sams from trying to find clues in the poems and plays. Holden's is by far the liveliest and most readable. He doesn't make the mistake Anthony Burgess did of spraying his own personality over Shakespeare in the usual tom-cat fashion; nor is he bonkers, excessively academic or portentous. If you want to discover as much as can be known or surmised about the Bard, especially the early years, then Holden's book is fascinating. His thesis that the SHakespeares all closet Catholics, and that the young WS was sent as a teenager to recusant Lancashire to teach at Sir Thomas Hesketh's house as good an explanation as any of how the "rude groom" acquired polish and knowledge of how aristocratic families lived. His gloss on his marriage, the untimely death of his son Hamnett and his growing interest in his daughters all substantiated by apt quotations.

A wonderful piece of detective-work. Alongside Joanthan Bates's The Genius of Shakespeare it's a great new addition to the modern enthusiast's library.

Some of the other reviews incite me to add yet a few more words. Holden does NOT blur fact and fiction. He consistently lables speculation and inference, identifies sources, outlines opposing views, gives reasons for his choices, and qualifies his conclusions. His reading of the plays, while brief, reaches deeply into the heart of Shakespeare's works. This is a responsible and valuable book.

Started off OK but soon deteriorated into the realms of utter absurdity. The presence of William Desmond Taylor would have been much more effective if it had merely been implied . When the present day cop started to argue with Taylor's ghost - particularly so early in the book it all became a bit silly and I quickly lost interest. Would have been much better to have simply "Dropped Hints" to suggest the great man's presence and then brought him into the foreground action much further into the book. An interesting idea ruined by shortening the suspense.

This well-researched murder mystery reminds me of Jack Finney's wonderful pair of time travel fantasy-mysteries, From Time to Time, and Time and Again. Peeples' book does not have the romantic charm of Finney's books---the protagonist here is more into the physical aspect of love---but the time travel theme is similar. While Finney used an elaborate deliberate scheme to effect time travel, Peeples chooses to make the ultimate trip an accident.
In The Man Who Died Twice, a 1970's Los Angeles Police detective travels back to 1922 Los Angeles, and inhabits the body of William Desmond Taylor, a Hollywood producer who was murdered in real-life Hollywood in February 1922. The LA detective, Ernie Carter, has the advantage of knowing lots of details about the case, from having read the police files, and just living in the Hollywood/LA area all his life. Carter, with Taylor's personality serving as a kind of alter ego, tries to prevent Taylor (and himself!) from being murdered.
Along the way, Taylor/Carter encounters many legendary Hollywood figures, including D.W. Griffith, William Randolph Hearst, John Barrymore, Mabel Normand, and Rudolf Valentino. It is sobering to read about the sad and/or untimely end of many of these stars, and to contemplate how little Hollywood has changed since, to wit Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, John Belushi, Tony Perkins, and many many others.
Peeples brings Hollywood in 1922 to vibrant life, transporting the reader to the silent era with great skill. He seemingly mentions all of the possible murderers, and keeps the reader guessing as to which one he will use as the actual shooter. In real life, the case was never solved, but Peeples' murderer is convincing.
An old science fiction story once had a time traveller in the age of dinosaurs walking along a special path, from which he could not stray. He could not pick flowers, kill any of the animals, or leave any evidence of his visit. If he did, all of the ensuing history of the world would change, subtly in the time of dinosaurs, massively in his own 20th century. I am reminded of that story when I read a book like this. I will leave it to you, if you read this book, to discover if Peeples adheres to the tenets of the SF story.

As a Chicagoland native and budding fan of "Outfit" stories, I was anxious to learn all I could about "Joe Batters". This book does deliver information I didn't already have, but don't let the page count fool you. Roemer pads this book with all kinds of extraneous stuff, and wanders in his narrative. He has no idea how to organize information, and this book seems to be no more than a rough draft. Roemer claims to be impartial, but opinion drips from every sentence. He can never let the evidence speak for itself. He always has to comment on it. If you're expecting nothing more than one man's war stories of his time in the FBI, then this book will not disappoint, but this is not the omnibus of Accardo information that I was hoping for.

When I saw there was a book about Accardo I rushed right out and got it. Accardo was a man I had great interest in, yet knew little about. I must give Roemer credit once again for another well researched mafia book. But sorry, on this one he falls a little short of the mark. Despite the fact he repeats alot of what he's said in his other books it's still an enlightening book about a very intelligent, very powerful and very cunning mobster. But because Tony Accardo was so damn good at keeping out of the lime light (the FBI's that is) in the end we don't know much about him at all. It is a shame and I don't blame Roemer for it, but rather give credit to Accardo for being one of the few mobsters we will never know much about. e.g. Gambino, Frankie La Porte, Funzi Tieri. But still it's a good read, as are Roemers other books and if you need a break from all the New York stories read about the Chicago Outfit. Which I belive will last longer under pressure from the law than any other Family in the US. GOOD STUFF

I grew up in the Chicago area, and I would hear Tony Accardo's name in the news from time to time, so when I found this book I was interested in knowing about the man that I heard about. Roemer a former FBI agent in Chicago , dealt with Accardo and the whole Outfit in Chicago. Roemer has given us a novel that gives us some insight in the the life of Accardo from being a bodyguard for Al Capone to his rise of the boss of the Outfit. It is a good read, but Accardo was a mobster who never spent a night in jail, and avoided the limelight, so how much is really known about him? Accardo wasn't a fool that is why he stayed at the top for so long and watched the others who came after him such as Sam Giancanna, be more flamboyant and go down the tubes. The book shows him to be a fair person, but it also shows us how he could resort to violence and order killings when he thought they were necessary. I feel if you are a fan of organized crime books, this is a must for you to read, and it will be a welcome change of pace than reading another book about some New York family

Want to know why the US and other countries have had such up-and-down economic problems for the last several decades? You can thank Paul Samuelson and other incompetent buffoons like him (I don't mind buffoons that much, but incompetent ones are just too much). Samuelson and his ilk operated on the false assumption that mathematics actually describes economic activity. Once you believe this, the next logical step (in Wacky World, at least) is to have math-oriented "economists" (most of whom are failed wannabe mathematicians, anyway) plan and run the economy.
Fortunately, free markets are stable; they only destabilize when the government intervenes. No neo-classical "economist" understands this, and mathematicians certainly don't (see review
below). The only economic school that describes the real world
is the Austrian school; they are of course are taught in very, very few colleges. Government interference has never worked, and it
never will. And Samuelson got a Nobel Prize? You might as well give me one, too.

When I was required to take econ as undergrad physics student and used this text, the professor made a big deal of econ students not understanding 'curves', by which assertion he implicitly meant the plotting of y=f(x) when f is smooth and invertible. Well the professor didn't understand 'curves' at a higher level: he failed to note that nearly all the 'curves' presented in the text were only 'cartoons', mere mental constructions not based on real data, and agreeing with no real data (excepting corn flakes sales in British supermarkets, if Paul Ormerod is correct). The idea of 'utility' is a useless fabrication that has no basis in empirical data. Those mental constructions represent instead the expectations of neo-classical economic theory, the religion of the IMF, World Bank, and a host of other neo-classically-educated economists. To be specific, the price-demand, price-supply 'curves' touted in the text do not exist in reality and also not in theory: e.g., see Osborne's book Finance and the Stock Market from a Physicist's Perspective for the explanation why. See also the economists' own proof that aggregate price-supply demand-suppy curves 'can be anything' even if individual supply-demand curves would behave as they expect! Furthermore, no real market is approximately in equilibrium, all real markets are examples of far from equilibrium systems. Unregulated free markets are unstable. None of this is hinted at in the text, where equilibrium and stability are implicitly and unfairly assumed without warning the unsuspecting reader. Worse, in the introductory chapter Samuelson uses a hokey, irrelevant pictorial argument to try to convince both himself and the reader that physics is as unscientific as neo-classical econ theory. For good information about econ theory, see the following books: Ormerod's The Death of Economics, Mirowski's More Heat than light, and Osborne's book. For those with enough intellectual stamina, there is also Giovanni Dosi's Innovation, Organization, and Economic Dynamics, a collection of essays that also points out that the emperor wears no clothes and tries to find a reliable ruler to replace His Uselessness. Instead of propagating misleading mythology it's now time for economists to face the facts and explain why, after convincing governments to follow their advice and deregulate, we face one big financial instability after the other: LTCM, Argentina, Enron, .... .

As text or as literature, this book is terribly written. Unsystematic, like a hodgepodge of review articles. Samuelson has noted that economists (like Galbraith) who write too well may be suspect by other economists, but this is an unfortunate viewpoint. The best writing is done by the clearest thinkers: Einstein (in both German and English), Feynman, V.I. Arnol'd, and Fischer Black are examples. Bad writing, in contrast, often reflects sloppy thinking. In short, this text could have been cut to half it's size, to the benefit of the reader who wants to understand what Samuelson has to say.

For the story of how neo-classical econ won out academically, see Mirowski's 'Machine Dreams'.

This book is very famed in China.
The reader of the book is not college student but postgraduate.
The publisher in China have translated and published the textbook for above 4 times, The lasted one in 16th edition.

i am a editor.
who can help me that i want to know the top 10 or 20 business textbook in the world? it's including Economics?

liuhui@wise-link.com

This textbook is a mess! Certain sections such as those that deal with classical transmission genetics are reasonably good. On the other hand, those sections that deal with recombinant DNA/genomic technology and the molecular basis of cancer are very weak. The writing in these sections is convoluted, and the level of coverage fluctuates wildly between oversimplification and mind-numbing detail. The book does not seem to have a clear target audience in mind, and the authors appear to have not spoken with each other during the writing. Considering the relative strengths of their earlier text, "Introduction to Genetic Analysis," this new effort is all the more disappointing.

Genetics has traditionally been taught with the topics in historical order, starting with Mendel and only later reaching molecular genetics. However, it is much more logical to explain Mendelian genetics in the context of molecular genetics. (No other science abandons a logical building-up of concepts in return for historical chronology!) Griffiths and colleagues are the first to write a text with this preferable and long-overdue approach. Their overall organization is the best that I've seen. While many of the chapters are very well written, there are some parts of the book that are substandard and hopelessly jumbled, such as the chapter on mutational mechanisms and DNA repair. As this is a first edition, I am optimistic that these problems will be ironed out in the second edition. Another criticism is that the figures are adequate but not outstanding; the artists should take lessons from their colleagues who worked on Genetics: From Genes to Genomes by Hartwell and colleagues. Despite its drawbacks, I prefer this text to others that are available.

I'm very impressed with the excercises in the end of every chapter. The excercises are fun and not too difficult.
The material is very well illustrated. Again, good work .

As a college librarian, I've been exposed to lots of book, Both professionally, and as an avid reader starting since I can remember. I have literally read thousands of books, and have been reading science fiction since I was a teenager. It is my favorite genre of books. I've read the usual authors, such as Heinlein, Asimov, Poul Andersen, Andre Norton, Larry Niven. Right now I'm reading a lot of military science fiction, and in my own 300+ book collection include authors such as David Weber, David Drake, John Ringo, John Steakley, Sharon Lee, C.J. Cherryh, and others. Simply put, I love reading science fiction. I tell you this because it should give some credence to my statement that Derelict is one of the worst written books I've ever read of any genre. Or I should say started to read. It is 714 pages long and I couldn't get past page 41. I really tried to give the book the benefit of the doubt, but the pain of reading it soon overwhelmed any optimism I had that it would improve. While I admire the author's ambition and effort to write a book of this length, I sincerely wish he had taken some writing classes, or at least had someone edit the book. The book is published by Writer's Showcase, an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc. What this publisher allows authors to do is to pay to have their books published. The website for the publisher states that Writer's Showcase is for "authors who could benefit from additional editorial and marketing direction." I think Williams, the author, should ask Writer's Showcase for his money back. The only editing direction this book took was backwards. Where to start? One problem was that I kept stopping to mentally correct problems in basic grammar and punctuation, and wonder why an author would include exclamation marks (!) at the end of almost every other sentence and even use them in place of question marks. These may seem insignificant matters, but grammar and punctuation can greatly assist or hinder the flow of a book. So it should come as no surprise that the sentences themselves that comprise the book have no flow, no cohesion, and seemingly no purpose other than to use up as many words as possible. Try reading a few pages of sentences such as: "like the steel jaws of a soporific leviathan the access doors parted, breaking in half the great chrysanthemum painted center as the two doors vanished into the overhead and deck, unveiling ahead the rapier like probe which pointed directly towards the Promenade Room like a glaring broadsword." And no, reading it in context does not help a bit. Here's another one: "Human bodies caught by the section's gravitional pull twirled slowly about its imaginary axis, all frozen hard into grotesque poses like hearty contortionists condemned forever to remain the still objects of their bizarre craft." And lastly, "Unannounced, Heather Gagnon quietly entered Goss's office and eased her dark-suited endowments into a cushiony swivel high-back and friviously gave it a twist....Quickly Gagnon placed her compact away and just a quickly produced a Virginia Slims Menthol and placed it into her thin, frosted lips. Taking a quick puff she pushed her brunette fullness away and primly adjusted the high collar of her imported smock." Now imagine paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter of this, for 714 pages. I can't really tell you about the plot of the book because I didn't finish it. If I was a paid reviewer, I would have made a more heroic effort to read the book. I just couldn't. Instead, I went to a bookstore and purchased one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, and read it to restore my faith in good writing. By the way, if you think I am being too hard on the book, then spend the $.. to buy it and make up your own mind. And you can enjoy how "in the spot of lighting a small hatch sprung and beings started dislodging enmasse from the hellacious innards of that old, rotting hulk. The 24 men immediately tore in horror from the onrushing denizens. These were hideous insectine beings with huge brains deranged of formaldehyde and age: a segmented rabble bearing ancient weaponry and rusted bludgeons in their scaled claws." Don't say I didn't warn you. The terrors in this book are nothing compared to the terror in reading it.

I bought and read this book based upon a single customer review and wish to add my opinion to the mix. Good things: The character developement was fairly well done, and the story is unique. I personally like longer stories, so the length of the story seemed appropriate. Bad things: The story did get off to a slow start with a several hundred page description of the shore leave taken by a group of soliders. While many emotional bonds were made, I got sick of reading about all the drinking, eating, and sex. As a healthy male, that was easy to grasp and seemed beat to death. The technology of this fairly advanced society was not well described, nor were the political situations detailed... Finally, my biggest complaint is that the author used WAY too many exclamation points. Its weird, and I'm normally not a stickler for things like that, but it got annoying. In summary this is an average book which is unfortunately not worth its cover price.

I occasionally check out new selections by authors that are relatively unknown, looking for something different. This is how I came across "The Derelict." At over 700 pages, this novel is really a two to three book series and I can honestly say that I am ready for two to three MORE! The first thing that amazed me was how fast these characters developed into people I could relate to. The second amazing thing was that this didn't happen with just one or two "leading" characters, but with about a half a dozen personalities! Most books that attempt this kind of thing seem to have the peoples personalities too vague or blurred together. This crew rapidly turns into memorable people as the adventures begin. You move along with one of these Guys or Gals for a while then suddenly things pick up someplace else. "Hey, what happened to-, Oh what's this?, WOW!, ok." and then off to yet another place until all these different sub stories weave into a clear pattern of action and adventure. Did I say "action"? I meant to say "ACTION"! About half way through "The Derelict" I couldn't believe how fast things were happening. In fact I was a bit worried since I have had too many books "peak" early on and the ending just seemed "added on" to clean up the left overs. Not here! "The Derelict" brings you on to the edge of your seat and keeps you there. Think you can see what's coming? Wrong! You just never know what to expect next. This book doesn't fall into "typical" scenarios, it takes two twists and then a left turn that makes you dizzy, but what is really stunning is that fact that everything is made believable! None of that "Oh yeah, right" kind of stuff. The book just keeps building and getting better. As the crew finally boards "The Derelict", this adventure starts to blend into a mystery and then adds moments of absolutely heart stopping terror. The action never stops. After the last page, I found myself taking a deep breath and dropping back hard to Earth. Apparently the author, Anthony L. Williams, has been working on a totally different book, but has indicated that he may consider a sequel. I, for one, am waiting and I am pretty sure that if you read "The Derelict" you too, will want to see more adventures in "The Bartolian Vector."