The book is interesting, but I tried a number of the supposedly "easy" trick shots.. They're not easy and I'm a fairly decent shot (play in leagues etc..). I'm sure with consistent practice, you could actually make 1 or 2 of these shots, but even then they would be "low percentage" shots. The placement of the balls must be perfect and no text can tell where to place these balls with the kind of precision you'll need to make these shots. Just don't expect to buy this book and be making trick shots the next day.. - You'll be disappointed. Even so, it's fun just to see these shots diagramed and the historical facts/anecdotes are interesting.

This book covers the classics, such as the football shot, butterfly shot, machine gun shot, just showin' off, etc, plus variations, (i.e. masse machine gun shot) lesser known shots, and shots by the author. Some require almost no skill at all, while making others could keep pros happy all day.
Every shot has information about its history, how to do it, and sometimes even suggestions on what to say before you attempt it, plus a clear yet detailed digram of the setup and shot.
Almost any book will tell you how to do a few, common trick shots, but this one has them all.

Once again Byrne delivers concise info in an easy understandable manner. I currently own several of his books and videos; all of which are helpful. Some of his info may be found in earlier writings, but that's the case with many tomes in this area. It's no surprise he was inducted into the BCA Hall of Fame for his wonderful contributions to this sport via his writings/videos.

This is another wonderfully written book by Robert Byrne. It shows the vivid life of a pool hustler/hobo/drunk/real person that was in his prime in the 1920's-1950's. If gives a real sense of McGoorty and his life in what apear to be his own words. He also shares extremely colorful insight, his opinion, into several famous and well known professional billiard players and World Champions of his era. It is full of real life experiences during those times; however, the language and crude tone are very vulgar. If you're not offended it is an enjoyable interesting read.

McGoorty, billiards legend, tells all. Not quite on the same plateau as, for example, Mezz Mezzrow's 'Really the Blues', but definitely up there in the modest pantheon of books unafraid to celebrate lowbrow Americana in all its primal glory. McGoorty's glorious world of the 1920s and 30s is gone now, but thankfully we have a few books like this to remind us what it was like.

Quick review: Very unique voice. Was a pleasure to read. Excellent Social Anthropological details contained within. Highly recommended. Made me want to learn 3 cushion.

After picking this book up at a Sam's club out of curiosity I found that I couldn't put it down and ended up putting it in the cart. My companion is a begining Astronomy buff and he couldn't get enough eighther. We were reading it to each other and trying to read it at the same time. We have learned alot from this book and have put it to good use with his new telescope. I highly remommed this book to the person who has always wanted to get started in astronomy!

This beautifully produced book is a superb addition to the library of any backyard astronomer or anyone from eight to eighty. It's a best buy for several reasons.
The first is its outstanding quality. The second is the BEWARE!.
This book is actually a softcover, otherwise identical reprint of "Advanced Skywatching", ISBN: 0783549415, published in 1997, also by Time-Life.
Perhaps Time-Life used this subterfuge to catch unwary on-line shoppers that already own "Advanced Skywatching" (as I do), since you can't view the contents on-line to discover you already own the same book under a different name.

The complaint on the star charts about this book (or its twin) not covering the entire sky is not critical.
There isn't room on anyone's bookshelf for all the possible fun sky-hops, of which this book and its twin present abundant excellent examples. There are more and different, also challenging and instructive ones in another fine volume, "Turn Left at Orion", and many others.

Not to worry if you get sucked in. This one makes a fine gift for your favorite grandchild as mine will.
Add this to your "must have" list if you don't already own its twin. If you do, buy it anyhow and give it to someone special.
The price is astonishingly low for the fine content.

It's fun, informative and useful. I have several Byrne books and videos and I review them once in a while. I hesitated buying this in fear it was merely a revamping of old material. I found it used...and bought it anyway; I was so wrong, it's totally new and fresh and a great addition to my library. Byrne comes thru once again and shows why he's been inducted into the BCA hall of Fame.

Originally after I read Byrne's "Skyscraper" novel I thought he had absolutely no talent in placing words together, placing him in the moronic catagory, as well as a complete bore! But he swings and connects with this work! Bravo!

"Brush with the Law" is a double memoir written by two students who attended law school at the same time but at different schools: Jaime Marquart at Harvard Law and Robert Byrnes on the other side of the continent at Stanford Law.

Full disclosure: I was a classmate of both Marquart and Byrnes, as I completed my first year at Stanford and then transferred to Harvard for my second and third years. I was a casual acquaintance of Byrnes while I was at Stanford, but to the best of my recollection I have never met Marquart.

Years from now, readers may well see this book as a quintessential product of the 1990s. (Byrnes and Marquart entered law school in 1995 and graduated in 1998.) The '90s was a decade when the word "slacker" entered the popular lexicon and when revealing raunchy secrets on talk shows such as"The Jerry Springer Show" became a national fad. "Brush with the Law" manages to achieve the dubious feat of combining both the slacker genre and the Jerry Springer phenomenon in a book which purportedly is about elite law schools.

Both Marquart and Byrnes qualify as slackers - neither seems to have any interest in law, and neither spends much time in class. Marquart goes so far as to invent an elaborate course-selection procedure he dubs "The System," which enables him to pass his classes without actually attending them. (I give Marquart credit on this score - I attended almost all of my classes and kept up with the assigned readings reasonably well, yet my grades were about the same as Marquart's.)

The "Jerry Springer" aspect of the book makes the book an entertaining read, albeit a guilty pleasure. Marquart spends his time and his financial aid checks gambling at Foxwoods and Atlantic City. In a bizarre scene near the end of the book, Marquart is orally serviced by an Atlantic City prostitute who takes a break to pass gas, explaining, "I just had seafood with my boyfriend."

Not to be outdone, Byrnes spends much of the book smoking crack in the bathroom of a San Francisco bar. He also participates in a group sex experience. (I and everyone else at Stanford Law had heard rumors of this incident and Byrnes' participation in it, but I had never believed the rumors until I read the book.)

The unusual double-memoir format works reasonably well. Byrnes and Marquart brush by each other at several points in the narrative and end up working at the same law firm in Los Angeles - Young & Mathers in the book, Quinn, Emanuel in real life. Of the two authors, Byrnes is the better writer. Marquart's dialogue tends to sound stilted - even at Harvard, nobody really talks the way his characters do.

I wouldn't want either Byrnes or Marquart to represent me as my lawyer. And I question why either Byrnes or Marquart ever bothered to go to law school given their obvious lack of interest in law either as a profession or as an academic subject - a question which could equally well have been asked of many of my other law school classmates.

Nevertheless, the sheer depravity of Byrnes' and Marquart's tales makes "Brush with the Law" hard to put down - it's like a gruesome car wreck that you can't help but rubberneck at as you drive by.

As a classmate (and non-acquaintance) of Jaime Marquart at Harvard Law School, I found this book impossible to put down. It is essentially an unblinking confession of how Marquart at Harvard, and Robert Byrnes at Stanford, achieved slightly-above-average grades in law school while not attending class, not studying until a day or two before their exams, and spending most of their time (apparently) gambling, drinking, taking drugs, and/or bouncing from woman to woman. The disturbing but important lessons from this are (1) that it's not worth making an effort to pull ahead of the pack grade-wise at Harvard or Stanford law school; (2) that, if you go to Harvard or Stanford to learn law, rather than to prove something, you shouldn't be worried about being with the pack anyway; and (3) in all areas of life, you can't grind your way to stardom (assuming stardom is what you want). For law students who do *not* attend Harvard or Stanford (or, I guess, Yale), this book should be approached with extreme caution. Grades *are* important, and hard work *can* make a big difference, in your likelihood of success if you're getting a degree from any but the top handful of schools. For more on this, see *Letters from Law School,* by Lawrence Dieker. (One other point: the URL given in *Brush with the Law* for seeing copies of Byrnes's and Marquart's exams, outlines, etc., appears to be dead.)

I'm writing this having just finished my first semester at Harvard Law. This book is an all-too-accurate description of law school life. Contrary to other reviews here, I can vouch for the fact that class attendance isn't necessary and that you can learn a semester's worth of material from other people's notes in 5 days (and still pull A's). Also, nobody cheated on any exams in the book; law school exams are impossible to cheat on as they're open-book (this includes any printed material other than your classmates' exams).

The people here aren't as bad as they'd have you believe; I have a lot of great friends that I've made this year, but you do have to seek them out from the dull masses.

The book is fun, funny, well-written and should be required for anyone thinking about attending a prestigious law school.

A daringly austere office building towers above the teeming streets of Manhattan. Shortly after it opens, a woman dies from a glass pane hurtling down from the upper stories, and an office executive is killed when his floor's windows blow out, leaving him hanging from a precarious ledge until his heart fails. An engineer is hired to discern the building's flaws, as lawsuits mount against the nefarious owner. Suddenly, the engineer comes to a ghastly conclusion.....! A well written, taut drama which blends non-fiction events with an array of colorful fictional characters, and tension-filled plot elements. A real page-turner!

I first read this book in it's condensed format, but enjoyed it so much, I sought out the full, unedited version at my local library. Skyscraper is so well written, so vivid, that I can see it being made into an exellent movie with a huge special effects budget. The lead villian in this book was so well done, a person could'nt help but REALLY hate him. All the characters were very believable, and at various points in the story, you actually get inside thier heads, and see what they are thinking, which makes them seem so much more real. As the tension mounts, you can almost taste it, and the climax is truly an awesome thing. I found the book a very difficult thing to put down, and enjoyed every last page. As I said before, This book has all the ingredients needed to make one incredible motion picture.

Being an avid pool player, I often look for books on the subject to take up the time when I can't play. Most of the stories in this book were well written and were very enjoyable. Granted, there were some stories that were not as good, but in any book of short stories, that is bound to be the case. Overall, the book was humorous, and I enjoyed reading it.

You've got to love a book with comics in it. The actual text was pretty good too. The book covers several psychological experiments, which were interesting. Works well for general reading as well as a text book if you are interested in psychology.

This is as fun as any number of similar books, perhaps even more so, but there are some er... surprising features:
- a fair number of the "best things anyone's ever said" were apparently said by Robert Byrne himself. Hmm...
- Where Byrne doesn't like the quote he just changes it, Oscar Wilde in particular gets mangled
- I can't prove it, but I'm sure some of these quotes are just made up: one from Andrew Mellon in particular rings false
- Sometimes he gives the source of the quote, sometimes he can't be bothered
- Michael Douglas is "Michael Douglas, actor and producer", all the other yahoos you've never heard of remain just a bunch of names

Anyway - there are 2 types of readers out there: those that find Byrne's roguishness charming, and those that don't. I'm sort of in the former group, as is Byrne himself.

Maybe 2,548 quotes but not that many different quotes. The book is a combination of his previous four books. They are placed one after the other and bound together as one book. The problem is that the books have not been culled of repeats. So, many quotes show up in all four books and therefore show up four times in this book.
I will have to say that it contains lots of quotes that I have not seen anywhere else and it is an enjoyable read. Each of the four books is organized into logical sections and related quotes in each section.
When you have ten minutes of time to kill it is easy to pick up and read a few passages and then put it down. It is an interesting read and is well worth the price even with the repeats.

Usually, I only review music, but I just have to put in my two cents on this book.

Perhaps a better title for this extremely entertaining quote book is "The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said When They Were In A Really Cynical Mood." By limiting himself to the acerbic, Robert Byrne has created a most unusual quote book. Unlike most qoute books, this is not a reference book, but rather a book to be read for pleasure.

All in all, superb bathroom reading.

This book contains very little information that will be of use to an 8 or 9-ball player and close to half of the book is spent discussing specific 3-Cushion shots. I bought this book for the defense section hoping to learn some more about that but again it related to 3-Cushion rather than anything for 8 or 9-ball. Since I don't know the first thing about 3-Cushion billiards, I can't say whether or not the information about that is good or not.

If you've already read Byrne's standard book, don't waste your money on this book, unless you're really in to 3cushion billiards. There is very little new info in this book. Borrow it from a friend, or check it out in the library if you can. Some stuff is useful, but you'll be disappointed if you've already read Byrne's.

...I don't claim any good talent in pool, but i do enjoy reading up on all the strategies and thought processes, and attempting to apply them when I play. Byrne's Advanced Technique isn't so much for advanced players only, but covers some specific topics that aer very interesting as well, such as the half-ball hit, the masse shot, the physics of the heavy tavern cueball, and so on. The section on Three-Cushion billiards is somewhat redundant, though, if you have his Standard. but it has some other topics, including more shots from master play, to keep one engrossed. He also writes some stories on several of the games greats, including three-cushion legends like Ceulemans and Blohmdal. Overall, a very good buy if you want to know as much about the game as you can.