The kind of cop i would like to pull me over - he liked to give traffic violators a verbal warning instead of a ticket, wish we had traffic cops like that here in Reno. But he built an 8 car garage and filled it up with stuff stolen from yachts. He had a WWII trainer plane, several corvettes, and his own yacht. A mild mannered cop who slept around on his wife, stole and was involved in three murders, but he hated to write tickets! His wife was an LA prosecutor, but she claimed she did not know about her hubbie cops illegal activities. She did not even know about his affair with a young Chinese woman. A great read - I could not put it down.

VERY INTERESTING STORY. CANNOT BELIEVE HIS WIFE DID NOT KNOW OF ALL HIS INVOLVEMENT OF STOLEN GOODS.WHAT A DISGRACE FOR LAPD..HE WAS LUCKY HE TOOK DEAL SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN MUCH HARDER SENTENCE. SO MANY LIVESCUT SHORT..WHERE IS HE NOW? BOOK WELL WRITTEN. EXPOSING THE CORRUPTION THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE IN MANY OTHER PD.LEASURE WAS A DISGRACE TO HIS PROFESSION. WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM AND WIFE THIS MANY YEARS LATER TERM OF 15 YEARS FINISHED..

I have read all of Edward Humes' other books and was delighted when Amazon.com recently added this one. Its a fascinating tale of a mild-mannered traffic cop who moonlights as a hired killer and even steals yachts on the side. Reminds me of the 1980s movie about the LAPD starring Richard Gere, but this story is true. It's a real page-turner.

I loved reading this book because I always wondered what being a police officer was like. The stories in Cop Tales 2000 made me feel as though I was right there on the street with the cops. If you want to read about what real cops do, this is the book! I highly recommend it.

An Outstanding collection of Stories associated with the world of Law Enforcement, crafted by Authors that have lived the experience of the world of COPS. It is a must read. It brings you incidents of the real world that we all exist in. I read them twice. Read Cop Tales 2000, you'll love it. Fascinating.

"Ernest Maltravers" is the first part of a series written around 1834 and 1835 by Edward Lord Lytton Bulwer, The sequel or second part is "Alice or the Mysteries" also available from Amazon. This is a remarkably tender story of a wealthy aristocratic young man Ernest Maltravers, who meets, becomes a guardian for and falls in love with a poor innocent and uneducated young beautiful girl Alice. Her father happens to be a very bad apple from whom she flees, after he tries to rob and murder Maltravers, who first meets Alice when he stops at their cottage when he is lost. Alice warns Ernest of his peril and he escapes. Her father beats her and she runs away and finds Ernest and lives with him. Feeling indebted to ALice for saving his life, he cares for her and hires a tutor for her to educate her. He then falls in love with her. She does not know his real name, since he is going by an alias since they are living together, Ernest has to leave for a while, when he reads in a newspaper that his father is dying. During the time Ernest is gone Alice's father and a crony rob houses and rob Ernest's house and kidnap Alice. Ernest returns and is broken hearted to find her gone without a trace. He does not know also that she is now carrying his child. The books then tell of the next 18 years from then as they go through life and try to find each other again. Neither one ever finds a love that they shared with anyone else. I wont tell you if they find each other again. Buy the books and read and enjoy Bulwer's enchanting prose and his outstanding story. This would make a great movie!

I can learn the basic of the psychology from this book since this is the textbook of my college!

We used this textbook for my AP Psychology class, and it served its purpose well. The book does an excellent job at covering everything and giving an introduction to the field. Plenty of good examples, as well as diagrams and such to help explain, are given. My only complaint is that the text is often incredibly dry, making reading difficult; but if you can look past that, it provides a very good "introduction to psychology", as the title says it will.

Just as the authors said, 'The Tradition Continues', this work explains every aspects and perspective of Psychology to me in depth. I think this is a 'must-have' for all beginning Psychology students.

This beautifully illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam's classic poem is a gem. The illustrations complement the lyrical imagery of the poem. Two editions of Fitzgerald's translation are included, with the second including additional quatrains, and representing a mature and slightly darker reading of the poem. The introduction contains a lot of interesting information, but don't be misled. Far from being a work of skepticism, this beautiful poem reflects deep-thinking belief.

One should be wary when purchasing or reading a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The various translations are VERY different. They are based on different original manuscripts, which do not contain exactly the same material. The FitzGerald translation is much more of an interpretation of Khayyam than a translation, although it is a wonderful piece of work in and of itself, it is victorian baroque romanticism not Sufism. From my own personal experience (I've read much of three of the translations, the ones by FitzGerald in the 1850s, by a professor from Cambridge made in the mid 1900s, and by Robert Graves in the 1960s) I would suggest that you go with the most modern translation (which is no longer the translation by Graves). The Graves translation definately is a work of both deep philosophical ideas and of beautiful poetry.

Khayyam's poetry is a beacon of honesty and courage in a writing form rife with the romantic,silly and childish.Poetry has almost exclusively been the domain of the mystifiers and the pretentious.Khayyam's message is looked down upon by the people who don't have the courage to be pessimists and instead hide behind their daddy in the sky or in some metaphysical womb.Khayyam, like Lucretius,looked honestly around him and drew the conclusions we all know deep down to be true but are usually to weak to admit.Khayyam knew life was an absurdity and the greatest absurdity was not to enjoy yourself and do and think as you please.After all, this is the REAL religion that the world has always adhered to,whatever its pretenses to the contrary.After reading Khayyam almost all other poets seem insipid by comparison.Every poem is exquisite and has the ring of truth.Never mind if Fitzgerald's translation is not faithful to the original Persian;the miraculous,yet simple truth of Khayyam comes through just the same.If you buy one book of poetry in your life make this book the one.

This anthology is a great collection of many of my favorite poems. I have enjoyed reading these to my children at night before bedtime. There are some wonderful inspirational poems. I also like another anthology, "Poetry for a Lifetime", which has a similar selection but has more illustrations and has added comments from the editor. Both are fine additions to any home library.

A wonderful book that contains everything for the entire family.
There are love poems and ballads for the young and old alike; and there are some lovely ones which my niece and nephew are always asking me to read aloud for them like THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT and THE SPIDER TO THE FLY. There is a wide range of poets like William Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas John Keats and many many more. It's amazing how they carry me right back to my schooldays and set off a spell of nostalgia; and I like that. With lots of humour Inspirational verse and Ancient Ballads, I would call this a proper book of poems because it has something in it for all of us. Read it at small family gatherings, or see your kids off to sleep with some of the lovely children poems. A good buy.

Nutface
January 21st, 2002

This book has what Peterson's "Mexican Birds" lacks: good colour pictures of (nearly) all birds of Mexico and adjacent areas and their Spanish names. However, the presentation of the pictures is a mishmash. The descriptions of the birds are not detailed but very short. It is a pity that there is no information about the behaviour of the birds, often very important for identification.

We used this book on a recent trip to Belize. It is THE book in use by local Belizian birding enthusiasts, and we only saw it for sale at one shop during our 12 day stay, so it might be hard to get once you're there. Birds of same species on different color plates slow you down, but the pictures are very good. Highly recommend taking this book with you if you plan to do any serious birdwatching.

This field guide will enable you to see paintings of all of the birds that occur in the area. It also discusses (briefly) each bird. The paintings are excellent and the copy is quick and to the point. To pick at nits, though, the arrangement of the paintings is confusing. Not all birds in a specific family are illustrated on the same plate, and some are found pages away from the rest of their family. The logic seems to be that if the bird is found regularly in northern North America (the elegant trogon, for example) its picture does not need to run with the rest of its relatives. Close study of the guide can overcome this problem, however, making it an easy, economical way to pack the information of other guides into the field.

...The part that I found interesting that I didn't get in the other books was the Story of E.O.Lawerence. In most of the other books I have read on the subject you just hear about Lawerence as the great man and hear about his Calutrons at Oak Ridge. This book told more of his story and the type of person he was.

Although that was interesting to me over all I found this book lacking in a lot of areas. One was the fact that he didn't talk more about the tests at Livermore and Los Alamos. It seemed to be several stories that where not tied together well because it would jump from espionage to bomb building to jealousy between the three.

I believe the book talked about the problems but not really the reasons. If Lawrence and Oppenheimer were such good friends at first why did Lawrence band his brother Frank from Berkley because he told a lie it just didn't seem to make sense and I thought there should have been more of an explanation.

The book played Teller off in a more kinder light than I have seen in other books. It also seem to show that Oppenheimer was not an agent but someone who thought that nuclear energy had to be controlled and band because he thought the general public couldn't handle it. This showed especially when it talks about him crumpling the model of Rickover's sub.

Another thing with this book is that you should keep a dictionary with you while reading this book unless you know the meaning of words like antithetical, proselytize and anathema. I don't mind this because I like to increase my vocabulary I just thought you should know.

The book, to use one of the author's favorite words is an imbroglio, a confused mass.

I got out of it what I wanted that some of the other books on the subject did not have. If you want to know about Lawerence this one tells more than other books. It was interesting to find out that all the people who died from cancer from the Rad lab because they didn't know about raditation early on.

Gregg Herken's BROTHERHOOD OF THE BOMB is subtitled: "The
Tangled Lives And Loyalties Of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest
Lawrence, And Edward Teller". This statement implies that
this book is something of a three-way biography of three
important nuclear scientists, but it actually has a broader
focus, discussing not merely the lives of these three men but
traces through the story of the US nuclear weapons program in
World War II; the American Communist Party; the Red spy
network in the US; McCarthyism and the Red witch hunts of the
Cold War; and the rise of the nuclear arms race.

In a sense, this relatively broad focus makes this book, if
not exactly frustrating because it's an okay read, at
least a little unsatisfying, since it gives enough of these
stories to be intriguing but not enough to give a clear
picture -- while distracting enough from the story of Lawrence,
Oppenheimer, and Teller so that they never seem to really
come alive.

This is a pity, since at least Oppenheimer and Teller are
fascinating individuals -- Oppenheimer was brilliant and
arrogant, impatient with lesser intellects, but still
much admired; and Teller is brilliant as well, with the odd
unintentional humor of the single-minded. (In an interview
a few years ago he told the reporter up front: "If you
mention Strangelove ONE TIME, I will THROW YOU OUT!")

In the end I get the feeling like I would have been happier
with something with much more scope, detail, and length;
or, with the scope it has, less detail and length. The
story of Oppenheimer's political persecution is laid out
blow-by-blow, but for myself I think a more concise
description would have let me see the forest for the trees
much better.

I must admit that the description of AEC Chairman Lewis
Strauss, who orchestrated the charge on Oppenheimer, was
vivid enough to be creepy, since Strauss was the sort of
fellow whose faith in his own convictions so strong that
he could burn any number of witches at the stake without
a second thought. It's good to be reminded that there are
people like that out there!

OK, I don't want to go too far. This isn't a bad book.
It's well-researched and provides worthwhile information.
There are fascinating bits in it, for example how
Oppenheimer was not merely given a clean bill of health
by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, but even
praised as something of a national hero by the prominent
HUAC member, Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California.
(There always was a "Good Dick Nixon" and a "Bad Dick
Nixon".)

It just left me wanting much more -- which, I suppose, is
a good thing as well.

This book was very fascinating and fun to read. The book is very informative and interesting about the development of "the Bomb", and beyond. The book goes into vast detail about Ernest Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller; especially Ernest Lawrence. The book starts in about 1939 with Ernest's invention of the cyclotron, and ends in the early 1960's with the Limited Test-Ban treaty. Besides talking about the relationships between the three physicists, which is very interesting, the book also talks about a lot of the small people involved in the production of the first fission weapon. What I think is cool, is the information given on Robert Oppenheimer from the FBI. The book also sends a lot of time discussing Edward Teller's interest and development of the Hydrogen Bomb. Although it does give some information about the nuclear testing we have done, it would be better if the Author discussed this more. Overall, I enjoyed this book and definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in the history and development of nuclear weapons.

This book is full of many statements concerning acts of the law. If one wishes to read about such things, this is the book for you. If you are not interested in things such as courts, judges and gavels I suggest that you buy another book, not this one.The author uses too many complex words and ends up losing the reader in a sea of nonsense arguements. In the future, I suggest the author include more short stories and funny "law" anecdotes in order to make the book a bit more fun to read.

If you revere books and are an avowed bibliophile, then Henry Huntington is someone to admire and respect. His book collection is one of the premiere collections in the world, especially his concentration of incunabula. Huntington's mammoth collection is stored in the incomparable Huntington Gardens in San Marino, California - one of the most lovely places on earth. The permanent exhibitions include a first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and numerous Shakespearian folios. Huntington's massive collection of autographs is also on display.

The story of how Huntington amassed these priceless treasures is fascinating: the amount of zeal and money he poured into this endeavor makes for a world class story. Unfortunately, this book doesn't focus enough on this aspect of his life. The narrative becomes slow, plodding and ultimately tedious. One wishes that Thorpe would have concentrated more completely on Huntington's mania for book collecting, a passion to be envied for those of us not blessed with being multi-millionaires. Instead he veers off into areas not particularly interesting, though his history of early 20th century California is exceptional.

Huntington's story is not one full of scintillating orgies, nor was he a riveting personal character, like Hearst. But this book paints a rather dour, boring picture of one of the greatest American collectors.