this book reminds me of the good old days of baseball where nothing mattered but baseball, and you had stars like Mantle, Maris, DiMaggio, Aaron, Killebrew, Kaline, Drysdale, Koufax, Berra, and Whitey Ford to name a few.
the book, The Mick, talks about the entire baseball life of Mickey Charles Mantle, to hero and baseball legend.

the book begins with how Mickey's dad brought him up around baseball and how his father taught him to become a switch hitter. Mickey talks about girls, booze, and other fun stuff he did while playing ball for Joplin and the Yankees.

when you read this book, you almost feel like you're there with Mickey when this stuff is happening. you're there when he hits a 536 foot homer, or when he busted his knee in the World Series. you know how he feels when he says he hated to play against Dodger great, Sandy Koufax, and you know what his emotions were like once he retired from the game that he says was the only thing he knew how to do.

you learn about Casey Stengel and how he really cared for and pushed for Mickey to be a great player.

great book on the baseball life of Mickey Mantle. i recommened this book highly to anyone who likes baseball or to anyone who wants to read about the baseball life of The Mick.

At first, I just got this book because I had to do a book report, and since I like baseball, I thought that this book would be interesting. Although I neither liked the Yankees or really knew much about Mantle, this book had a good amount of information about his life before and with the Yankees, and turned out to be pretty good. Everything was from his point of view, of course, but that didn't make the book any less interesting. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about baseball or just Mantle and the Yankees in particular.

The Mick was a very good book. It showed a great insight of the life of Mickey Mantle, one of the best baseball players ever to live. He told about his views on life and baseball.

Naked Prey is the latest of John Sandford's Lucas Davenport series. Davenport has a new job for the governor that sends him off to a remote area of Minnesota to investigate a suspected lynching of a black man and white woman. One unfortunate result of the setting is that few of the regular series characters are in this book, and with one exception, those that appear do so briefly.

Sandford breaks with the formula that has so often served him well in the past -- Davenport versus a killer (who may or may not be identified to the reader) with each making move and counter-move against one another. Here, Davenport actually solves the initial crime early in the book. However, the samll town near the crime scene has a lot of secrets that continue to propel the plot. At times, the characters are driven by mistakes and misunderstandings as to what is actually happening -- which is close to the way things happen in real life. Sandford also has a good feel for Midwestern characters and the way they talk. The dialog is sharp throughout the book.

If you like the Prey series, you will want to read this book. I don't rank it at the top of the series because of some plot holes that occur early in the book. Without giving the plot away, the first killing occurs because the killer has learned the names of his victims from someone else who he has killed before the book has begun. How he found this person, who should have been otherwise unknown to him, is not clear. Also,this person gives him only some but not all of the names of the people he would be looking for -- again, no explanation. However, Sandford keeps the plot moving quickly enough that this problem is quickly forgotten. Too bad that it is a year before another Prey novel comes out.

with another entry in his fine "Prey" series, a group of books centered on Lucas Davenport, "the richest cop in Minnesota" (rich because he also designs video games).

Sandford set the stage for change at the conclusion of his last book, letting the reader percolate on what would be the differences in Lucas when he becomes an active father, and when he leaves the police department for a quasi-bureaucratic governmental position in a new state department headed by his old boss, Rose Marie Roux. Wisely, although Sandford went forward with these changes, the impact was streamlined by having 90% of the book's action happen in rural northern Minnesota, in the fictional small town of Broderick. Family man Lucas still has his best sidekick, Del, gainfully employed with him -- and married or not, he still can spot and appreciate a great looking woman. Some things never change!

The first two murders may be motivated by racial hatred - one victim is black, and his significant other is white...they are found brutally slain and hanging from a barren tree in the frosty Minnesota winter. There's so much odd and unusual "stuff" going on in Broderick, it's difficult for Lucas & Del to pin down the any information about the murders, and the killings continue.

Sandford manages to deftly interweave his social viewpoints -- his lack of respect for the media, his vague unsettlement with the way that federal, state and local authorities sometimes impede each other to solve a case that has generated media attention, and most importantly, his support of a little known grass roots campaign that is quietly smuggling prescription drugs from Canada to US patients who need and can't afford them.
Unlike many other writers of this genre, Sandford can keep both his tale of the crime and his social commentary moving in the same direction -- one does not eclipse or slow down the other.

The book is also notable in that it provides a lot of insight into tribal casinos...a staple of the Minnesota scenery in the last decade. Tribal casinos have changed rural Minnesota in many ways, and Sandford captures this contrast of big city activity with the rural tundra.

The prize of the novel, as many readers have commented, is new character Letty West, who will doubtless appear in future instalments. A precocious 12-year old, Letty's like many rural kids that come from dysfunctional single parent families....in the cities, kids from these homes tend to run with gangs...in the country, they tend to be loners, with old souls. Letty is such a character, and she's the best addition to the series in a long time.

This may not be the finest of Sandford's series, but its darn close! Don't wait for the paperback!

Lucas Davenport is back in John Sandford's continuing series, and fans of the detective won't be disappointed. Davenport now works for a Minnesota state agency, the BCA, under Rose, his old superior from the Minneapolis police department. A murder scene that resembles a lynching is enough to bring in Davenport and his partner Del to invesigate and clean up before a major political crisis can begin. The murder scene is discovered by a very unusual 12 year old girl, Letty West, who talks and acts many years her senior. Davenport enlists Letty's help in his investigation, which revolves around the hanging murders, multiple kidnappings, a car theft ring, and drug smuggling. The individual crimes are linked through several threads that are not apparent at first to Davenport or the several law enforcement groups he is working with on the case.

Davenport's domestic scenes with his wife Weather are kept to a minimum in this yarn, with almost all of the action focused on the crimes. Letty West takes center stage, and she proves more than a match for Davenport. She traps muskrats, totes a rifle, drives pickups, swears a lot, and helps pick up the pace of the book whenever she appears (which is often). There is strong rapport between Davenport and Letty, and the foundations are set for the making of a good team in future editions of the series.

Broad coverage, including hot new topics: SVM, boosting and bagging, modern evaluation methods (ROC and lift curves). Well grounded in practical data mining applications, talks about DM issues outside model building, which are rarely discussed: feature engineering, data cleaning, etc. Clear and well written: illustrative examples help the presentation a lot. Describes in detail decision trees and rule learners, instance-based learning, and numerical prediction. Accompanied by the WEKA system, implementing in Java many of the methods discussed in the book, and available for download for free. An excellent hands-on textbook for an applied Machine Learening/DM class, or recommended reading for ayone who wants to understand DM. Good next step for those that have whetted their appetite with Berry and Linof's book.

Witten and Frank have generated a book that is readable without eliminating all technical (yes, even mathematical!) descriptions of the key data mining algorithms. And they are up-to-date, including support vector machines and boosting. There are sufficient examples of the techniques to provide readers with a good feel for what each technique can accomplish. For example, how many books can provide a readable explanation of support vector machines?

There are some quibbles, such as not including any discussion of neural networks (noted in Ch. 1 with another reference)--I believe it deserves some attention because of its widespread use. Additionally, future editions should include a least a brief summary of data preprocessing, input selection, feature creation, etc. But these are quibbles.

The Java portion of the book is not of as much interest to me, but for those wishing to implement the algorithms, it provides a nice blueprint (from the code I looked at).

For what they have undertaken, they have performed admirably, and I would highly recommend this book.

Over the last 3 years our company has bought 15+ copies of this book and have given it to our new employees to help them gain a practical perspective when writing machine learning applications. The book is filled with practical insights and gems learnt from real data analysis experience. We have read almost all other data mining and machine learning books and have standardized on this book. Although the book is great, the software is amazing! Weka (the name of the software that is described in the book and is available for free) contains the largest collection of machine learning algorithms available in a coherent package. The software is written in Java and we have used it under a variety of platforms. Weka is incredible, and when combined with the well written explanations I have to give this book top marks. I'm looking forward to the next edition.

Can the secret of success be boiled down to giving and getting attention? Think Hollywood - or look at the advertising industry or the "stars" of the business world - the most successful are the ones that get all the attention. The flip side of this attention coin as presented in "The Attention Economy" is the success that comes from managing your own attention effectively - something very few people recognize, let alone know how to control. The book takes on the problems that hinder productivity (both personal and business) by viewing them through a new lens: "Understanding and managing attention," the authors claim, "is now the single most important determinant of business success." A heady claim, but one that Davenport and Beck support with compelling insights - starting with an explanation of how our minds instinctively create their own attention hierarchies (yes, sex is near the top, but so is catastrophe, self-esteem, and jockeying for power among colleagues.), and then focusing the "attention lens" on topics like leadership, strategy, and organizational structure. Despite its serious business bent (both Davenport and Beck are seasoned professionals, and, the book is published by Harvard Business School Press, after all) the book has a hip, refreshing tone and manages to straddle the line between enlightening the business professional and entertaining the human within. That's what I liked about the book the most - instead of approaching professionals as slightly sentient processors of information, the authors are concerned with the limited natural resource that powers individuals and organizations - their attention - and help us maximize its potential.

I've worked nearly 20 years strategy consulting and management education and in that time I've read countless business books. Most present ideas and trends that are here today, gone tomorrow. This has been the case even more in the past five years with all the e-commerce focused books. Sadly, the books that actually present core ideas that will last for decades are usually written in a boring or academic style.

"The Attention Economy" is a page-turner, but more importantly, it presents a fundamental (and until now, overlooked) business topic--attention management--in a smart way. While CEO's might not be worrying whether they'll be 'disintermediated' in twenty years, they sure will be worrying about how to manage their attention.

My hope is that this book won't start a trend, but rather a paradigm shift in how manager's perceive and attend to the core tasks--leadership, strategy formulation, information management, planning--of their professional lives.

Everyone knows how important attention is, but few business thinkers have had the courage or follow-through and take on the topic in a management-focused way before. I expected the book to focus more on advertising and Hollywood. Thankfully it didn't. The book's freshness and originality lies in the fact that it shows the relationship between attention and business to be far more extensive than just found in those "attention industries." On that note, the chapters on leadership and organizational structure were particularly fresh.

Davenport has a knack for forecasting where business is going; he was a pioneer in the Reengineering and Knowledge Management trends. In predicting and setting the direction of both of these, he had a keen sense for the "human side" of things. This is the case here as well: in AE he starts with that uniquely human activity-attention-and shows how it can be managed for success in the business world.

This is my third time into Sandford prey series and unfortunately they seem to be getting worse. I loved Mind Prey and was hoping that the rest of the Prey series were written in the same way, but Secret Prey was not.

This crime thriller sees the reader again with Lucas Davenport trying to solve a murder of an extremely wealthy businessman - there are a number of possible suspects and one by one they get eliminated during the course of the book. Halfway through the book the reader finds out who the killer is, but it still takes Lucas a while to get there.

I enjoyed this book, but it certainly didn't 'wow' me like Mind Prey as I felt that the last half of the book really didn't tell us anything new, it just made us follow Lucas' trail to the killer. I read this book in a few hours & I recommend it if you are looking for time to kill.

I don't think that this is one of Sandford's best, but it is still entertaining.

I've enjoyed all of John Sandford's Lucas Davenport novels. While Silent Prey is true to form, it falls well short of Sandford's best effort. Much of this novel seems forced. Davenport's battle with depression is simply distracting. His not unexpected relationship with a female detective, while entertaining at times, seems to be thrown in for the laugh track. Davenport's fellow detectives, fully fleshed out in the previous "Prey" novels, are not given much to do here ... and that's too bad. Part of the fun in the Davenport stories comes from the other detectives in the squad.

The villain in this story is the highlight of the book. Evil comes in many forms and none so subtle as this one. Sandford's killers are never simple and this one is as complex as any he has created. Frankly, the villain makes the story.

I recommend this book to any Sandford fan. If you have never read one of the "Prey" novels, you may still want to read this one. However, I would suggest picking up "Winter Prey" first.

In the ninth installment of the Prey series, Lucas Davenport has to sort out a hornet's nest of suspects with motive to determine who killed the board chairman of a local bank.

Sandford does a great job of setting up the reader for the surprise villain. This is a little different than other 'Prey' books, because the bad guys are usually more apparent.

Also in this new 'Prey' book, Lucas' personal life takes a hit in the form of an awkward estrangement from his fiancé. Because I have enjoyed watching Lucas Davenport mature from a womanizing hound to an in-love romantic, this development was hard to take, but I am sure Sandford knows best. He has so far, anyway.

If you have read other books in the 'Prey' series, keep reading. If not, well what are you waiting for? Read them now.

I have read every single entry in Sandford's Prey series and this one wasn't quite up to par. His first few books were filled with menace and I thought his villains were outstanding. During that time he developed Davenport as the excellent character that he is now. However, this latest book bothered me. I liked Rinker, an unusual hit'man', but found Carmel totally over the top. Her actions, given her successful background as a top, hard-nosed defense attorney were inexplicable and made no sense. It was as though someone had done a brain transplant on her at the beginning of the book. I don't usually write reviews on books that I think are only average, but when it represents what I regard as a decline, I think it is noteworthy.

Hmmm. What a mix made in [location]! The unholy duo of Carmen and Clara! This is a big chewy book with enough chills to keep you up late into the night trying to finish it.

A Minnesota socialite is murdered in a parking garage, by what seems to be a professional killer. But why? As the story unfolds, and more corpses turn up, we follow these two women on their twisted mission.

I found myself feeling some empathy for Clara Rinker, while Carmen left me cold. It's a testament to Sanfords writing, that he can arouse such strong feelings about his characters. The chief protagonist: Lucas Davenport himself, is a conflicted man. Feared by many, but respected by most of his colleagues, he is a natural born cop with a taste for killing.

As he tracks Carmen and Clara through the many twists and turns of the case, we can sense the developing affinity he has with Clara Rinker.

Both females are very deftly drawn and their characters are well developed. This was a thoroughly enjoyable book, and I'm looking forard to Lucas's next encounter with the emotionally compelling Clara.

I've been an avid fan of John Sandford's books for a decade now and was sorry to see that Lucas Davenport seemed to have lost his edge. I was wary when I picked up the book: I didn't want to get disappointed but Sandford surprised the hell out of me.
His latest in the Prey series is his best yet. The story has frightening insights: Sandford was able to draw the profile of a memorable serial killer perfectly. His portrayal ranks amongst the very best ones I've ever read. But not only the story is superb. Something happened to Sandford. His prose whas never been extremely vivid or pewrful but in Certain Prey he not only exceeded himself but most of the genre. His style breathes it's so fresh. Not one bad sentence in his dialogues. His conversations with his bride-to-be Weather, his interactions with his peers are so vividly written that I felt for the first time: Lucas Davenport is a living, almost larger than life cop, not just an interesting character who seeks the advice of a nun, who drives a Porsche and who designs softwares.
If you haven't read Sandford and want to know him, this is the best book to start with.

Be prepared to rarely get up from your seat once you start Chosen Prey. Sandford's characters are very credible, three dimensional and well-developed, and Lucas Davenport continues to be one of the more interesting "good guys" in crime fiction. The plot is very suspenseful and riveting. In typical Sandord style, there is no surprise as to who the killer is, yet the need for non-stop reading of his books is to see how the killer is caught. If you've read some of the other books in the "Prey" series, you'll know that how the criminal is brought to justice is not always in the way you'd suspect. Chosen Prey is a book I think you'll enjoy very much. As I said, though, be prepared to delay other things you need to do because you won't want to put this book down. It's well worth you're time and money.

Colleagues respect St. Patrick University associate professor art historian James Qatar for his collective works. This includes one book and several scholarly articles published in highly regarded journals and magazines. Unbeknownst to his peers is that Professor Qater has a second life in which he hunts blondes, has sex with them, and kills them.

When an early victim is found, the police link her to photographs that are part of Qater's hobby of creating pornographic works with women he knows but who don't really know him. Being a political appointee, Minneapolis Deputy Chief of Police Lucas Davenport expects to lose his job within six months when the mayor retires. Lucas intends to use his time wisely to catch the killer.

John Sandford is one of the top authors of police procedurals due to his three dimensional characters that consistently turn the "Prey" books into great reads. The hero is a flawed individual with a complex and realistic personal life that places demands on him even as he risks everything because he believes in the value of justice for all. CHOSEN PREY is the best of a great series. The audience knows the identity of the killer early on, but watch in fascination as Lucas tries to do likewise while balancing his complex personal life.

Harriet Klausner

All of us Sandford fans deeply look forward each year for early May to come around because that mostly means the release of a new Prey novel! In "Chosen Prey," Minneapolis Detective, Lucas Davenport, along with Marcy Sherrill, Sloan, Del, and Weather (Lucas fiance), return in one of John Sandford's most interesting and exciting Prey novels that he has written. The plot: James Qatar is a prestegious history professor at St. Patrick University in Minneapolis. He has a very secretive life on the side. He enjoys playing kinky sex games with women he barely knows and ends up killing them for pleasure. He also enjoys taking pictures of women and distorting their figures to look like they are participating in grotesque sexual activities. His method of murder: a rope. James Qatar is a very sick individual that has killed over eight women in three states. None of the cops have been able to link him to the murder. When a murdered women turns up in the barren woods, close to home to Lucas Davenport, he vows to find this killer who killed this beautiful woman. After investigating for a while, and with the assistance of and out of state officer, he discovers that three other women have mysteriously disappeared in Wisconsin. All these murders/ disappearances are connected. Can Davenport and the gang get James Qatar before he claims his next victim? The twelfth novel in this amazing series is a definite success!

This is apparently a reprint of one of the really great old catalogs of Victorian Millwork! It has fabulous designs for window ornamentation, verandas, brackets, gable ends, fireplace mantels and most especially doors. Black & White sketches show an impressive variety of ideas.