This was a very good biography of Frank Costello. In addition you also recieved a good history of organized crime.This book
tells of Costello's leadership role in the Mafia. You are taken through bootlegging.the gambling empires that were built by
organized crime as well as the House un-American activities
hearings. The author also gives you good insight into the attempted murder of Costello by rival forces.You also get a good insight into Bugsy Seigel,Meyer Lansky, and other prominent

figures in organized crime. This isn actually a very good book.
Read it.

There has been much attention focused on this book in the last year or so. First Harold Ramis, noted "Prime Minster of the Underworld" as inspiration for his mob picture, "Analyze This". Then I read where former CBS President Tom Leahy along with Norman Twain obtained an option to do the book as a movie. It made me go out and get a copy. I was not disapointed! "Prime Minister" is the sort of book that isn't written much anymore. It is done with elan' and the subject, Frank Costello, the "capo di capo" is treated with great dignity. It is a dignity that Costello strove for in life, even as he headed an organized crime family. Costello's attorney wrote this book with the outstanding author Joseph DiMona. Together they weave an adventurous tale of an immigrant who through the din of will, grit and native intellect rose to the top of the "Cosa Nostra". Costello preferred negotiations to violence and acted as the Mob's peacemaker. "Prime Minister of the Underworld" presents a man of fundamental decency, ambivalent about life as a mobster, yet one of the most successful gangsters. It is this riddle, this internal contradiction that makes Costello compelling and drives this story. Wolf and DiMona display great restraint, they let the action speak for itself and there is not a moment gratutitous violence or moralizing. So complex is Costello's character that it needs no adornment and will bear no easy analyzation. What emerges is a clean portrait of an everyman as killer. George Wolf and Joe DiMona fashioned one of the great mob books of all time. A book as subtle and powerful as its' topic.

I enjoyed the first section on his childhood which was all new to me. But what I really enjoyed was the second section on the bootlegging days. It went into more detail than I could have asked for on how he set it up and even gave some detail on some of the gun fights men like Bugsy Seigel got into. I would have liked the book better if this section would have been a lot bigger. The rest of the book was good too and supplied an interesting theory on Lucky Luciano's infamous ride but didn't go into any real detail on how he ran and operated the crime family it focused more on his personal businessess. All in all interesting (especially the bootlegging section) and a fairly good story. I recommend at least giving it a try.

Has 2 critical and unique features for each site -- GPS address (in addition to street address) and the accessibility for public viewing. Before this book, I've wasting much travel time trying to find sites and then finding them completely hidden from view.

As a practicing architect and architectural historian living in California, I have found this book to be an essential part to my research for projects designed by FLW. The photography is rich and alive. I have visited most of the buildings included in this book, the photography could not be more powerful. What else can be expected from such a talented author as Mr. Heinz? Another fine book by Mr. Heinz and cannot wait to see his upcoming book on Green and Green's Blacker House.

The reader from California must have the wrong book. There is no photo of a decorative detail of the Hollyhock House. I checked on the cities and found that some are noted differently than other texts but are accurate. One example is the Sturges House (page 49) listed in Los Angeles, most others list it in Brentwood. After the OJ trial, everyone now knows Brentwood is actually a neighborhood of Los Angeles. The photo of the Millard House (page 61) is printed backwards but the house is symmetrical and is still recognizable.

The book reveals a great deal of new, previously unpublished material that adds a great deal to our understanding of Wright's work such as the sections on San Francisco and Los Angeles that give locations and information of the clients or sites for buildings that are demolished to those only proposed. It helps to make the work more real and exciting.

The California reader must keep in mind that the purpose of this book is to assist all the Pilgrims making their way to every one of Wright's work. For that it is one of the greatest books available as Wright's work needs to be seen in person to be appreciated.

I am sure we are all eagerly awaiting the last of the series, The East!

The most important book that's been vomited into our collective consiousness, perhaps ever! Compare him to Burroughs,compare him to Bukowski,compare him to Pynchon,but you're still miles away from the ballpark Mangels seems to be playing in.Try reading it out loud to a friend...or maybe someone you don't particularly like,even. This is every speed rap, caffeine-charged nightmare rant that can heard in any coffee house,in any American city,written in a cohesive, beautifully venomous form.If you respect your intellect... read this...then give it to someone you know who could use a good,swift kick.Go George! What's next,man? Is there anything left!

a howling, screaming rant that capytures everything over-the-top about our over-informed, under-educated, stir-fired world...a giant, rolling ball of blurred images and surreal hyper-realities that will crush anything in its way, including any belief systems or footholds you may have thought you had...stands proudly between Burroughs, Joyce, Kafka, and Pynchon...except it will make you howl with laughter...a 240-page outside jazz riff...the great american novel about the great american underbelly?

This book is just increadible. This author takes everything cynic in the world and packs it into 230 pages. You WILL laugh out loud reading this book, trust me. If you're a fan of _Eraserhead_ and other such oddness, read this book.

I teach early preschool and my children really enjoy this book. I have a great time reading it to them. The silly words are fun to read and even funnier for them to hear. They sit quietly and ask for it over and over. It's hard to find a book that pleases them all. "Froggy Gets Dressed" meets the challenge.

In my opinion, Jonathan London is a master storyteller. His books are entertaining to adults as well as kids. I am a teacher, and my 2nd graders adore this book- they want to read it over and over again. It's our favorite wintertime story!

I gave this book to my niece. I think my sister and brother-in-law have enjoyed it as much as she has. She just squeals when Froggy gets called in. She wants to read it over and over. A fun time for the whole family.

I've had this book on my desk for more years than I care to admit. I've never seen a better book on cabling. I hope that their new book maintains the high standard that they have set for themselves here. This book is quite simply the best cabling reference there is. If you need to know it, it's in this book.

I started out my telecommunications profession as a cable puller for voice and data networking. I found this book to be simply the best for this subject matter. I used to have two copies of this book, one at my desk and one in my toolbox with me. I often referred to the book when talking projects with IT managers. It helped me and them with cabling. One of my last jobs as a senior field technicians was with a major bank and our company got the bid on the stipulation that we give the IT manager my worn copy of the book.

Those days are long gone but I still have this book. I highly recommend it to you and it is still current in subject! Get this book!

When I was a MIS manager at a Coca-Cola plant in Brazil, I was luck to come accross with this book in an airport bookstore, several years ago. It gave me the strong fundamentals to start really understanding what a LAN cabling system was about. It would be nice to have a second edition, but this is still the top introduction anyone can find in the subject. Even its story telling style helps, the book is so interesting that once you start you don't let go until you're finished. Congratulations to the authors.

This book is truly a flashback to the days when attending a baseball game on the South Side was less about fringe entertainment and all about baseball. It really brought back some great memories. I miss Andy the Clown!

THIS BOOK IS WELL WORTH PURCHASING. IF YOU LOVED OLD COMISKEY THEN YOU WILL LOVE THIS NOSTALGIC TALE OF A GREAT PARK. EXCELLENT MEMEROBILIA MATERIAL. BUY IT YOU WON'T BE DISAPPOINTED. OUTSTANDING FOR WHITE SOX FANS.

this book rules buy it if you loved old comiskey! great pictures

always a pleasure to read. You won't be sorry if you buy this book!

The dialogue is priceless in this novel! I'm going to read it again and again. It takes place mostly in the 60s, where our hero, Ulysses, grows up as a brakeman for the railroad. His father is a movie star who banks off of what Frank Chin calls the white "racist love" of America. What would that be? Well, being Charlie Chan's son, being a "neurotic, exotic" Asian, being a prostitute, dragon lady, or an effeminate, passive individual; all in all, having a westernized expectation of an Asian. Our hero, Ulysses, is the true Chinaman and you should make an effort to read this book.

I liked it more than DONALD DUK (although, I loved that book), because it's a step higher in experiencing how it is to be a Chinaman. Frank Chin has changed my life, but no other book has done it more than this one. Incidentally, Chin happened to be the first Asian in history to get a play produced in America. If you're interested, you should get it here ... Since his play came out it caused a storm of controversy, as this one will too.

For many people, Trollope is a writer to stay away from. They assume he wrote terribly twee novels about vicars and tea cosies (which is half true). But anyone who has read "He Knew Was Right" will know just how progressive and real Trollope is. This incredibly insightful study of a marriage reveals a great deal not only about Victorian society but about the eternal struggles between men and women. It's a mystery to me why this book is not better known.

In his autobiography, Trollope zips past this story. I couldn't put it down, and read the last 40 moving and exhausting pages aloud to my wife. The Pallisers can get a bit wearying at times, though I love them all. But there is nothing tiresome in here; this book roars with its two intersecting plots and the relatively unique idea of making a sympathetic character, one whom you truly care for and about, a complete, irredeemable fool.

Several strong secondary characters, all just a little more complex than they seem, combine with a knock-out plot and vivid main characters, to make this my favorite Trollope novel. The man who will not accept the good around him but prefers to see the bad...? How's that for an eternal theme?

The Penguin Classic edition of He Knew He Was Right has a wonderful introduction. Frank Kermode provides a fascinating explanation of how the constraints of Victorian society limited the ways in which Trollope could write about "sexual jealousy," and how a relatively mild (by today's standards) incident (here, calling a woman by her "Christian" (first) name) could be the basis for suspicion of "infidelity." Kermode also provides an illuminating discussion comparing hero Louis Treveylan's obsession and jealousy with that of Othello. Finally, Kermode relates the novel to others of the period, both those by Trollope and those of his contemporaries.

While the focus of the novel is the main character's mental deterioration resulting from his unreasonable jealousy and increasing isolation, both from society and reality, Trollope also provides a cast of interesting women faced with possible marriage partners. At a time when a woman's only "career" opportunity was to make a successful marriage, the women in He Knew He Was Right each react differently to the male "opportunities" that come their way. Kermode notes that Trollope was not a supporter of the rights of women, yet he manages to describe the unreasonable limitations on, and expectations of, women in a sympathetic light.

The "main story," of Trevelyan and his wife, is actually one of the least compelling of the man-woman pairings in the novel. What I mean is that while their story IS compelling, the others are substantially more so. This is a wonderful book. And, personally I'd like to note that I laughed out loud while reading it. This was on a cross-country airplane flight, and I got some strange looks for laughing at what appeared to be a thick "serious" novel.

Through examples of our use, abuse and mystical ties to groundwater, Mr. Chapelle gently eases the layman into a greater appreciation of this vital resource. He doesn't spew politically correct nonsense---one of his chapters deals with a woman who, despite all evidence to the contrary, is convinced her well is poisoned by a toxic dump. Cautionary tales, groundwater mystery stories, even a little history; this book's got it all. It should whet the wistle of any future hydrology or geology student, while at the same time educating the casual reader.

The Hidden Sea is wonderful, low-tech introduction to ground water. I used it as part of an informal discussion class made up of a variety of students ranging from undergrads to PhD's. Everyone was able to understand and enjoy the book. For the novices it was a good introduction to typical field problems. For the experienced student it provided a unique historical review to put their studies into perspective. If you use it as a class text, try to have at least one discussion period on it. It will be an eye opener.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's "bite-sized" chapters and smooth flow made it hard to put down. It's narrative style made it easy reading, but it brought out some useful scientific concepts. It took a lot of ideas and looked at them from a new perspective. After thinking about it, I found myself thinking, "Hey, I knew that, but never thought about it from that angle." This would be a good supplementary text for any aquatic studies course. There are even some math problems you can develop if you like quantitative stuff.

I found this book very helpful as I was developing a paper on improving performance for my company's enterprise application. It is the only book I could find that generically dealt with the techniques for designing applications with performance in mind. It covers a broad range of topics explaining the causes of performance problems and possible solutions. I particularly liked the realistic view of a "distributed" architecture which is a hot topic. I did have some problems relating to the "standard" architectures presented; none of them exactly matched the current popular standards like J2EE.

Now that client-server is mainstream, it is OK to knock it. Specifically, performance problems arise with enterprise client-server systems due to the complexity of the distributed processing. The more hops between platforms, the more overhead, and the more points of failure. Client-server architecture is inherently distributed and often has to occur across multiple platforms connected by skinny wide area network (WAN) pipes. What can help? This wide-ranging diagnosis and treatment of the many aspects of the dilemma is highly recommended for its extent, depth, humor, and penetrating insight. Part One on performance fundamentals list 23 components of response time, offering incisive distinctions for both the beginner and the advanced practitioner. When cross-referenced in the extended application resource usage matrix to identify bottlenecks, these components become powerful drivers of response time tuning using trade-offs, choices, and priorities to squeeze every once of performance out of the available computing configuration. Part Two treats the software performance engineering process. One important goal is to build a performance model out of the hardware/software environments, application flow, data structures and business factors. In addition to complex interrelations of computing components, Loosley provides pointers to some very simple principles and methods for tuning complex systems. Part Three on principles is the heart of the book. Software engineering principles - formality, completeness, simplicity - provide the foundation for design principles of abstraction, decomposition, and information hiding - which, in turn, support refinement, independence, and localization (p. 207). These are explained and applied in sufficient depth and detail so that practicing performance engineers will find both helpful tips and techniques, amusing anecdotes, and theoretic principles. Queuing theory is explained but not treated mathematically other than the marshaling of a few simple metrics of practical interest. With the emergence of parallel processing as a relatively new candidate solution for decision support and data warehouse applications, the Chapter on The Parallelism Principle contains one of the best concise explanations I have seen in the literature of the differences between massive parallel processing, non-uniform memory architecture, and clusters as a processing resource. Part Four on Applications drills down into middleware and performance. The authors argue the concept of logical unit of work transaction management is sound and well proven in the world of host-centered (i.e., mainframe) computing. However, when the architecture of synchronous communications is transferred to distributed client-server, then problems arise. As soon as one of the multitude of processors waits, the entire system is at risk of log jamming. And since all computers wait at the same speed - both a humorous and sobering anecdote called "Bell's Law" - no amount of souped up hardware or software will make a difference. The authors document at least twenty points in which enterprise client-server - that is, three tiered - systems can experience bottle necks. The problem with client-server is that frequently only the database and the client workstation are suitably instrumented to gather performance metrics and data; and, even then, it is the interaction between the component that is most significant, not what goes on within each taken in isolation. Therefore, there is no easy answer. The bottlenecks must be worked and pushed down stream and squeezed out of the system. However, in the view of the authors, what will make a difference is a high performance architecture built on a form of asynchronous multi transaction workflow using decoupled processes (sometimes called "message-queuing" or "MQ" middleware). This is a major conclusion for which the authors argue persuasively in the climatic Chapter 16 on Architecture for High Performance. Part Five on Technologies looks at the inner workings of relational database management systems, transaction managers and monitors, and data warehousing technologies such as OLAP, ROLAP, and multidimensional data analysis (MDA). The availability of this material rounds out the completeness and comprehensive scope of the treatment provided. The authors set a high standard for collecting insightful and humorous one-liners, with proper credit to many other brilliant contributors, which also cut to the heart of the challenges of delivering performance in a client-server environment. "Software workloads expand to consume the available computing capacity" (p. 11). "There is nothing so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all" (p. 80). "Always work on the biggest bottleneck" (p. 113). "If you can't see the bug, you are looking in the wrong place" (p. 333). These zingers kept me returning to this text time and again. The book contains a rich assortment of illustrative and instructive graphics. The figures and tables are superbly drawn and produced in attractive gray scale. The performance guidelines - and as benefits a thorough compendium of over 700 pages of encyclopedic proportions - are separately listed at the back in a voluminous section of over 500 entries, extensive enough to be designated as Part Six. Given the challenges of mainstream client-server, Loosley and Douglas are like the cavalry to the rescue with a comprehensive and richly-ladened resource of distinctions and methods for understanding, addressing, and resolving the dilemmas faced by those tasked with building and managing distributed client-server. -- review originally submitted to Computing Reviews in 1998 -- but the good folks there already had someone else reviewing the book, so they decided not to publish it

This book should be required reading for all professional software systems engineers and software development engineers. It is an outstanding overview of the performance engineering discipline as it applies to client/server architectures. I am a practicing systems performance engineer with 20 years experience--10 in development and the last 10 in systems engineering. Many of the things I've learned through "experience" are included in this book. It is definitely worth the money.There is only one area which is not addressed in the book--how to apply SPE to one-of-a-kind complex multiprocessing/multitasking shared resource systems development which are without precedent (as far as I know this is not addressed anywhere in the literature). Such systems do not lend themselves to the preassigned quantitative software budgets required by the literal application of SPE. But because I am major proponent of designing in flexibility and performance all the other SPE principles certainly apply. Again, I highly recommend this book.