I highly doubt this is the best sportswriting of 1998! Littlefield picks two mediocre efforts by Charlie Pierce, and neglects the superb '98 writings of S.I.'s Steve Rushin and Franz Lidz. One has to wonder if a sort of reverse "race card" has been played here. This series grows increasingly mediocre. You'd be better off reading Rushin's great "Road Swing" and Lidz's astonishing "Unstrung Heroes."

Bill Littlefield made a couple of odd choices, and this series is a bit too narrow (given that it limits to a year's writing).

Try Halberstam's "Best American Sports Writing of the Century". Much better

The Moehringer, Hendra, Remnick, and Sterling pieces are standouts, but almost all the pieces sparkle with originality, integrity, and wit. It's particularly nice to see Sterling's "Soccer Parents" included alongside more standard fare, since it's somewhat experimental. Sterling has a lyrical voice and a sharp eye for detail; one hopes to hear more from her in the future.

Here is a book that will be important because of the importance of its authors. Derek Bok and William Bowen are both former presidents of Ivy League colleges.

I will not make any effort to analyze every aspect of their book, but as an educational researcher I believe that there is a need to be critical of the methods used to arrive at their conclusion--namely, that race-based admission policies have increased opportunities for black students to obtain jobs in professions that have been mainly closed to them.

The authors provide nothing by the way of a reasonably scientific attempt to determine the accuracy of their claim. If they really wanted to prove their point, it would be necessary for them to show that, had there been no "race-sensitive" admissions policies, the students who were enabled to attend prestigious colleges and universities because of race-sensitivity would not have been successful in life.

It seems the height of snobbery and arrogance to have former presidents of "prestigious" institutions claiming that the policies they used, and the education their schools delivered to the students, have been the "cause" of the success of these students. Implicit in this view is the suggestion that only by attending universities like Harvard or Princeton--and not some other college or university (without the "assistance" of race-based admissions policies)--could these students have achieved success.

Thomas Sowell has opined that students who are rejected from Berkeley, or any other selective college, would probably do quite well at some other (less selective) institution where they would be in the mainstream (i.e., among students of similar ability). The probability of dropping out of school is significantly greater when the vast majority of one's "peers" are functioning at a significantly higher level.

In this book, Bok and Bowen claim that students who might be rejected at the most selective schools would no longer be able to become part of the "backbone of the emergent black middle class." How about the other millions of college students who cannot attend the most selective schools? Are they being prevented from becoming part of the emergent middle class (backbone or otherwise)? Of course not!

To be truly scientific in their approach, Bok and Bowen would have to take a sample of 700 equally qualified black students (based on, say, GPA, majors, and SAT or ACT scores) who were not accepted at selective-admissions schools, and compare their success with the 700 who they did study, who had been admitted to selective schools via affirmative action. Limiting their study to students at the selective colleges and universities (and excluding all others) greatly weakens their conclusions.

It's a shame they didn't do such a study. Somebody should, if only to provide a convincing test of their hypothesis. Until this is done, Bok and Bowen will have provided a convincing political tract, but will not have answered the question about the real benefits of race-based selection policies.

I have read the book twice. Truth often is stranger than fiction. The book is complicated but the central theses is that blacks "need" lower standards to succeed in school, jobs and life. Basically, it says they cannot succeed in life without me the arrogant, academic white liberal providing lower standards for admissions to college for you, the blacks.

The whole subject of differences in test scores, academic achievement is a touchy subject. White IQ averages 100 and Blacks IQ averages 85, a gap of 15 points. Many believe, that the difference will be less once equal opportunity is provided. These people believe in equal opportunity and believe "all races" have the ability to succeed.

Bok and Bowen basically comes and says they CANNOT succeed without lower hurdles, lower admissions criteria, the aid of white paternalism. Bok and Bowen have basically accepted the very notion that blacks are inferior to whites and they will never succeed without the white man support. It's again the ideas of the "white man burden" to civilized the Africans in our midst. If this is not white racism at its worst. I have no idea what it is. Paternalism of liberal whites toward blacks is the worst form of racism possible. It is the "plantation mentality" at work again. If you behave toward the plantation master, I will invite you inside the master's house and let you have the goodies.

There no way to get around it: Bok and Bowen are academic racists.... academic racists of the worst type because they believe intrinsically that blacks are inferior to whites and only through their "benevolence" will blacks succeed. I find this ugly, distasteful and objectionable.

For public universities like the Universities of California, Texas, Michigan, etc. It is well known for decades now that there is two-admissions process. One process is for Whites-Asians and another process is for Blacks-Hispanics. At the University of Michigan, Whites-Asians will be auto-reject at the 6% percentile of applicants. Blacks-Hispanics at 6% will be auto-accept. Berkeley has had a gap year after year of 250-350 SAT points between the two groups. The NYT published the SAT scores of white-Asians, in the 1200-1300 range, whereas blacks-hispanics were in the range of 900, under a thousand. It is no secret-open seceret now that public universities have two-admissions process based on your race. It's like there is two-universities, one for you and one for me.

The only reason I write this is that public universities are under public control and public scrutiny. Much of the data came out of Freedom of Information Act request.

Private universities meanwhile are not publicly obligated to release their admissions data. But here in this book, by the former Presidents of Harvard and Princeton, they are publicly admitting they have two-admissions process. If you are white, your application will be placed with other white applicants and if you are blacks, you will be competing against other blacks.

It's an open admission of a two-system admissions process with the blacks system of admissions with much, much lower standards. I would think this is a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but Bok and Bowen insists "the only way they can make it"

This white academic racism of Bok and Bowen reminds me of the separate drinking fountains of the old US South. One fountain for whites and a shabbier one for the colored. Bok and Bowen is here endorsing the white racism of the US South. White and Blacks cannot drink from the same fountain, Bok and Bowen is saying they cannot "compete" because they are just too dumb.
Instead of the KKK of the south promoting the inferiority of blacks, we have the President of Harvard and Princeton, respected academics, promoting the inferiority of blacks. I consider this academic racism the worst form of "hate" imagination because it is an intellectual, accepted belief that blacks are inherently inferior.

Needless to say, I find the white racism of Bok and Bowen shocking and objectionable. Moreover, they openly admit that Ivy schools have a two-tier system of admissions, one for me and one for you people will be shocking to many readers. Bok and Bowen even defends the two-system admissions process.. lower standards for blacks'.Shocking.

Please buy the book, read it, and judge it for yourself. Your opinion might be different than mine, but the white racism of Bok and Bowen is the racism of the worst imaginable type.... they have concluded and accepted blacks are inferior and they need a lower set of standards to go anywhere in life or college, with the white man help of course. If this is not racism, I have no idea what is.

Misters Bowen and Bok have written two books superimposed on one another.

One book is a careful, dispassionate explication of a significant data set obtained over more than two decades for student cohorts at a set of colleges and universities practicing selective admission. These data to do not make a case for or against affirmative action in admission. They are however an extremely valuable resource for placing discussions about selective admission on a factual basis. It seems silly to this reviewer to debate whether the data are "scientific" or not. For other reviewers in this space to have attacked the book without substantiation as "unscientific" only reveals their own bias in this heated debate.

The other book is one of opinion and political values. Bowen and Bok argue a traditional progressive line of thought: that the most prestigious institutions have a responsibility to build a better society and that part of this mission is achieved by helping downtrodden segments of society to better themselves. No set of data can prove these values to be correct, nor can any data refute the dominant opposing view: that admission to the most prestigious institutions should be a reward for great personal merit as measured by an examination system. These are human values that, like religious beliefs, are not subject to straightforward empirical verification.

Readers on either side of the affirmative action debate will find some solace in the data presented in this book. Read with care, this book can provide a basis for more constructive debate. Take for example the famous Thomas Sowell assertion, cited (as Gospel!) by the Reader from Lansing, that students admitted to prestigious schools under an affirmative action plan will have a poor success rate. This is a factual assertion that is tested by the studies reported by Bowen and Bok. As it happens, success (measured by graduation rate) is extremely high at the most selective institutions for affirmative action minority students. This result does not "prove" that affirmative action is good, but it certainly should help us get past one specious argument and move on to more fruitful debate. And please, dear reviewers, read the book next time before you write your review.

Garth Ennis' work on Hellblazer is some of the best in the medium, but this trade horribly dissapoints. Any no name writer could spin this tale of John Constantine, it's suprising to see the Ennis name on it. Constantine himself loses most of what made him so cool in other Ennis works... He becomes an everyman in this book, a nobody with nothing so cool about him that someone would want to write a book about. But sadly enough, Ennis has done it, and it's a stinker.

I am sad to say that I didn't enjoy this as much as other Hellblazer TPBs that I have read. The art was OK, but the storytelling was jumpy. I love the character of John Constantine, though. They shouldn't 'Americanize' him with Nic Cage in the movie.

I have to believe that whoever didn't like this collection either doesn't get it or refuses to accept it. To be fair, the opening story is a little out of the ordinary for the usually London-based Constantine. Whereas Garth's other spectacular book PREACHER embraces the American Myth, "Damnation's Flame" thouroughly reveals it for what it is...a myth. Caught in a sliver of Hell, John encounters slaughtered Indians, soldiers who died for nothing, streets covered in crack, and a positively wanker of a president.

The other stories aren't earth-shattering, but they are enjoyable. John visits his old friend Brendan and meets Kit in a flashback to his days at Ravenscar (the mental hospital he was in and out of for three years). John also meets Brendan, now a hard-drinking ghost, in the present. And back in London, Chas tells his mates about one of the many times Constantine was apparently killed, and how this time there was even a funeral for him. The entire Ennis cast was present (Header, Kit, Brendan, Rick the Vic) as well as the Delano cast (Ray, Chas, Ritchie, Cheryl), and Moore's little-seen Emma.

By the way, if the sight of John F. Kennedy walking around with his hand pressed against the hole in his head to keep his brains from falling out isn't enough incentive to buy this book, check out his best line from the story:

"To be seen in a historical context as the conscience of the United States is not the honor one might think. It is, in fact, a burden, and one that I was...at the time...loath to shoulder. My chief concerns were, to set the record straight, immediate political survival, and regular extramarital sex with as many women as possible.

Do not buy this book, and for your own good, don't even read it!

First of all, I am an experienced computer programmer, and have developed code for the Java core programming language. I have read many-a-programming book, and can tell you to stay away from this one. Why?

This book:

* is not practical
* is filled with *serious* errors - not just typos
* fails by attempting to cover too many topics
* lacks examples and good diagrams
* lacks a sense of continuity from chapter to chapter

Many of this book's chapters are written as if they were a theorem: generalizations and buzzwords that don't get you anywhere. For example:

"If a set of permissions can between them imply a permission - even if no single permission in the set explicitly implies it completely by itself - you will need to provide your own implementation of PermissionCollection." Ha!

"Because sockets are just *programming* abstractions for network protocols, the other side of the connection does not have to use them. For example, the network program on the right side of this example may be coded in an exotic system that does not use the socket abstraction. That is, sockets don't use any additional communications mechanism other than that provided by the encapsulated protocol." Gimme a break!

Some of the errors in this book are the following:

* Chapter 5's author says that java.io.InputStream's "public int read(byte[] buf, int offset, int length)" method reads the input stream starting at 'offset' bytes deep into the input buffer - skipping the bytes toward the front of the buffer. This is incorrect. The author even has a diagram and examples to complement his error. This method actually reads starting at the front of the input buffer, and reads the bytes into 'buf' starting at buf[offset].

* As if all of the previous chapters' authors' errors weren't bad enough, Chapter 9's author took me to a screeching halt and compelled me to write this whole review when he said this: " It should be noted that the java.net.Socket object returned is bound to an ephemeral port number that is different from the one the ServerSocket is listening to (most applications don't care about that port number)." Whoa! This is absolutely, fundamentally wrong. In truth, the returned Socket has the *same* receiving port number as the ServerSocket. (Otherwise the client's Socket (whose destination port number is the same as the ServerSocket's receiving port number) wouldn't know what this "ephemeral port number" is, and so wouldn't be able to send packets to the server's newly created Socket.) IP packets are demultiplexed according to their *connection* (The 2 connected sockets, i.e. 5 parameters: the common protocol, the source's IP address & port number, and the destination's IP address & port number) and according to socket specificity, not just according to the receiving side's socket.

* Wrong diagrams. p.163: The diagram is of a program's output which shows "access denied", while its caption above says, basically, "tada, and it works." p.52: This diagram belongs in the I/O chapter.

The only chapter I found to be somewhat good was the Thread chapter (and a chapter on threads shouldn't even be in a book on networking). This book also suffers from lacking continuity due to the fact that it was written by 10 authors! For instance, this book has no consistent (or good) way of listing the API's and diagraming class relations. Chapters do not pedagogically build on the previous ones. I could go on...

If you want to learn about networking using Java, then here are your prerequisites. You should learn each of these from a book which specializes in the given topic.

* Basic Java Programming including I/O and Threads
* The TCP/IP protocol suite and TCP/IP networking
* Cryptography (optional)
* Java Security

After you do that, I highly recommend the book "TCP/IP Sockets In Java: Practical Guide for Programmers". This book gets the job done at only 110 pages. Another reason I recommend this book is that it lists references to 22 other good and relevant books/documents.

If you want to learn about HTML, Javascript, Servlets, JSP, RMI, CORBA, etc., then you should find a book specific to that topic. For instance, Marty Hall's books on Servlets and JSP are great.

Just because a programming book is thick, doesn't mean it's good. The book's publisher, Wrox, does put out some good books, but this just isn't one of them.

I bought this book in hopes that it would help guide me on the path to learn Java programming. Numbering over 1000 pages by several different authors, this book does not have a very consistent feel to it, and jumps around to various subjects about Java and various networking principles. The first 200 pages would be good for a university networking class, but as for being a decent tutorial, it is horrible. This book gives little code snippets here and there, but never fully combines them into one large, solid, and useful application.

If you are looking for a book to act as a Java tutorial to networking, this is not the book for you. It is very comprehensive in some areas, and much more than many people are willing to spend in getting through sections of this book. However, if you are looking for a little more general purpose Java networking Bible, then this book might be more suited for you.

I was looking to do more than what you normally find documented in Java and this gave me the details I needed. It has a lot of network protocol details right in the book so you don't have to keep switching between a protocol book and a Java book. Although it's titled, "Beginning Java Networking" it would also benefit an advanced Java programmer interested in writing networking programs.

I purchased the soft cover version, 64 pages long, there are 8 color photos of Wendt's paintings and 13 black and white. I'm sorry to say, the black and white photos DON'T do his paintings justice. And the color photos of his art work in this book, AREN'T the greatest either. ...I'm NOT really impressed with it. As far as what is written about Mr Wendt in the book... well.... Topics include: California Art Club; Wendt and Stendahl, The Letters; Four Conversations on William Wendt; and a few other topics. If your looking for quality photos of Mr Wendt's art work, I wouldn't look here in this book. And if your looking for something more in-depth on the life of William Wendt, well... I'd probably look elsewhere. In conclusion, I feel I wasted [my $].

Eagerly waited for this book from Amazon for two months, only to be sorely disappointed in the low resolution, muddy colors and blurry reproductions of the paintings. Even more disgusted that I paid ... for a book that onlyhas under 10 paintings in color, considering that Wendt was a master at selecting color for his CA masterpieces. Save your money for any Impressionism series that includes Wendt's work. Special thanks to Amazon for obtaining this rare book for me.

This book is not designed as intended for a board review. It is fill of CAQ level cases, with less than optimal images and is set in a 'what am i thinking' format. A waste of time and money.