Robert Levin has the natural talent to manipulate words and bend them to his will. His flair for the dramatic make each of his stories come to life right in front of you. One story in particular, The Profundity of Madness is a nonstop, verbal declaration of emotions. His characters are so true to life and his wonderful flow will keep you reading and wanting more. I would highly recommend this book along with his others, The Lizard and the Fly, as well as his new novel that is coming out April 2003, About Face. He's already received an affluent critique by the NY Times and they say the book is "Absolutely Brilliant!" This is the author to keep an eye on, he's definitely going places.

I really enjoyed this book. You can't get the stories out of your head and definitely don't want them to end. After finishing this book I bought The Lizard & the Fly which I would highly recommend also.

Read this collection on a weekend away. I found it very thought provoking. The characters are well-drawn with unique voices. Give it a try when you have time to kick back, laugh a little and perhaps shed a tear, as well. You'll come away wanting to read more.

A very comprehensive book on recruitment and selection. I found it especially useful on its coverage of interviewing and tests. Its coverage of structured and unstructured interviews as well as the five factors approach to personality tests is fairly extensive and substantiated with rationale. Very logically written and well sign-posted with appropriate sub-headings; it is very easy to follow the logic as well as easy to search any particular aspect of recruitment you need to check. Even the experienced recruiter will find it useful to refresh his or her skills. The authors have removed the mystery and ambiguity often associated with successful recruitment. Anybody who is in the hiring business should get a copy and read it.

At last, I found a book about hiring that treats me like I can think. This book is readable and has a lot of depth. The authors get you to think through where you are trying to go with your business as the first part of hiring. I got a lot out of that focus. Then they have solid information about what tools to use for good hiring. High-Impact Hiring shows you how to structure an interview, but also how to use other tools like tests and reference checks. They show you how to design your own performance tests. Their decision-making tools are cool--there's a decision table that helps you make sure you don't hire a disaster and sorts out all the information you've got. If you just want an interviewing book, you could get one of the other "hiring" books--though High-Impact Hiring's treatment of interviewing was the best I've read. This book that gives you a system, gives you knowledge and tools, and treats you with respect.

I used this book to design our company's hiring process, and found it helpful for all stages from job descriptions, interviewing, applications to offer letters. The quality of our hiring has improved significantly; all of the people we have hired since are still making major contributions to the company.

I got this book because I had read these same authors first book, High-Impact Hiring (by Rosse and Levin). Talent Flow to me is the follow-up to High-Impact Hiring. The first book is about how to hire someone for your business in a practical way based on performance, and Talent Flow is about what to do after you've made the hire: How to keep employees, keep them satisfied, and over the long run decide if you want to keep them and what to do about it. I liked both books.

Bought this book for my business, because of some problems we were having with dissatisfaction. I didn't think we had any retention issues, though. This book gave me much more than I bargained for. Instead of just having scattered tips on how to retain people or how to deal with dissatisfaction in your organization, these authors give you a complete framework that links workplace satisfaction and dissatisfaction with productive and counter-productive work performance and with employee retention. That's what they call "talent flow." When you have dissatisfaction at work, some of your good employees turn into bad ones, and other good ones leave. If they're leaving faster than your poorer performers, your organization is going to fill up with the kind of workers you don't want. The book helped us to find ways to keep our best employees more satisfied so that they kept performing well and stayed longer. It also helped us identify the others, and help them either move up or move them out. One of the best things about the book was the way the concepts and the practical advice were tied together. The authors write about research they did on how dissatisfaction affects work performance, and they also have clearly worked with a lot of businesses, because they are talking about real-world problems and real-world solutions. Good practical tools, too. Great book! Helped my business.

This is a complete review of almost all syndromes affecting the face, with complete information about the most important conditions and very good references until june 2001. Congratulations to the authors for their great effort to put together a lot of information very useful to phisicians, dentists and many other specialists.

About Face is an excellent book. Economically descriptive, the book is narrated via the distinctive voices of brothers Damion and Travis Face, two wonderful spirits that were easy to admire, feel sorry for, and at the same time, applaud in their efforts to escape a life many of us are lucky to have never known.

I would tell anyone interested in a fast-paced, beautiful story, to pick up a copy of this book.

And the ending? My God, hold on...

The authors take you along on their journey through growing up the hard way with a wit and poignancy that makes you really believe you are there. Great ending!

The author takes you along on his journey through growing up the hard way with a wit and poignancy that makes you really believe you are there. Great ending!

Well lets see, where do I begin? I really disliked this book. I had written a review of the Alienist a couple of years back, and I received a email from a lady urging me to get this book. Well I finally got around to it, and I must admit I was intrigued by the story line. I should have stopped there. I did not like this book for a number of reasons. I didn't like the way the story jumped around and around. I also felt like the author was sex crazed. There seemed to be some perverse sex offense in all of the story lines. I was discusted by the sexual acts that were commited in this book. I think the author had a good idea for a story, but his way of telling it was not very good. It iritated me having to read every characters thoughts every second. The characters were lifeless, and unreal. The dialogue between characters were boring, and on a first grade level. I just finished the book, a few minutes ago, and I can't wait until I sell it at the half price store, so that way I could get some of the money back that I wasted on this book. I urge all that read this to ignore all positive reviews of this book and skip it, unless you want a book that talks non stop about rape, sodomizing, molestation, and any other sex crime you can think of. I wish Mr. Levin the best of luck in his future books, but I for one will never buy another one of his books.

Like everyone else that has reviewed this book I received an e-mail urging me to purchase this book based on another review I wrote. I personally thought that this marketing ploy was quite brilliant.

The book itself was good. The plot was interesting, the characters memorable and Levin really has a way with words. Many of his descriptions are unique and very effective. His character development is amazing (even if some of them were only around for a few pages) but I could not, in all good conscience, give this book a higher rating due to the MANY typos.

As a PR person who works with many authors I found these errors highly disturbing. For instance calling a glock a gluck and constantly changing tense in mid-sentence. The continuity problems also bothered me - in the beginning of the book they headed chapters that take place in the past by saying "five years earlier" but forgo this later in the book which made the read VERY confusing. Since Levin jumps back and forth so often it is hard to keep track.

Besides the basics of editing - this book was enjoyable and I would recommend it to others as long as you can overlook the proofing problems. If Levin could get "Lizard" or his next book picked up by a bigger publishing house or if Voyage Books put a little more money into the marketing (and editing) of this book it could have been a big hit. Reviewers like nothing more than a talented, creative new writer. Let's hope Levin makes the most of it and pushes for a second run with more PR.

why, oh why did this book not land on the bestseller's list? Why is it not there still?

I ordered American Meat after I finished reading Levin' novel, The Lizard and the Fly. Good. Interesting. Guy's got a great imagination, and uses equally great imagery.

This is a good book of poetry. It takes a look at life through eyes wide open, lays it out there for the reader to see, and does it with a bite. Yeah, there are a couple of lovey-dovey poems, the kind I'm not really into, but for the most part, the poetry is laced with muscle. It comes right at you, pulls no punches, and after you read a few of them, you kinda feel like you're out of breath. Besides the lovey-dovey stuff, my only other complaint is that it's too damn short, and I for one would like to read more of Levin's work.

NOTE: I wrote this review for the neurology pearls of wisdom, but the comments generally apply to the whole series. Since I thought the warning about some of the inaccuracies may be important for residents to look out for, I'm posting the review here as well. Please bear in mind this is a personal opinion only, but based on using probably every review text out there.

The idea behind Boston Medical Publishing's "pearls of wisdom" series (not to be confused with the higher quality Hanley & Belfus' "Pearls" Series)is a good one: publish a series of books in the various specialties that consist entirely of questions and answers in the various subtopics within those specialties.
However, the execution is weak for the following reasons:

1. Inaccuracies/mistakes.
I recently looked through the pediatrics text (latest, 2nd edition) at my bookshop (it was one of the few subjects initially available there). During some 20 minutes of browsing, I found 2 definite errors, and one ambiguity. Medicine is one field where I think there should be an *extremely* low tolerance for less than sterling writing. Note: the mistakes I found were not gray areas - they were not in complex management issues where there can be more than one right answer. These were clear cut factual errors that could have been avoided by more careful editing.

2. Poor referencing.
I know the authors state in their preface (which is a standard preface used in all the different subjects in the series!) that their intention wasn't to reference. But I think in this day and age of Evidence based medicine, literature citations are of paramount importance - not only to demonstrate a thorough understanding of the literature on all the topics, but so that readers may reach for the best review/original paper where necessary. In this regard, the "Secrets" series published by Hanley and Belfus are simply outstanding. They reference (often with multiple citations) each and every question/answer!!

3. Coverage
A minor, but not unimportant criticism is the coverage. I found that for the price I paid, the coverage of topics could have been better. If the authors could increase the questions by 2/3, I feel they will have a MUCH better book. Questions should stress more pathology, diagnostics (esp. diff diagnosis and clinical approach), and management.

4. For its shortcomings, the price (about USD 88.00) is astonishing. These books are merely a compilation of questions and answers for exam review, not comprehensive full colour textbooks! I do not understand why it should cost that much, when cost of production should be low - no pictures, no diagrams, no references even. Just one line questions and several line answers. The price is, i feel, unfair.

Conclusion:
Buy it only if:
1. You are prepared to double check every answer/statement against authoritative textbooks and the literature.
2. You can afford to throw your money on a good, but less than ideal product.
3. You want to get your hands on every review book available for revision purposes.

This is an excellent book! The information is in a quick question and answer format categorized by system (i.e. cardiology). This book is perfect for quick learning sessions when on call, as a break while studying, or for complete board preparation. I highly recommend it.

Anthologies, especially of translation, require a stable voice or principle to unite the choices made, to even disparate voices to the pitch of the whole and make that chorus sing in unison. A selection like this, made by a friend of the dying translator by rifling of his life's filing cabinet of occasional translations, could easily fail. What Levin notes, however, in his introduction and selections, was a lonely tone which the translator Friend responded to and echoed in some Hebrew poets: "The simple talk of my home...would never be a simple matter - a position Friend knew all too well." These translations succeed where the Brooklyn born Friend, in Israel for "fifty years in a language and culture that were never quite his own", reflected Hebrew poets' tones of dislocation and loss. Failure arose from the same source, when his dislocation from a living English idiom lent a stiltedness to some colloquial Hebrew poets.

His Bialik translations, though he didn't care for Bialik, withstand examination by other Bialik lovers: "Once again, dreaming a giant dream/men hasten to their little sins." A crisp, elegant rendering. Likewise his versions of Rachel: "A true pact is ours, a tie time cannot dissever/Only what I have lost is what I possess forever." He can make these modern Hebrew poets sound like eighteenth century London wits. But with the colloquial and contemporary Amichai he stumbles: "All the generations that preceded me contributed me/in small amounts..." Here "contributed me" echoes the Hebrew locution in a way not possible in English and the chattiness of the original stiffens to alien brocade. Friend succeeds where a not quite twentieth century "poetic" English is appropriate, fails where conversational tone is required.

No small part of this book's appeal and usefulness as a general introduction are Levin's laconic, evocative biographical notes: Gabriel Preil, born in Estonia, settled to write Hebrew poetry in the United States and "died while on a visit to Jerusalem, awaiting the publication of his Collected Poems". Lonely souls translated by a lonely voice, far in time and spirit from contemporary English and its streetsmart verse.