Michael Lewis (theSociologist, not the Developmental Psychologist) is less concerned about hurting our collective feelings and sensibilities than convincing us that higher education is in severe trouble. One basic theme: the Professor wants the "lifestyle" but too often rejects the work and the moral responsibility that accompanies the position. The book's irony is it makes readers (especially the deeply offended ones) either "ready for action" to make a better Academy or "ready to quit." Although many of us feel insulted and indicted we are also grateful for the courage shown by Lewis to communicate the unpopular problems.

One of the premiere sex researchers, Michael Ross, takes his expertise into the underbelly of Gay life by looking at the dance party circuit scene. this is one of the only objective empirical glimpses into this important social phenomenon. It stands out as an important insight into a wide range of social behaviors surrounding the dance/rave/party drug scene and inroads into health promotion and damage control.

This is a good sightseeing guide that should help anyone who is interested in traveling the States of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico by car.

Even if you know you want to see the Grand Canyon, what else do you do in the Northern Arizona / Southern Utah area? This book answers that question.

Arranged by state, the book highlights different attractions in each area. It also suggests driving loops, designed to hi-light the highlights while traveling a circular route along major highways. This is certainly designed well for someone who is unfamiliar with the area and wants a travel itinerary laid out with suggested sights and attractions.

Accommodations or restraints are not listed, so one would have to look to another guide or the internet for those. This book can get you started with your destinations, however.

This book discusses in some detail John Tenniel's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its sequel, "Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There". The bulk of the book makes detailed comparisons between aspects of Tenniel's illustrations and other similar illustrations and artwork by Tenniel and his contemporaries, including Dodgson's own illustrations for "Alice's Adventures Under Ground", and a lot of comparison with "Punch" illustrations, where Tenniel worked. The working relationship between Dodgson and Tenniel is discussed, and Hancher also describes the exacting extent to which both perfectionists wanted their work done as best as possible, such as the very tight correlation between text and layout of the illustrations demanded by Dodgson.

A good reference item for people interested in children's book illustrations of the period, or of the original Tenniel-illustrated editions of Alice in particular. 150 large-format (29 x 26 cm) landscape pages, with many black & white illustrations from Punch, the Macmillan editions of Alice, Dodgson's handwritten manuscript, and other illustrations and artwork, on only fair-quality paper.

If you are a Bond fan, you will love this book. Have hours of fun with your friends as you try and recall the little details of the big world of James Bond. The book features stills, questions, and answers, as well as a summary on each of the movies in the series. The book also features the two unofficial films Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983). As a note of trivia, look for my name, Jason M. Allentoff in the acknowledgements.

This is a nice little guidebook, but there's nothing here specifically for cheapskates. I thought I'd find secrets to getting discounts at Disney. Nope! Their big tip for getting a break on your hotel room -- ask the customer service rep if there are any discounts. I didn't need to buy a book to tell me that.

Sehlinger's guide is MUCH better. It gave me enough information to decide for myself what the best values are.

This is an excellent book for those who have been to the Disney parks in Florida. Maps and quick, easy to follow instructions for all the parks are given. You may even shake your head when you read and analyze past trips & behavior.

SINCE THIS IS NOT FROM THE DISNEY COMPANY, YOU GET HONEST INFORMATION FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE DISNEY FANS. The parts I liked most were the sections where hints were given about "why" Disney folks plan certain programs.

Read this guide to stay one step ahead of those who are one step ahead.

This book is the best guide to Walt Disney World!! The Authors are veteran Disney World fans. They have done it all and can give you the inside veiw on how to plan a trip to WDW. Michel Lewis and Debbi Lacey may be cheapskates,but they don't scrimp on comfort and Disney Magic!! They develage all the best secerts of the "world". From the best road to take from the airport to WDW, to the best cheap eats in the parks,to where to "hang your hat" for the night,to shoe hints and much more. This guide has it all!! From one Disney World Fan to another, 5 stars!!!

As a huge fan of "Babbitt" and especially "Main Street," I was happy to have come across an old edition of "Dodsworth" in a used bookstore. I tore into it eagerly but soon came up short. Neither satire like "Babbitt" nor as psychologically astute as "Main Street," the book reads like something from a middle school book club. The colloquialisms are corn-pone, far more prominent than in "Babbitt." Sam's reactions to his ocean voyages and to Europe are child-like, as are his inner responses to his wife's intolerable behaviors. The soap opera-ish inner monologues do not ring true, containing embarrassing proclamations about Great Europe and marital resolutions. Sam Dodsworth is painted as so naive, trusting, xenophobic and insecure that it is difficult to accept that he had an Ivy League education and was a master of business and industry.

The characterizations, in fact, strain credibility. How a man 50 years of age, president of an auto manufacturing company, can be so entirely innocent of the customs of the U.S. and the world outside his small city is baffling. He evidences no ability for making small talk, is ignorant of all current events and politics, is absent of even minor social charms with the rich-- all of these traits are overexaggerated for the purposes of the book. That Dodsworth and his wife have such a sudden disaffection and disenchantment ignores the certain difficulties of raising two children and navigating 20 years of maariage. It seems unlikely that Fran's pretentions emerge only on their trip. Certainly her preferences and choices in managing a family would have foreshadowed these problems.

A common criticism of Lewis's body of work is its uneveness. The depth and success of "Main Street" are contrasted with many of his later writings. I found "Dodsworth" too to read more like a novelization of an early screenplay, exaggerated and distorted for dramatic effect.

"Dodsworth" harkens to a day when you took time to read books, to savor words, descriptions, phrases, conversations between people. This is not a fast beach read, but a book to enjoy at a slow pace matching the flow of the text. Conversations go on for pages, with characters speaking in paragraphs, not sentences of 4 or 5 words. The book is an exploration of the mood and mind of Dodsworth, a retired American industrialist, still very much in the prime of his life, who is cajoled into taking his wife on an open-ended trip to Europe. The wife, battling the on-coming middle age years, flirts outrageously, and this leads to romantic entanglements. Dodsworth is left to fend for himself, and returns home, where he longs for his wayward spouse. Returning to Europe, he finds little changed and they agree to divorce. After fumbling around the contintent, Dodsworth finds a woman to love, but then his wife is dumped by her latest paramour and Dodsworh is faced with the choice of returning to his mate of 20 plus years, or setting out on a new course. You can feel his pain in coming to his decision. This book is a terrific discourse on the Ugly American as well as the phony European royalty. Both sides are equally distasteful, but interesting none-the-less. The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is that Lewis seems to rush the ending. The resolution comes too quickly compared to the pace of the rest of the book. It's like the author thought, "Well, I've got almost 400 pages, so let's wrap it up." By the way, there is a very good movie made of the book featuring Walter Houston. It's available on video and very faithful to the book.

No doubt, this one is for your 'must read' list. When you put it down, you will feel you've lost contact with some great characters, that you've really got inside a marriage, that you've seen life the way it can be.

Samuel Dodsworth is an automobile magnate in the early years of the business. When his company is bought-out, he's left free at age 50, to do whatever he wants. But he has a slick, steel-willed, glamorous socialite for a wife and she has ambitions of climbing. He had always been "too busy to be discontented, and he managed to believe that Fran loved him.""(p.11) Sam gets roped into an extended European tour. Turns out, he's just an escort and backdrop for her movie. He experiences rising discomfort as she worms her way into European high society (or what she takes to be such). The trip gives both of them the first chance in decades to find out who they are---the common motif in literature and life of travelling to discover yourself---and they realize that they don't have much in common. Their European experiences transform them. On a visit back to the States, Dodsworth finds that he has changed; he can't regard his old friends, their old routines and concerns, and their ways with the same equanimity. They have become provincial and empty in his eyes, but what has he become ? He slowly comes to the conclusion that he's cut loose from all the went before, but has no direction for the future. He takes up several possibilities, but is caught among the rocks of loving the wayward Fran, wanting to do something useful in the world, and needing love himself. It's a long haul, but he makes it. Lewis skillfully keeps the psychological tension going to the very last page. Great stuff ! As for Fran, you'll have to read the book.

DODSWORTH is a psychological study of the first order, sincere, unpretentious and so well-written. It is not a satire on the lines of "Main Street", "Babbitt" or "Elmer Gantry", but a serious novel in the full sense of the word. Samuel Dodsworth comes across as a solid man of conservative nature who may have once been in a rut, but learns to think far more than people ever give him credit for, particularly his wife. He becomes flexible and learns to live, while Fran only continues to consume and demand. The plot plays itself out amidst a background of constant discussion as to what makes an American, what makes a European and what are the differences ? While this theme fascinated Henry James and numbers of other writers, it seems a bit passé in this day of the Web, 7 hour flights across 'the pond', massive tourism, MBAs in Europe and great museums in America. Still, it's part of the ambiance of the 1920s when this novel was written. The slow dissolution of the marriage, the contradictions of personality, the existence of strengths and weaknesses, aggressive and passive roles in both husband and wife, the psychological disintegration and re-building of a man's self-image-these are the main themes of DODSWORTH. It's one of the great American novels.

Articles published in different newspapers and magazines in the years 1980-1990 about major and lesser financial adventures.
The best ones for me, were 'Eddie the Chop House Boy' - about a stock salesman who continues to take everybody for a ride at different broker houses and 'Taken for a ride on the Customer's yacht' about Louis Rukeyzer as emperor without clothes.
Most articles have only historic value: the S & L scandal, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, the RJR Nabisco battle, the cornering of the bond market by Salomon brothers, the LBO mania (leveraged Rip-Off) and the end of the Japanese bull market (kamikaze capitalism).
All articles written in an ironical or sarcastic style.

This is a collection of essays previously published in newspapers and magazines around the nation where some 10 years ago we could witness Lewis' early literary attempts. The book was consistently funny, insightful, and a good primer on several financial issues that dominated the 1980's. Most of these articles, for those interested in the authors' chronological history, came after he wrote his groundbreaking financial humor book entitled Liars Poker, which is regarded as a "must read" for anyone entering into the investment banking industry, particularly in bond trading where we he worked.

Mr. Lewis' writing style is great, which is why I read his book entitled Next, another good read if you are interested. Most of the topics in this book cover financial/business culture issues that date back during the late eighties, so there's also a bit of historical perspective to it.

The topics are a wide array and include stories about the domestic S&L scandal, some events that occurred in the French Bourse (their word for a stock market), the proliferation of the American Express Card during the 1980s, some offshore banking insights, Louis Rukeyser, Donald Trump, LBO stories and some comments on the Japanese capitalists. Like I said, he talks about a wide array of topics but remember that the book is a compilation of many articles.

I give it a 4 star rating. It was highly entertaining but nothing that caused my life to change or caused me to have a "light bulb" go off in my head.

When the plain facts can no longer provoke a response, a deft, incisive lampooning jab is often effective. Lewis is author of the best-selling Liar's Poker (Norton, 1989), which irreverently documented the decline of Wall Street at the end of the 1980s. Here he successfully skewers the familiar cast of characters that pillaged the 1980s financial landscape. He takes on the entire money cultures of Wall Street, Europe, and Japan in this collection of send-ups and put-downs. These 30-some pieces have all appeared elsewhere, mostly in Manhattan, Inc., and the New Republic, where Lewis sometimes wrote pseudonymously to protect his job as a bond dealer with Salomon Brothers brokerage house. (He now writes for a living.) Lewis skillfully captures the previous decade in much the same way Tom Wolfe captured the 1960s and 1970s.

I was looking for a clean and concise approach to XML. Instead I got the impression that this book was just an excuse for the author to squeeze in as much minutia on SGML as he thought he could get away with.

It does give good background on XML along with a mind numbing amount of hype.

Look elsewhere for a good introduction to using XML.

It's a pretty decent indication of the potential of the XML document/messaging structure, but lacks significant insight into designing any type of formal business application.

Most of the book relies heavly on perl scripts for message processing. I wish some attention was directed at VB/ASP or CGI for message processing.

With few XML books on the market, I would recommend this book, as it provides a good insight of the potential of XML.

This is obviously a book where the authors commited themselves to writing a certain number of pages and then, half-way into the work they realized that didn't have enought material to cover it. The totally useless 100-page poorly-commented pre-release Java source code for a DOM-implementation in chapter 10 is a particularily good example of this.

Another horrible chapter is chapter 11, which contains an explataion of user interface interaction that is so overly abstract but still so extremely stupid that I've used that particular chapter as an example of how a really useless book should be written.

Also, early in the book the author explains that the book is amed towards rpogrammers. It's interesting to see that they hardly ever back their examples up with and source code at all.

In short. Don't buy this book.

This is the first time I have reviewed a book for Amazon. I am doing this because I consider this book to be 100% garbage.

If you are looking for a book full of annoying cross references (i.e. see page 118; see page 73) and for a book which repeats the same quotes or phrases in different chapters (was there really no editor?) BUY THIS BOOK.

Also, if you are looking for cheap tid-bits and trivia about the US women's soccer team (was it really necessary to write three times about one female ripping her shirt off after a goal?) BUT THIS BOOK.

If you want to have a general overview about the rules of Soccer but want nothing of strategy, technique, training, then BUY THIS BOOK. (or why not just go to the FIFA website and download the same rules which make up 50% of this book)

But if you want to learn how to play or coach soccer, forget it. This book is a COMPLETE waste of time.

This is a book, especially for parents who are trying to figure out the game and people who'd like to learn more about it.

Carries on the excellent tradition of the "for dummies" books: offers solid content and information for veteran soccer afficionados while organized as a well-written, well rounded introduction for the novice. Gives comprehensive overviews about all aspects of the game -- rules, strategies, the world of professional soccer (the leagues, tournaments, events), as well as an excellent history of the game and its development. It's refreshing to see a book for newcomers that doesn't strip things down - there is a wealth of well-researched information here that is useful for the experienced fan or participant.